For Converts and Reverts, What were you before you became Catholic

[janiruchan]

I was agnostic…felt really empty not having a God. I wasn’t vain as well, except for the truth.
God gave me a good Religious studies teacher and healed me through a retreat…since then I became a devout catholic.

 

[Avila123]

It is so wonderful to read all your testimonies. Our very own CAF Journey Home.

Thank you for sharing God’s blessings in your lives.

:flowers:

 

[pippin]

I was raised Catholic but didn’t really understand the faith. My senior year in High School I met some Baptists who impressed me with their knowledge of the Bible. I started attending Bible study with them and then going to church with them. I always felt God calling me back to the Catholic Church, but then I met my husband who was raised Baptist. When it was clear that we would get married, I decided to stay in the Baptist Church so we could worship together. There were many things about the Baptist Church and the way they interpreted Scripture that we could not agree with. Eventually we both quit going to church.
I still believed in God and still felt Him calling me to the Catholic Church, but other than praying, did nothing about it.

Then came 9/11. My husband came to me the next day and said “God told me we’re going to Church Sunday”. I was quite surprised and asked which church. We had moved since we had stopped going and didn’t have a church at that time. I was just hoping he wouldn’t pick a Baptist church. I was stunned when he named the nearby Catholic Church. He joined RCIA two weeks later. I went with him. We are both so happy to be home.

 

[maggiedoc]

I was raised Church of England ( Anglican )with exposure to Methodist and Plymouth Brethren worship thanks to grandparents. My parents were evangelical-type Anglicans and “Roman” practices were distrusted.
I was a committed and practising Christian, met my husband a non-believing non-practising Catholic. Serious discussions happened before marriage in Anglican church. He attended with me on & off till he became enamoured with Jesus, then we both attended, but found over time that our respect for Life was not supported. As more beliefs and practices changed my husband decided to revisit his Catholic roots which disturbed me greatly. As a very broad-minded gesture I agreed to attend RCIA with him and found myself on a deep and challenging journey with Our Lord. There was no going back and I am so so thankful to be in the Catholic church now.

 

[steymard]

I was raised devout Evangelical-charismatic-baptist-thingy. I read the Bible plenty and even quite a bit of Church Fathers.

It took a relatively short time for me to be utterly convinced of Catholicism once I started investigating the Church’s claims. It still makes the most sense to me even now. But now it’s not simply a philosophical sense or a logical sense - it also makes the most sense in how it addresses the problems of human nature, and also makes a spiritual sense in its great beauty and in its incomparable divine liturgy that raises the heart of man to God and unites man with God.

 

[iepuras]

I was born and raised Mormon. I spent most of my adulthood so far as Mormon. Eighteen months ago, I researched about LDS church history and learned Joseph Smith was a false prophet. A great burden was lifted because I struggled a lot with Mormonism, but I was unsure where to go next. I decided I still believed in God and that Jesus Christ was God Incarnate and was resurrected. I looked at the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy and chose the Catholic Church, primarily because of the primacy of Peter.

 

[maggiedoc]

I was raised devout Evangelical-charismatic-baptist-thingy. I read the Bible plenty and even quite a bit of Church Fathers.

It took a relatively short time for me to be utterly convinced of Catholicism once I started investigating the Church’s claims. It still makes the most sense to me even now. But now it’s not simply a philosophical sense or a logical sense - it also makes the most sense in how it addresses the problems of human nature, and also makes a spiritual sense in its great beauty and in its incomparable divine liturgy that raises the heart of man to God and unites man with God.

 

[maggiedoc]

maggiedoc:
steymard–you describe my sentiments also re: Catholicism.:

 

[RachaelM]

I’m grateful for the unbroken lineage in the Catholic Church from Jesus’ time walking the earth to now, and from Abraham, to Jesus before his incarnation. Oh, and for the Father’s promise of salvation to Eve back in the Garden…

 

[EIF5A]

Born and raised Protestant with a slight charismatic/Pentecostal bent.

Believed in God, Jesus, death and resurrection, sin, etc, but did not feel Christian. Went to church but felt lacking.

Lived a life of sin, fully knowingly and consciously.

Long story short, I read a few books (that I think God placed in my way…or it was some coincidence) and believed in the Real Presence of the Eucharist → truth of the Catholic Church and the lives and merits of the saints → removed (most of) my reservations about Marian beliefs.

Only after finding the Catholic faith and tradition did I find the desire to change my ways and strive for a more virtuous life (the constant reminder of my sinful ways is more difficult as a pseudo-Catholic, but I guess it’s better than remaining negligent and ignorant).

 

[Basilian]

I was raised by an atheist father and an agnostic mother. I never could be sure what they were, exactly, since no one ever talked about God or religion in any part of my family. My mum’s mum was a fallen-away Catholic, but that was the extent of my knowledge. I never entered a real church building until I was 19, and then it was only to look around for a minute.

When I was 19 I discovered logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and sound-thinking for the first time. Until then, I had prided myself on being very wise & matter-of-fact. The fact is, however, that I was an ignorant sentimental fool. The 18th-century anti-deist Anglican philosophers helped me (especially Samuel Clarke), but the primary foundation was laid by St. Thomas Aquinas. Through a long and painstaking process, I attended my first Mass on Tuesday, May 18, 2010.

Many things went through to make this thing work, but the simple logic of Aquinas - defeating my very silly atheistic presuppositions - led to baptism in 2011. Thanks be to God. I took his first name as my Baptismal/Confirmation name.

 

[CathConvert2013]

I was raised episcopalian. Became baptist. Then secular/agnostic/atheist.

My mother was a cradle catholic but renounced it by her late 20s. My father was raised southern baptist. He had been married before and was not interested in an annulment. I think they chose to marry in a Presbyterian church. I was also baptized and attended preschool in a Presbyterian church. I only remember attending the episcopalian church. As a teen I attended a new age church and a baptist church on occasion with friends. I felt most drawn to baptist churches at the time, repented and was baptized again, became engaged, and was married in a baptist church. We received a lot of marriage prep, almost like pre-Cana. After we got married we stopped attending. No need for the church anymore, we were no longer living in sin woohoo! We started our family, and we thought we lived a good life: secular, agnostic, atheist, etc. Still had no need for church. My grandmother passed away in October 2012, and she was catholic and enjoyed a full funeral mass. I was amazed at the church’s beauty. I began to look into the Catholic Church immediately and joined RCIA within 2 weeks. My sister did the same in her own state and we came into the church at the Easter vigil 2013. My children have been baptized, received their first reconciliations and first Eucharists between last summer and this Easter season. My husband is attending mass with us a couple times per month, and we have a large amount of Catholic neighbors that help encourage him to attend. I push too hard by myself, but when the neighbors ask him what time he’s attending mass, he can’t say no!

 

[philv]

I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist, and went to a few other Protestant churches until I noticed they were all teaching different things, even seeing that as a worship leader. I had to look into the source of what the original teachings were, and they weren’t Seventh-day Adventists, nor were they Pentecostals, nor were they First Presbyterians. They were Catholic in the book of Acts and in the writings of the early church fathers. St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and student of St. John, convinced me the most, saying “Where the bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be; even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church" (~A.D. 107). I now have a bishop after all these years

 

[TK421]

I went to a Restoration Church growing up (a kind of fundamentalism), and then became agnostic/irreligious, and then I was a vague and indecisive evangelical Christian, and then I became a voracious Papist.

 

[DeFuret]

Well, I didn’t convert to Roman Catholicism, but I did go to some sort of small-c catholicism from a less catholic background (Anglicans can do that sort of horizontal conversion). It was a complicated process, but in extremely simplistic terms:

I grew up in a wishy-washy Anglicanism as a child, then moved to a very unwanted agnosticism/borderline weak atheism/irreligion in my early/mid teens. Then I went back to Low Anglicanism at 16/17, but became a very materialistic irreligious nominal Christian in my university years. I then became involved with generic Protestant Christianity online, a resurgence in serious interest in Christianity which led to actual Church attendance in “social justice” broad church Anglicanism. I was a bit disturbed at the emphasis on modern politics and contemporary cultural norms (usually leftist in nature) in some of the latter churches, at the expense of, well, Christianity. I was already personally leaning Anglo-Catholic while still attending lower-Anglican churches when I got a hold of G. K. Chesterton, who totally destroyed the fallacies that dominated within them and made it such that I couldn’t take them seriously anymore. At about the same time (during a philosophical crisis in which my long-held mechanistic materialist biases and metaphysical naturalism finally clashed with my increasing religiosity) I discovered Ed Feser. I then sought out an Anglo-Catholic parish.

Whew. The whole story is even more complicated.