Hi,
I’m a convert from Adventism to Catholic.
Here’s a post a made quite a while ago…
I became dissatisfied with SDA teachings while attending an SDA college in the early 80s. For years I avoided discussion with SDAs other than close family (only because those discussions were unavoidable). In what few discussions came about, a point many Adventists tried to make, was that attitudes have ‘changed’, adventism has ‘matured’ and that many of the issues the led to my leaving are no longer around.
Well, things do change, the internet made discussion both more accessible and more anonymous, so I started conversations. (anonymity is a big deal when you have a lot of 3rd and 4th generation Adventists in the family, many of them working for their denomination.)
What I have found here and in other forums around the internet, is that not much has changed from what I can see. It is maybe packaged differently, prettier wrappings, more rounded corners and extra padding around the sharp edges… but I can’t see that anything has really changed.
I have a list, but as its best to deal with one thing at a time in a thread, I’m going to start with one of the first things (out of many) that began to push me out of my comfort zone to consider that maybe as an Adventist I wasn’t following the Truth after all.
As I came to the Adventist school as an upperclassman transfer, I had a great many religion courses to take that were required classes but of course were not available at the state university I had attended. I had 12 religion credits that first semester. Four classes. Each class had a different style, but the substance was the same: “Catholicism is not Christian because they believe…” “The Catholic Church is evil and apostate because history records they did …” Almost everything fit into those two categories, just fill in the blank with the specific details.
I began to have a problem in class though. Especially the first category. One professor devoted an entire hour to a lecture on ‘Mary worship’ and elaborated extensively on it and why it was wrong. As a kid I had attended a Catholic gradeschool and as was usual at that time, we attended daily mass and memorized our catechism lessons out of the Baltimore Catechism. What the Adventist professor was teaching was not what I remembered learning. At the end of class, when there was opportunity for questions, I brought up that the Catholic church does not teach about Mary as he had just told the class, expecting some reasonable answer. His response was that everything the Catholic church publishes to teach its doctrine are deceptive lies to make things seem ok, but that the reality is the Catholic church teaches ‘Mary Worship’ because it is really pagan goddess worship disguised as Christianity. He then refused further questioning in class on the subject.
As the semester continued, this became a very familiar pattern.
“History says…” but what I remembered from secular history classes was very different. “the Catholic church believes…” but what I remembered was very different. I thought I was remembering wrong, so I began researching Catholic beliefs, after all I only had a few months of elementary school level instruction. Every thing I found confirmed what I remembered.
My experiences with Adventists are they are in general nice people, but there is an underlying intensity directed at converting those they interact with to their views. They can with seeming sincerely say they love Catholics and are not Anti-Catholic, then in almost the next breath ask me if I’m aware the Catholic Church is the whore of bablyon and that the papacy is the beast.
The reason I left? At first it was the dishonesty of my Adventist professors misrepresenting Catholic teaching and history even when confronted with evidence contrary to their position. Later, in studying those issues, the beauty of the Catholic faith became irresistible. As I child I loved the Catholic faith. My family was not Catholic when I attended Catholic school, but I fell in love with the faith there. Attending daily mass, I would pray during communion that someday I would be a member and be able to recieve Jesus in communion like my classmates. I loved our book report assignments that required reading the biography of a saint. Reading lives of the great saints became my favorite kind of literature and continued long after I returned to attending public school. Later though, wanting to follow Jesus, I sadly gave up my intention to be Catholic because I thought, based on Adventist books and bible studies from my Adventist relatives, that becoming Adventist was the right thing to do. Finding out later, after giving up my first love, that those teachings were full of distortions and lies was a harsh betrayal. I know now that I can follow Jesus… by being CATHOLIC!
God is Good
MarysRoses
