I’m a REvert!
My story was actually in This Rock seven years ago:
Hell and Grace.
A more detailed version is on my site:
My Reversion.
Here’s a brief summary:
my mom was a non-practicing Catholic and my dad was like a deist, when I was born shortly after their marriage outside the Church.
they divorced when I was 7 or 8, I went with my mom, who remarried a Catholic, and I was then brought into the Catholic Church at age 9 at 1979 Easter Vigil.
Shortly afterward, I had a terrible fear I was going to go to hell, and eventually I was persuaded that I had nothing to worry about as long as I was “normal” and not like Hilter or Stalin. After that, I had little regard for questions like “what must a person do to be saved”, until like after undergrad college.
So, in HS, after confirmation, my hero was not Jesus but Eddie Van Halen. But at least the bishop’s sermon about resisting peer pressure inspired me to not drink and fornicate like other teenagers.
But, in college, faced with severe emotional trauma and a questioning of my worth as a human being (because I was a nerd), led me to believe that i needed help from God as my heavenly father, and so even though I still didn’t understand why “bad things happen to good people” (which had made me sort of deist until then), I just had to admit that I needed help from God.
I then began to practice Catholicism again and to start to read the Bible, but because the Catholic church in my small town was just telling people, as is typical of US Catholiciism, mushy platitudes about “love and peace and sharing and caring”, and yet, the world around me was going to hell in a hand basket, with widespread apostasy, I became angry and rejected the Catholic Church, and because I had never heard of such a thing as Oral Tradition, I naturally just believed that the only true source of doctrine was the Bible.
This sent me on a terrifying journey into Protestantism, with its myriads of competing factions that torture the consciences of poor material heretics in search of truth, and I was also becoming terribly mentally ill. I would come home all the time and throw myself on my knees at my bedside and beg Jesus in terrible fear to forgive me (because I usually had read some scary Bible verse that spoke of Hell, and I thought I was going to hell because I had done that).
In the first part of that process I started to go to Baptist Church, because, hey, the Baptists are the most strict, aren’t they, therefore they must be the true religion? I also, because of my extremity, was thinking like a Waldense, that i would have to sell everything I own and become a wondering homeless preacher to be saved. I was also briefly terrified by SDA theology.
But of course, eventually in my studies, I stumbled across the fact that it was MEN who decided what writings are a part of Scripture. After a while, then it became apparent that Protestantism cannot give an objective reason for why their canon of Scripture is correct. After that, I realized if the RCC is not infallible, then we don’t even know for sure what belongs in the Bible. Since then, my reversion to Catholicism has only been strengthened through continual study of theology and apologetics, etc. Consequently, I cannot conceivably see any possibility that I will ever be anything but Catholic. I simply know too much!
