Catholic Converts - Marcus Grodi

Lent is the season of conversion of heart. At Easter, new catechumens are welcomed into the Catholic Church. Throughout Lent this year, I will be posting the conversion stories of some well known individuals and their journey home to Rome.

Marcus Grodi - Marcus Grodi (1958?- ): apologist, president of The Coming Home Network, and host of EWTN's "Journey Home" program; originally a Presbyterian pastor.

I am a former Protestant minister. Like so many others who have trodden the path that leads to Rome by way of that country known as Protestantism, I never imagined I would one day convert to Catholicism.
By temperament and training I’m more of a pastor than a scholar, so the story of my conversion to the Catholic Church may lack the technical details in which theologians traffic and in which some readers delight. But I hope I will accurately explain why I did what I did, and why I believe with all my heart that all Protestants should do likewise.
I won’t dwell on the details of my early years, except to say that I was raised by two loving parents in a nominally Protestant home, and I went through most of the experiences that make up the childhood and adolescence of the typical American baby-boomer. I was taught to love Jesus and go to church on Sunday. I also managed to blunder into most of the dumb mistakes that other kids in my generation made. But after a season of teenage rebellion, when I was twenty years old, I experienced a radical re-conversion to Jesus Christ. I turned away from the lures of the world and became serious about prayer and Bible study.
As a young adult, I made a recommitment to Christ, accepting him as my Lord and Savior, praying that he would help me fulfill the mission in life he had chosen for me.
The more I sought through prayer and study to follow Jesus and confirm my life to his will, the more I felt an aching sense of longing to devote my life entirely to serving him. Gradually, the way dawn’s first faint rays peek over a dark horizon, the conviction that the Lord was calling me to be a minister began to grow.
That conviction grew steadily stronger while I was in college and then afterwards during my job as an engineer. Eventually I couldn’t ignore the call. I was convinced the Lord wanted me to become a minister, so I quit my job and enrolled in Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in suburban Boston. I acquired a master of divinity degree and was shortly thereafter ordained to the Protestant ministry.
My six-year-old son, Jon-Marc, recently memorized the Cub Scouts’ oath, which goes in part: “I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and my country.” This earnest boyhood vow rather neatly sums up my own reasons for giving up a career in engineering in order to serve the Lord with complete abandon in full-time ministry. I took my new pastoral duties seriously, and I wanted to perform them correctly and faithfully, so that at the end of my life, when I stood face-to-face before God, I could hear him speak those all-important words: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” As I settled down into the rather pleasant life of a Protestant minister, I felt happy and at peace with myself and God ? I finally felt that I had arrived.
I had not arrived.
I soon found myself faced with a host of confusing theological and administrative questions. There were exegetical dilemmas over how to correctly interpret difficult biblical passages and also liturgical decisions that could easily divide a congregation. My seminary studies had not adequately prepared me to deal with this morass of options.
I just wanted to be a good pastor, but I couldn’t find consistent answers to my questions from my fellow minister friends, nor from the “how to” books on my shelf, nor from the leaders of my Presbyterian denomination. It seemed that every pastor was expected to make up his own mind on these issues.
This “reinvent the wheel as often as you need to” mentality that is at the heart of Protestantism’s pastoral ethos was deeply disturbing to me. “Why should I have to reinvent the wheel?” I asked myself in annoyance. “What about the Christian ministers down through the centuries who faced the same issues? What did they do?” Protestantism’s emancipation from Rome’s “manmade” laws and dogmas and customs that had “shackled” Christians for centuries (that, of course, was how we were taught in seminary to view the “triumph” of the Reformation over Romanism) began to look a lot more like anarchy than genuine freedom.
I didn’t receive the answers I needed, even though I prayed constantly for guidance. I felt I had exhausted my resources and didn’t know where to turn. Ironically, this frustrating sense of being out of answers was providential. It set me up to be open to answers offered by the Roman Catholic Church. I’m sure that if I had felt that I had all the answers I wouldn’t have been able or willing to investigate things at a deeper level.

A breach in my defense
In the ancient world, cities were built on hilltops and ringed with stout walls that protected the inhabitants against invaders. When an invading army laid siege to a city, as when Nebuchadnezzer’s army surrounded Jerusalem in 2 Kings 25:1-7, the inhabitants were safe as long as their food and water held out and for as long as their walls could withstand the onslaught of the catapult’s missile and the sapper’s pick. But if the wall was breached, the city was lost.
My willingness to consider the claims of the Catholic Church began as a result of a breach in the wall of the Reformed Protestant theology that encircled my soul. For nearly forty years I labored to construct that wall, stone-by-stone, to protect my Protestant convictions.
The stones were formed from my personal experiences, seminary education, relationships, and my successes and failures in the ministry. The mortar that cemented the stones in place was my Protestant faith and philosophy. My wall was high and thick and, I thought, impregnable against anything that might intrude.
But as the mortar crumbled and the stones began to shift and slide, at first imperceptibly, but later on with an alarming rapidity, I became worried. I tried hard to discern the reason for my growing lack of confidence in the doctrines of Protestantism.
I wasn’t sure what I was seeking to replace my Calvinist beliefs, but I knew my theology was not invincible. I read more books and consulted with theologians in an effort to patch the wall, but I made no headway.
I reflected often on Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not unto your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.” This exhortation both haunted and consoled me as I grappled with the doctrinal confusion and procedural chaos within Protestantism.
The Reformers had championed the notion of private interpretation of the Bible by the individual, a position I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with, in light of Proverbs 3:5-6.
Bible-believing Protestants claim they do follow the teaching in this passage by seeking the Lord’s guidance. The problem is that there are thousands of different paths of doctrine down which Protestants feel the Lord is directing them to travel. And these doctrines vary widely according to denomination.
I struggled with the questions, “How do I know what God’s will is for my life and for the people in my congregation? How can I be sure that what I’m preaching is correct? How do I know what truth is?” In light of the doctrinal mayhem that exists within Protestantism?each denomination staking out for itself doctrine based on the interpretations of the man who founded it?-he standard Protestant boast, “I believe only in what the Bible says,” began to ring hollow. I professed to look to the Bible alone to determine truth, but the Reformed doctrines I inherited from John Calvin, John Knox and the Puritans clashed in many respects with those held by my Lutheran, Baptist, and Anglican friends.
In the Gospel Jesus explained what it means to be a true disciple (cf. Matt. 19:16-23). It’s more than reading the Bible, or having your name in a church membership roster, or regularly attending Sunday services, or even praying a simple prayer of conversion to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. These things, good though they are, by themselves don’t make one a true disciple of Jesus. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ means making a radical commitment to love and obey the Lord in every word, action, and attitude, and to strive to radiate his love to others. The true disciple, Jesus said, is willing to give up everything, even his own life, if necessary, to follow the Lord.
I was deeply convinced of this fact, and as I tried to put it into practice in my own life (not always with much success) I also did my best to convince my congregation that this call to discipleship is not an option?it’s something all Christians are called to strive for. The irony was that my Protestant theology made me impotent to call them to radical discipleship, and it made them impotent to hear and heed the call.
One might ask, “If all it takes to be saved is to ‘confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead’ (Rom. 10:9), then why must I change? Oh, sure, I should change my sinful ways. I should strive to please God. But if I don’t, what does it really matter? My salvation is assured.”
There’s a story about a newspaper reporter in New York City who wanted to write an article on what people consider the most amazing invention of the twentieth century. He hit the streets, interviewing people at random, and received a variety of answers: the airplane, the telephone, the automobile, computers, nuclear energy, space travel, and antibiotic medicine. The answers went on along these lines until one fellow gave an unlikely answer:
“It’s obvious. The most amazing invention was the thermos.”
“The thermos?” queried the reporter, eyebrows raised.
“Of course. It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.”
The newspaperman blinked. “So what?”
“How does it know?”
This anecdote had meaning for me. Since it was my duty and desire to teach the truth of Jesus Christ to my congregation, my growing concern was, “How do I know what is truth and what isn’t?”
Every Sunday I would stand in my pulpit and interpret Scripture for my flock, knowing that within a fifteen mile radius of my church there were dozens of other Protestant pastors?all of whom believed that the Bible alone is the sole authority for doctrine and practice?but each was teaching something different from what I was teaching. “Is my interpretation of Scripture the right one or not?” I’d wonder. “Maybe one of those other pastors is right, and I’m misleading these people who trust me.”
There was also the knowledge?no, the gut-twisting certitude?that one day I would die and stand before the Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal Judge, and I would be required to answer not just for my own actions but also for how I led the people he had given me to pastor. “Am I preaching truth or error?” I asked the Lord repeatedly. “I think I’m right, but how can I know for sure?”
This dilemma haunted me.
I started questioning every aspect of my ministry and Reformed theology, from insignificant issues to important ones. I look back now with a certain embarrassed humor at how I fretted during those trying days of uncertainty. At one point I even wrangled with doubts over whether or not to wear a clerical collar. Since there is no mandatory clerical dress code for Presbyterian ministers some wear collars, some wear business suits, some robes, and others a combination of all. One minister friend kept a clerical collar in the glove compartment of his car, just in case donning it might bring some advantage to him, “Like getting out of a speeding ticket!” He once confided with a conspiratorial grin. I decided not to wear a clerical collar. At Sunday services I wore a plain black choir robe over my business suit.
When it came to the form and content of Sunday liturgy every church had its own views on how things should be done, and each pastor was free to do pretty much whatever he wanted within reason.
Without mandated denominational guidelines to steer me, I did what all the other pastors were doing: I improvised. Hymns, sermons, Scripture selections, congregational participation, and the administration of baptism, marriage, and the Lord’s Supper were all fair game for experimentation. I shudder at the memory of one particular Sunday when, in an effort to make the youth service more interesting and “relevant,” I spoke the Lord’s words of consecration, “This is my Body, this is my Blood, do this in memory of me,” over a pitcher of soda pop and a bowel of potato chips.
Theological questions vexed me the most. I remember standing beside the hospital bed of a man who was near death after suffering a heart attack. His distraught wife asked me, “Is my husband going to heaven?” All I could do was mouth some sort of pious but vague “we-must-trust-in-the-Lord” reassurance about her husband’s salvation. She may have been comforted but I was tormented by her tearful plea. After all, as a Reformed pastor I believed John Calvin’s doctrines of predestination and perseverance of the saints. This man had given his life to Christ, he had been regenerated, and was confident that he was one of God’s elect. But was he?
I was deeply unsettled by the knowledge that no matter how earnestly he may have thought he was predestined for heaven (it’s interesting that all who preach the doctrine of predestination firmly believe they themselves are one of the elect), and no matter how sincerely those around him believed he was, he may not have gone to heaven.
And what if he had secretly “backslidden” into serious sin and been living in a state of rebellion against God at the moment his heart attack caught him by surprise? Reformed theology told me that if that were the case, then the poor fellow had simply been deluded by a false security, thinking he was regenerated and predestined for heaven when in fact he had been unregenerated all along and on his way to hell. Calvin taught that the Lord’s elect will?must?persevere in grace and election. If a person dies in a state of rebellion against God he proves he never was one of the elect. “What kind of absolute assurance was that?” I wondered.
I found it harder to give clear, confident answers to the “will my husband go to heaven?” kinds of questions my parishioners asked. Every Protestant pastor I knew had a different set of criteria that he listed as “necessary” for salvation. As a Calvinist I believed that if one publicly accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior, one is saved by grace through faith. But even as I consoled others with these fine-sounding words, I was troubled by the worldly and sometimes grossly sinful lifestyles these now-deceased members of my congregation had lived. After just a few years of ministry I began to doubt whether I should continue.

The Mad Dawg theory of Lollipops:

God's whole deal is to get us to choose Him freely and without distracting enticements. But first He has to get our attention and to persuade us that He's good and all that.

So He gives out lollipops. The professionals call them "consolations", but that's 'cause they talk funny.

SO when God does not give you a lollipop, He's saying,"Okay, I've taken off the training wheels. Get out there and skin your knees."

Now, personally, I'm a wuss, so I always say,"I wannanotherlollipop NO FAYurh!"

SO He kicks me in the butt.

But, yeah! This is really a fine lady. She is so up front with the struggle. After a weekday Mass last week she said,"I guess I feel pretty good about it. I'm in. Where else could I go." And I went off on how backhanded Peter's remark to Jesus is: Where ELSE could we go." as in"It's not like we LIKE you or anything. It's just that all the other stuff is OBVIOUSLY bogus. We're stuck with You."

SO it's not like we LIKE being Catholic all the time. It's like being married. Sometimes, darn it, I am SO ready to pack my bags! I am SO OUT of here! Bring me some young honey, let's have a meal of nothing but sodium and cholesterol! Let's follow it by killing brain cells and risking an STD or two or three. Now THAT's something like!

And Jesus just watches and finally says, "You done yet?"
"Yessir"
"Okay. Get to work. There's stuff needs doing."
Okay, Sir. Sorry Sir."
"It's okay. Shut up. Get to work."

It's like Herbert's poem,"The Collar".

I Struck the board, and cry'd, No more,
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me bloud, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did drie it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the yeare onely lost to me?
Have I no bayes to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away; take heed: I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I reply'd, My Lord.

Or,
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

- John Donne

. . . why are the 17th century English religious poets so difficult . . . and so true?

I will be opening the thread because the article raises issues which the Protestants may need to address, e.g.:

This “reinvent the wheel as often as you need to” mentality that is at the heart of Protestantism’s pastoral ethos was deeply disturbing to me. “Why should I have to reinvent the wheel?” I asked myself in annoyance. “What about the Christian ministers down through the centuries who faced the same issues? What did they do?” Protestantism’s emancipation from Rome’s “manmade” laws and dogmas and customs that had “shackled” Christians for centuries (that, of course, was how we were taught in seminary to view the “triumph” of the Reformation over Romanism) began to look a lot more like anarchy than genuine freedom.

I soon found myself faced with a host of confusing theological and administrative questions. There were exegetical dilemmas over how to correctly interpret difficult biblical passages and also liturgical decisions that could easily divide a congregation. My seminary studies had not adequately prepared me to deal with this morass of options. I just wanted to be a good pastor, but I couldn’t find consistent answers to my questions from my fellow minister friends, nor from the “how to” books on my shelf, nor from the leaders of my Presbyterian denomination. It seemed that every pastor was expected to make up his own mind on these issues. This “reinvent the wheel as often as you need to” mentality that is at the heart of Protestantism’s pastoral ethos was deeply disturbing to me. “Why should I have to reinvent the wheel?” I asked myself in annoyance. “What about the Christian ministers down through the centuries who faced the same issues? What did they do?” Protestantism’s emancipation from Rome’s “manmade” laws and dogmas and customs that had “shackled” Christians for centuries (that, of course, was how we were taught in seminary to view the “triumph” of the Reformation over Romanism) began to look a lot more like anarchy than genuine freedom. I didn’t receive the answers I needed, even though I prayed constantly for guidance. I felt I had exhausted my resources and didn’t know where to turn.

Genuine freedom, then, consists of suspending one's intellect? Of course, he needn't feel such angst concerning the "tough questions". The majority of Catholics in this country deny one or more "essential" Catholic doctrine, despite claims that the "cafeteria is closed", but still feel comfortable warming the pews. Protestants, on the other hand, recognize that the vast majority of doctrinal disputes are not salvational in nature, but are significant enough to warrant recognition and a degree of separation.

Not salvational in nature.

Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you will have no life in you!

I believe that this is salvational and I haven't come across any Protestants who believe that, though I do, and the majority of my Catholic friends and family also believe it.
The cafeteria is closed as far as most of us are concerned. The few that don’t subscribe to Catholic Doctrine are relying on God’s love and not His justice as are so many in the Christian world today. That actually scares the daylights out of me!

From my vantage point, it seems as though you have your Catholic statistics a little skewed !

Regardless, from all that I have read that you have written, you appear to be a person living out your faith in Our Savior, Jesus Christ, which makes us brothers and sisters in Christ.

God Bless us all!

Genuine freedom consists of finding the truth, which will set you free. The reason there are an infinity of Protestant (using the term in its broadest sense, as meaning neither Orthodox nor Catholic, since there is no theological unity even among Protestants) sects is that everyone has decided that their particular fragment of the truth, the one that really attracts them, is the only one. And if it's not emphasized in the church to which they already belong, they go off and found another one. The reality of Protestantism is that you have 30-40,000 bigger or smaller groups, each one emphasizing one little splinter of the truth that it finds more important than the others.

Note that I am not saying that Protestantism is based upon falsehood or maliciousness, or even upon the personal desire for power on the part of individual church founders. I think even those who found a church are genuinely seeking the truth, but because they have cut themselves off from the vast tree of doctrine that grows up from the death of the Lord and is watered with the blood of martyrs, they can inevitably get only a splinter of it. And soon someone else in their church comes along who sees another bit of truth he feels is underemphasized, and he goes off to found yet another church based on that splinter.

The Catholic Church does not replace thought and that was not the point the author was making. It's like accepting the Creed or any patristic formulation. Would you want to have to reinvent the Athanasian Creed? The Creeds, the doctrines of the Church, and all of the many doctrinal formulations achieved through the confrontation with historical challenges and often at the cost of blood and suffering and approved as being in line with tradition and doctrine from the very start are there for the taking. It's not necessary to reinvent them, and most of us would not be capable of it, anyway. It is certainly possible to think about them, however, and to call the attention of others to some aspect of them you find particularly attractive.

In the Catholic Church, people who have some aspect of the truth they feel called to emphasize more than another often found religious orders or do something similar to give a collective expression of their particular vision. I recently visited Assisi and was profoundly impressed by St. Francis and his prayerful, humble tenacity in following the Lord in the particular way to which he had been called - even though there was often considerable suspicion of him in the Church at that time, and there were other, similar movements that left the Church.

Yet because he accepted the vast trove of doctrine and simply remained certain that he was called to emphasize one aspect of Christian life within it, now, 800 years later, there are millions of Franciscans all over the world, doing good for the Lord. When I was in Assisi, I met young, orthodox Franciscans from all over the world who are absolutely on fire with their missionary zeal and desire to follow St. Francis' vision - 800 years later.

So the point I am trying to make is not that Protestant founders are evil, but that by cutting themselves off from the fullness of the Faith (that is, the doctrine that comes to us from the Apostles and has been developed over the centuries by the mind of the Church), they are condemned to have to "reinvent" it simply because human nature requires an answer to all questions. And in this process, others will come along who see some other part of it, and they will go off on their own. Human nature requires certainty of truth, but the human mind is limited. Accepting the truths of the Catholic Church is simply acknowledging that there are some things that require the collective intelligence and faith of the entire Church, and one you have accepted these truths, you are free to move on to the particular thing to which the Lord is calling you.

Not quite. We expect imperfection in men, even those who lead our churches. We don't leave because a splinter of the truth that is important to us has been left out, but because the leadership insists on telling us untruth, while calling that untruth, truth. Most of us don't go off & start new churches or found new denominations.

You believe that God has protected your church from that kind of error, that the men leading your church are prevented from committing it. We disagree. Others before us also disagreed, which is why they left in protest.

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