Was Rich Mullins Catholic?

[Faithwalker]

This being said, I think those who lived close to him and his relatives are much better placed than us or the catholic speculators to know if Rich was a born again Christian, and of course he was, because his songs are just the reflexion of what abounded in his heart for Jesus:

“Though Rich was drawn to Catholicism, he had trouble with some of its teachings (who wouldn’t…). He went through seven months of catechism, but in the end he chose not to convert.” “For Rich being faithful to Jesus was more important than where he worshipped” Rich’s mother states that she would be Ok with him becoming Catholic, but his sister said “he wasn’t becoming anything but closer to God.”

Which is all what really matters if we wanna walk with the Lord, isn’t it.

God bless you everybody.

Calo <><

 

[AlanFromWichita]

When I compare the comments from the Catholic sites (that all said he was ready to convert to Catholicism) with the commments from the author of the book (who personally knew Rich) and those of his family, I get the feeling that it was wishful thinking on his family’s and author’s part that he not become Catholic.

I agree. I visited the Newman Center at Wichita State U. where Fr. Matt McGuinness (or McGinness, I’m not sure) was pastor. Fr. Matt gave Rich his instructions. I asked Fr. Matt, “is it true Rich was to receive his first Holy Communion the very weekend he died on his way here to Wichita? Enquiring minds want to know.” He said, “he was almost ready, but not quite ready for that weekend. We expected that he would receive it within a couple weeks of the day of the accident.”

I’ve read that he told some friends that one concern he had about becoming Catholic was that he might alienate much of his audience, and that bothered him, but not enough to stop him from going through with it. It took the car accident to stop him from formally receiving the sacraments.

I hope it wasn’t bad to resurrect this old thread, but I was on the subject and found it here.

Alan

 

[Monica4316]

This is from another thread…“cs lewis and rich mullins were very instrumental in pointing me toward rome. neither were catholic at the time, but both were on the rome side of me, and opened my mind to some of the things i misunderstood that catholics teach.”

This may seem like an odd question, but I ordered a Rich Mullins cd a few months ago because I love his music and especailly his lyrics, but was surprised when the booklet inside the cd had pictures of an old church, a rosary, a statue of Mary, etc. One of the songs on the cd "Screen Door’ also talks about the need for faith AND works. It seems like a very ‘Catholic’ cd in many ways.

Ever since I got this CD I’ve wondered if Mr. Mullins was Catholic or on the road to Catholicism when he died. Does anyone know? The post above seems to imply he was, but it also implies C.S. Lews became Catholic…something I didnt’ know either. Thanks!

He had already decided to convert at the time that he died. That’s what I’ve heard everywhere… I dont know… apparently he was ready to make his first Confession and everything (or Communion).

I like his music and he seems like a very sincere, good musician and person.

(edit: oh I see I already had replied to this thread. lol…)

 

[Monica4316]

I’ve been to several of Rich’s concerts, and had the privilege of providing my personal grand piano for a free (like most of his concerts) concert he gave at our church, All Saints, a few days before his last Christmas, for Marriage Encounter. Note to piano players: the first thing he played while trying out my piano, after a couple arpeggios was some of the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

Anyway, at that concert, he talked about the Screen Door song. He was inspired to write it after he had picked up a very unpleasant hitchhiker, and finally lied to him saying this was his exit, then driving a few extra miles so the hitchhiker wouldn’t see him again. The hitchhiker smelled very bad, and had a very negative attitude about everything. Afterwards, he wrote Screen Door as a penance of sorts. He said he’s always been intrigued by the Catholic Church but never had gotten up the guts to join, and made a specific connection to faith and works. (good observation, Elzee!)

At the end of the concert, everybody formed a circle and sang the ME song. Rich told me after the concert that he had never felt so welcome.

Funny thing, the first time my wife and I saw him in person, in Emporia Kansas, my wife gave me a t-shirt with “Top Ten Reasons to Remain Roman Catholic” and ordered me to wear it to the concert, at a Protestant Church, in a crowd overwhelmingly Protestant. After the concert, we had a chance to talk to him (it was then he consented to the ME concert) and he read my entire t-shirt, front and back. My wife was among those trying to get him to become Catholic; I was only following orders.

While in Wichita, Rich was noted by many who knew him personally for dropping in unexpectedly on friends, especially religious people, and asking them lots of questions. At the time, he lived in the attic of the Rev Jim Smith, who currently teaches at Friends University, Rich’s alma mater. One of his good friends was Father Matt McGuinness, who currently runs the Newman Center at Wichita State University. We knew Fr. Matt because he used to be an associate pastor at All Saints.

Anyway, Rich died on I-35 while driving from Rockford Il, where he was working on his next album, headed for Wichita for a charity concert for which our family had tickets. Strange thing, my wife had premonitions that we would never see him again several weeks before when I refused to drive to Tulsa for a concert because of difficulty making arrangements for our kids. My wife was so bothered she had to begin taking medication. I showed her out tickets and assured her that we would see him again. I was wrong.

Afterwards, Father Matt said that Rich had been in training for some time, and was scheduled to receive his First Holy Communion that very weekend, after the concert.

Our parish priest at the time, who is now retired, was very conservative but took an immediate liking to Mullins shortly into the concert. Julie asked him what might become of Rich since he was almost Catholic. Father Busch told Julie, “Julie, he was Catholic.”

Alan

Thank you for sharing that

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Thank you for sharing that

You’re welcome. I so enjoy Rich that I love to tell my stories. I feel lucky to have had some sort of connection with him.

There is one correction, though. Some time later, I went to the Newman Center and asked Father Matt, “is it true that Rich Mullins was to receive his first Holy Communion the very weekend he died on his way to Wichita? Enquiring minds want to know.”

Father Matt said that Rich was almost ready, but not yet for that weekend. He and Rich had planned on his receiving Communion about two or three weeks from then.

We had tickets for the whole family to see a charity concert at an open ballpark, Lawrence–Dumont Stadium, scheduled for the day after he died. After his death, we were able to get a refund for our tickets. Any proceeds from tickets that were not returned were to go to Rich’s favorite charity, Compassion International. We kept the tickets.

An article from the Wichita Eagle about it.

Alan

 

[Eric_Prine]

I’m digging out this old thread because I had just seen a movie just released ondDVD on Rich Mullins called Ragamuffin. Amazing movie- highly recommend it but it hasn’t gotten much attention.

Though there are questions about how close Rich was in becoming Catholic, I would have at least loved it if they showed how he started going to mass at the end of his life. They unfortunately did not and to me it seemed they just completely ignored this part of his life. Instead it seemed like they ended it on a very gloomy part of his life.

Despite that, it is still well worth seeing in my opinion.

 

[Fairjer]

Eric,

I agree and agree, both on the movie and about Rich’s life and The Church. I have thought about that as well, and would only guess, just as no one is discussing Rich coming into the Church outright, no one wanted to bring it up in the movie.

I suggest seeing the movie to anyone that is looking to see God and a close up snapshot of Rich’s life.

FJ

 

[Cloisterella]

I have a blog about Rich Mullins’ Journey to Catholicism. It was widely known that he was planning to enter the church only days before he died. I saw the movie as well and was very disturbed by it. In fact, I am seriously considering taking down the blog because of the bad example portrayed of Rich in the movie. If the movie was true, It made Rich Mullins look like he led a double life. He often preached about living a Christian life and was sometimes quite forceful about it. I don’t want to use the word condemning to describe his preaching, but it was certainly convicting. In listening to him, I never assumed that he was going out after his concerts drinking and spending day after day hungover in hotel rooms and showing up drunk to important functions. The movie also showed that he had a terrible temper.

I guess if Rich Mullins never preached at his concerts and just went on stage and sang his songs, it wouldn’t have been so hard to watch the darkness of his life as portrayed in the movie, but he truly gave the impression by his preaching that he was a good Christian man.

So I am thinking of removing the blog because of the bad witness to our Catholic faith. Any advice you might have would help me to think this through. Thanks. Www.richmullinspirituality.blogspot.com

 

[Eric_Prine]

Ragamuffin was too polite of a term… but I’m not sure if the word I’m thinking would be too harsh for a Catholic forum. It definitely challenged me on the concept of grace. In a way that only Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground has. It seemed like Rich had high ideals but was lacking tools and a support base to help him change deep rooted issues. I get the impression that healing did take place as he wrestled with wounds from his childhood and that the end of his life was about his volunteer work on a reservation and going to daily mass. I personally wonder if it being an Evangelical movie they didn’t know how to show the transfiguration of the end of his life without making it a pro-Catholic movie. We as Catholics are not Pelagians; we don’t believe that men just need to buckle down and pick themselves up with their own bootstraps. It would be much better to inform others that while he was finally conquering certain defects in his life he was also coming more and more in contact with the fullness of the faith which subsists in the Catholic Church.

I have a feeling that what made the movie so dark was that they removed what started helping him the most at the end of his life. Maybe this is worth investigating and can end up being a great testimony to the Catholic faith? Please don’t shut down the blog just yet. Every man’s life is a work of art and points to a universal truth: even if it exposes our own personal falsehood.

 

[josemandez]

As a longtime fan of Rich Mullins, I think the best evidence of his intentions can be found in direct quotations from him during the last six months of his life. During his last concert tour, he said many things which indicated more of a Catholic/Sacramental way of looking at things (e.g. Baptism and good works being somehow salvific) but also said other things which are heretical from a Catholic viewpoint (e.g. “We’re not saved because we’re good; we’re good because we’re saved.”-That’s a direct quote from one of his concerts just a month or two before he died. There is no doubt that Rich was on an exodus from traditional evangelical Protestantism; he was very critical of evangelical culture at the last, and spoke in glowing terms of the pope and many Catholic ways of doing things. One wonders, though, whether his journey would have ended in Catholicism, or whether he simply would have become a different kind of Protestant.

I really could see Rich going either way on this one, and I probably lean more toward his becoming Catholic, based on the evidence I’ve read (I’m a Protestant, so I am not making that claim because I have an axe to grind). Naturally, most Catholics want to believe he was becoming Catholic, and most evangelicals/Protestants want to imagine that he would remain in their tradition.

Here’s why I could see him going either way: Rich Mullins was a big fan of Brennan Manning, a Catholic priest who basically left the priesthood and married, remaining a Catholic in name but preaching a Gospel of grace that very much echoes the Protestant dogma of salvation by faith alone. In Brennan’s book The Ragamuffin Gospel, he dismisses those who want him to talk about “what we have to do to earn our salvation.” In Catholic doctrine, salvation is quite literally lost every time that one commits a mortal sin and has to be regained through confession, which is difficult to square with Brennan Manning’s teaching on grace and salvation (remember that Rich endorsed Brennan’s writings through the early to mid 90’s).

On the other hand, there is evidence from non-biased sources that he did intend to convert. Peter Kruse, a Protestant teenager whose family hosted Rich and his band in their house just a few weeks before he died, has indicated that Rich had told them that he intended to convert, much to the chagrin of Peter’s mother, who harbored some anti-Catholic sentiments and even called Rich out for wanting to become a Catholic. Peter did not know Rich very well and was a Protestant, so he doesn’t really have an axe to grind in this debate. The one man who was closest to Rich at the time of his death is unable to tell us anything about his intentions at the last. Mitch Mcvicker was Rich’s roommate and was riding with him in the crash that killed Rich. However, because of the physical trauma of the event, Mitch is unable to remember anything that happened in the 2-3 weeks prior to the crash.

 

[Robyn_p]

As a longtime fan of Rich Mullins, I think the best evidence of his intentions can be found in direct quotations from him during the last six months of his life. During his last concert tour, he said many things which indicated more of a Catholic/Sacramental way of looking at things (e.g. Baptism and good works being somehow salvific) but also said other things which are heretical from a Catholic viewpoint (e.g. “We’re not saved because we’re good; we’re good because we’re saved.”-)

I just wanted to point out that this statement of Mullins is not at all heretical from a Catholic viewpoint. Here’s the official doctrine of the Church regarding salvation, from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

1996 Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.

2007 With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, **for we have received everything from him, our Creator. **

2008 The merit of man before God in the Christian life arises from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of his grace. The fatherly action of God is first on his own initiative, and then follows man’s free acting through his collaboration, so that the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful. Man’s merit, moreover, itself is due to God, for his good actions proceed in Christ, from the predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit

2009 Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God’s gratuitous justice. This is our right by grace, the full right of love, making us “co-heirs” with Christ and worthy of obtaining “the promised inheritance of eternal life.” The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness. “Grace has gone before us; now we are given what is due.… Our merits are God’s gifts.”

2010 Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion.

So in fact, saying that we are not saved because we are good is a very Catholic statement. Yes it is true, Catholicism teaches that we must persevere in God’s grace to make it to Heaven, but the initial grace of salvation God gives us is entirely his doing. He doesn’t save us because of anything we do.

I just wanted to clear that up because I know a lot of Protestants are under the impression that Catholics believe we earn our salvation. But we don’t.

 

[manualman]

Many, if not most, protestant converts to Catholicism are received into the church even before they have resolved every single issue they have with the catholic church. Typically, they come to recognize Christ in the Eucharist and after that intellectual and theological protestations seem pointless. The fact that Rich was still troubled by certain teachings of the catholic church is not evidence that he had rejected her.

I followed Rich Mullins from the late 1990’s through his death and his lyrics followed a very clear trend towards increasingly recognizing the Sacramental way in which God reveals Himself to mankind. Arguably he might have ended up some sort of high church Anglican, but there is no doubt at all that he was increasingly disillusioned with American Evangelicalism and finding much of what he found lacking there present in the catholic church.

A short time poster in this thread called Catholicism’s claims to be THE church established by Christ arrogant and absurd. The same, of course, goes for the claims of Christ himself… unless they are true.

 

[DiZent]

I watched the Movie, Ragmuffin, which was recommended by a CA member- Nick Alexander. I have always loved Rich Mullins’ music and I had heard of his intent to convert to Catholicism before he died. This was not reflected in the movie, but I could palpably see Rich’s struggle with OSAS. Good movie.