For Catholic Converts! (New or seasoned ;) )

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nickybr38

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Okay guys. Initially there wasn’t much fuss when I revealed I was joining the Church. But lately, in the last few weeks, it seems like people are coming at me from all sides asking: WHY the Catholic Church? And they’re being very respectful in response to my answer but I’m starting to get tired of answering this question. HAHA. I know I wouldn’t get these questions if I was joining the Baptist, United, Anglican, OR Luthern because… well, I’ve attended ALL of these at some point (although I never expressed any interested in JOINING them so perhaps that is a distinction?) and nobody batted an eye (although they nearly died on the spot when I said I was willingly attending a Mormon temple with my roommate).

My answer is usually along the lines of;

I have to go to the Church that existed before the Protestant break because it’s the Church closest to the disciples (except I usually say MUCH more - but that’s the gist).

And that seems to be enough to satisfy.

But I’m curious for my fellow converts. How do YOU answer the question: WHY join the Catholic Church???

And do/did you ever get tired of being asked (even if it is, potentially, a moment for evangelization)?

I suppose I feel like I’m falling short in my answer right now and I’m losing patience because I feel like I’m failing.
 
Because I always wanted to, and felt I had to.

It was a call to battle. Like Father John Corapi, I often think in those terms.

As time goes on, I am becoming more familiar with the faith, though what I know could maybe fill a thimble. I can answer questions now I could not even a year ago.
 
I usually say something along the lines of I started reading history and found that the Catholic Church is the one founded by Christ, so if it is something Christ started I figured I should be a part of that.

My problem is explaining why in a short sentence or two. That statement is true and is a large part of the reason I’m Catholic, but there is also a lot more to it than that. But I’m not really able to consolidate it down into a short little sentence. So until I come up with something that better expresses what I experienced, that what I stick to. 🤷

As for getting tired of the question, don’t stress about it too much. For me, everyone was very curious at first, I’m sure in part because pretty much no one knew it was even a possibility until I was certain that is where I was headed, but it trailed off a lot after the first round of questions. Now, about three years later, it is not a conversation I have on a regular basis. It comes up off and on when I meet someone new and mention it, but not anywhere close to as often as it did at first. 😃
 
Because I want to become a nun, and becoming Catholic seemed to be the logical first step. 🙂

Miz
 
I didn’t get much guff from anyone until after I was baptized earlier this year.

I usually keep it short and simple: God gave me the gift of His graces; and I accepted them by receiving the sacraments through His true Church.
 
nickybr38 said:
I suppose I feel like I’m falling short in my answer right now and I’m losing patience because I feel like I’m failing.
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Me, too - I hate getting into arguments in real life (on-line obviously is a different story 😛 ) so I usually just say something along the lines of, “I love the beauty of the liturgy, I love praying the Hours in Gregorian chant, I love the statues and icons, and the fabulous stained glass windows, I love watching the processions, especially when there are lots of priests and Altar servers, the Knights are cool, too - and, um - that feeling when you go to Confession, after it’s over, when all my sins are forgiven - and, yeah, the Mass.” 🙂

:rolleyes: 😃
 
And now the second part of the question since I had a new experience tonight.

How do you respond when someone asks WHY and then proceeds to inform you they WERE Catholic until they realized the errors of the church and they’d LOVE to share it with you sometime over tea?

Go to tea? Or politely decline? :eek:
 
nickybr38 said:
And now the second part of the question since I had a new experience tonight.

How do you respond when someone asks WHY and then proceeds to inform you they WERE Catholic until they realized the errors of the church and they’d LOVE to share it with you sometime over tea?

Go to tea? Or politely decline? :eek:
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Depends on your relationship to the person and your strength as an apologist.

I recommend watching The Journey Home. EWTN probably has it up on Youtube these days.
 
Awesome thread! Considering a conversion and running into those questions a lot. I know why I am leaning that way, but its hard to express under cross examination.( unfortunately that is what a few of these conversations have turned into). My biggest problem is the fact that when I am passionate about something I tend to get defensive. I apparently would not make a good apologist.🙂
 
Well, when someone asks me why I converted, I usually launch into a spiel about reading the ECFs, looking at todays Catholic liturgy versus the early church worship services spelled out by Origin and the Didache etc., then the primacy of Peter (which usually allows me to explain the Petros Petra thing when they throw a fit ;)), then the forgiveness of sins, keys to the kingdom, hierarchical church founded by Christ, etc. etc. etc. I leave NO DOUBT as to why I became Catholic.
nickybr38 said:
And now the second part of the question since I had a new experience tonight.

How do you respond when someone asks WHY and then proceeds to inform you they WERE Catholic until they realized the errors of the church and they’d LOVE to share it with you sometime over tea?

Go to tea? Or politely decline? :eek:
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lol, every time I get this I hear Triple H in my head shouting “BRING IT!!!” and then I go have a chat. There is nothing (well, very little) they can come up with that I havent already heard and researched myself since I was about as anti-catholic as you can get. Heck I probably would have been a Chick-monger if I had known about him at the time.

The hard part for me (but getting easier by the day) is to keep it charitable. ESPECIALLY when they inevitably launch into the attack on Marian devotion. The primacy of Peter is relatively simple to defend, as is the succession of bishops, confession, and obedience to the Church. The Mass takes some explaining, but the Marian Doctrines are very hard for some of these people to understand, let alone accept.

Good luck with this one. If you go talk to this person, bring a catechism and if possible get fundamentalism and catholicism (I think thats what its called) by Peter Kreeft and some of the tracts off the library here.

FSC
 
Newsy said:
Awesome thread! Considering a conversion and running into those questions a lot. I know why I am leaning that way, but its hard to express under cross examination.( unfortunately that is what a few of these conversations have turned into). My biggest problem is the fact that when I am passionate about something I tend to get defensive. I apparently would not make a good apologist.🙂
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Passion is a WONDERFUL thing in apologetics. I love running into it when I talk to my fundamentalist friends. I dislike when passion becomes attacking, however, whether it is me doing it or the person with whom I am discussion my faith. The best way to avoid anger is to be well prepared. Study your catechism so you know what the Church actually teaches versus what the propaganda says we teach, and start reading some of the tracts written on here by Jimmy Akin (he is my favorite since he was fervently anti-catholic, check out his conversion story if you can find it). Also “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics”, Armstrongs “A Biblical defense of Catholicism”, and anything written by Karl Keating. The dearth of new apologetics being produced makes it relatively easy to prepare yourself. The “Beginning Apologetics” sold here is very very good, but it is very very basic and will require you to read the source material to have a well formulated response to well prepared “evangelists” trying to convert you back from Catholicism.

FSC
 
I say that one by one I found out that the misconceptions I had been told about the Church were completely wrong. I bet 90% of what protestants “know” about Catholicism is wrong or misinterpreted. Now I know that the Catholic Church holds the truth.
I also like to point out that the Bible was not written until around 400 AD, and that it was compiled by the Catholic Church so Sola Scriptura could not have worked for early Christians. Also, Paul himself said to hold fast to the traditions he gave to early Churches! One of the big hangups some people have is truths not explicitely stated in the Bible. Unless the Bible specifically says something, they don’t believe it (though they make exceptions for some things, like the Trinity 🤷)
 
FidesSpesCarita said:
Passion is a WONDERFUL thing in apologetics. I love running into it when I talk to my fundamentalist friends. I dislike when passion becomes attacking, however, whether it is me doing it or the person with whom I am discussion my faith. The best way to avoid anger is to be well prepared. Study your catechism so you know what the Church actually teaches versus what the propaganda says we teach, and start reading some of the tracts written on here by Jimmy Akin (he is my favorite since he was fervently anti-catholic, check out his conversion story if you can find it). Also “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics”, Armstrongs “A Biblical defense of Catholicism”, and anything written by Karl Keating. The dearth of new apologetics being produced makes it relatively easy to prepare yourself. The “Beginning Apologetics” sold here is very very good, but it is very very basic and will require you to read the source material to have a well formulated response to well prepared “evangelists” trying to convert you back from Catholicism.

FSC
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FidesSpesCarita, Thanks for the encouragement and advice! I have read a lot of Hahn, Keating and others in my journey. Blessings
 
FidesSpesCarita said:
Well, when someone asks me why I converted, I usually launch into a spiel about reading the ECFs, looking at todays Catholic liturgy versus the early church worship services spelled out by Origin and the Didache etc., then the primacy of Peter (which usually allows me to explain the Petros Petra thing when they throw a fit ;)), then the forgiveness of sins, keys to the kingdom, hierarchical church founded by Christ, etc. etc. etc. I leave NO DOUBT as to why I became Catholic.

lol, every time I get this I hear Triple H in my head shouting “BRING IT!!!” and then I go have a chat. There is nothing (well, very little) they can come up with that I havent already heard and researched myself since I was about as anti-catholic as you can get. Heck I probably would have been a Chick-monger if I had known about him at the time.

The hard part for me (but getting easier by the day) is to keep it charitable. ESPECIALLY when they inevitably launch into the attack on Marian devotion. The primacy of Peter is relatively simple to defend, as is the succession of bishops, confession, and obedience to the Church. The Mass takes some explaining, but the Marian Doctrines are very hard for some of these people to understand, let alone accept.

Good luck with this one. If you go talk to this person, bring a catechism and if possible get fundamentalism and catholicism (I think thats what its called) by Peter Kreeft and some of the tracts off the library here.

FSC
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I declined. 🙂 She was raised Catholic, I was not. I have heard a lot of anti-Catholic bunk, all of which has been DE-bunked in my studies BUT I don’t feel confident engaging in defence of the Church just yet and I know that’s what this particular meeting would degenerate into. I’m not quite prepared to defend the Church to someone who was IN the Church and chose to leave because the Bible led them out. :\

PS: On an amusing side note I just received Scott Hahn’s Reasons to Believe book last night! HAHA. Maybe I’ll read this and THEN take up that offer for tea. 😉
 
My family and friends werent anti-Catholic, but werent really Pro-Catholic eithier so when I said I was joining the Catholic Church they were very surprised and I got asked the question, “but why the Catholic church?” alot.

My answer was usually along the lines of, “It is the outcome of a long period of Biblical and Historical studies.”

The ones who dont really care just go “Oh ok” and some get interested and ask for what I mean which gives me a chance to share what I learnt to them.

Its a nice generic answer that is easy to say and will sift those who are just asking for the heck of it out and those who are really intrested in learning can ask more.
 
I went through the same sort of “grilling” just before I was received into the Church while going through RCIA 20+ years ago. Over the years I’ve read about many in the same boat. It seems those interested in the Church can’t help but “run into” those who question their decision. I think it’s an effort by the enemy to scare people off. I believe it was in my case, at any rate. I hadn’t heard from anyone in the Pentecostal sect I’d been a member of for several years until I was going through RCIA. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from an old friend I’d gone to Bible college with. And a lady actually drove up to my house, jumped out of her car after parking her car halfway out in the street, hurried up to my door (I happened to be on the porch and so saw the whole thing) just to demand from me why I was becoming a Catholic. I didn’t have to seek them out, they came to me! LOL! I explained quietly and simply that I had come to believe in the teachings of the Church and so was in RCIA. The old friend wanted to know if I would still have a “personal relationship” with Christ. I was happy to tell her that the Catholic faith was all about knowing Jesus as one’s Lord and Savior, which surprised her but seemed to satisfy her.

I felt I was being tested to be sure I really knew where God was leading me and understood what I was doing. After all, becoming Catholic means living out the Christian faith in the fullness of truth. It demands we face ourselves truthfully, as well. As G.K. Chesterton famously said: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried”. He was speaking of Catholicism in that statement, not some generic form of Protestantism. And he was so right. Being a Catholic, if practiced, is difficult since we are asked to be counter-cultural/anti-worldly as we follow Christ in his Church.
 
nickybr38 said:
And now the second part of the question since I had a new experience tonight.

How do you respond when someone asks WHY and then proceeds to inform you they WERE Catholic until they realized the errors of the church and they’d LOVE to share it with you sometime over tea?

Go to tea? Or politely decline? :eek:
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That’s up to you.

The Church’s official teaching contains no errors, though. You might listen in order to learn what they think the errors are, so that you can research them and come to understand why they aren’t errors, if you have a love for apologetics.

Key reasons why I converted, aside from spiritual experiences, are:
  1. The Early Church was Catholic. Reading their writings and finding no evidence of Protestant beliefs in the Early Church, but explicit Catholicism in many places, was a key factor. For who would best know how the Scripture should be interpreted? People who live 2,000 years after it was written or people who actually knew the apostles, or knew their friends, people who heard the apostles’ oral teaching or had it passed down to them without anywhere near the time gap we have here in the 21st century. The fact that the Early Christians were Catholic, as can be seen from their writings, was a great light in my journey.
  2. I compared and contrasted the Early Church Fathers with the Protestant Reformers. Zwingli was a fornicator who wasn’t willing to hold to priestly celibacy. He was a rebellious war leader. He and Martin Luther hated each other because they had different views about the Eucharist. Martin Luther celebrated when Zwingli died, saying it was God’s justice. Martin Luther was shocking to me. He was probably the most important leader of the Reformation. However, he believed bigamy can be valid, he removed several books from the New Testament canon of Scripture as well as the Old Testament (and Revelation says anyone who removes from the words of that book will have his share removed from the tree of life), he was savagely Anti-Semitic, he called the lords of Germany into absolutely bloodthirsty cruelty toward rebelling peasants he himself motivated toward rebellion in the first place, and he was glad to see killed either Catholics or Protestants who disagreed with his doctrine at all. Finding out how horrible many of the most important Reformers were, and comparing their violent rebellions with the loving charity of the Early Church Fathers, even while the Early Church endured the most ruthless persecutions from the Roman Empire, was a sign for me.
  3. I found in Catholicism an extremely beautiful light of reason. I learned that Protestant doctrines, where they deviate from Catholicism, are extremely unBiblical (for instance, Sola Scriptura hasn’t got a single bit of textual support in the Bible), and controversial Catholic doctrines like the Immaculate Conception or Prayer to Saints are actually very Biblically supported. I saw profound logic and evidence supporting all the Catholic beliefs.
  4. I also came to see great beauty in the Catholic Church’s structure and teachings. On the other hand, there is great ugliness in the endless numbers of divisions in Protestantism, the uncertainty over doctrine, the great degree of disunity, the non-sacramental lifestyle. Also, from a historical vantage point, Protestantism has always fallen into more and more pieces, more and more divisions and uncertainties, whereas Catholicism has remained one constant faith for the entire 2,000 years of its existence. The Catholic Church is “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” When I was comparing the Catholic Church to Christian denominations, the Church’s identity as “One, Catholic and Apostolic” stood out to me as great signs of its being the true Church. For it possesses these qualities far beyond any other church or denomination. Now that I’ve grown more in my faith, to me, its Holiness has become its greatest and most delightful sign, in my soul. There is such beauty and truth throughout Catholicism. Not throughout all Catholics, but throughout all Catholicism.
  5. The Lord gave me some very helpful spiritual experiences.
 
Charlotte1776 said:
I bet 90% of what protestants “know” about Catholicism is wrong or misinterpreted.
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That is so true. It’s a generalization, of course, but I think it’s very often true. It is of the Protestants I know, though they know a lot more now, of course, since I’ve converted. I also had a lot of ignorance, when I was Protestant. And when Protestants do know what the Church teaches on some issue, they don’t tend to know the reasons why we think what we do. There’s a lot of ignorance.
Charlotte1776 said:
Now I know that the Catholic Church holds the truth.
I also like to point out that the Bible was not written until around 400 AD,
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You mean the canon assembled. The Bible was all written by the end of the first century, but it wasn’t compiled into a “Bible” and there was no certainty over which books were infallible until around the canon was established around 400 AD.

Also, the canon they established included the Deuterocanonicals. So if Protestants will accept that the council was only using human wisdom and could make mistakes in its Old Testament canon, it obviously follows that it could make mistakes in its New Testament canon too . . . which means one doesn’t have any way of knowing what books are infallible, if any, unless one accepts the authority of the Catholic Church.
Charlotte1776 said:
and that it was compiled by the Catholic Church so Sola Scriptura could not have worked for early Christians.
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Yep.
Charlotte1776 said:
Also, Paul himself said to hold fast to the traditions he gave to early Churches! One of the big hangups some people have is truths not explicitely stated in the Bible. Unless the Bible specifically says something, they don’t believe it (though they make exceptions for some things, like the Trinity 🤷)
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And polygamy ;). That’s one I might talk more often to conservative Protestants about, when we talk about Tradition. It’s a lot easier to make a case for polygamy, using Scripture alone, than it is to make one against it. This is a case where all Christians need Tradition badly.
 
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