What brought you to the Catholic Faith?

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Montie_Claunch

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What brought you to the Catholic Faith? I’m Curious.
 
I guess you could say i was born catholic, but by praying, researching and contemplating i became Catholic.
 
I was very fortunate to be born Catholic. Now that I’m older I don’t have to go searching for the true Church because I’m already in it! Yay! Big thx to my mum and dad.
 
It was really the *history *of the Church that attracted me (I found myself unable to deny that the Catholic Church was the very same Church that Jesus established). But it was the particular doctrine of the Papacy which I did not *expect *to find in ancient Christianity that convinced me of the fullness of the historical unity, so my vote goes to the Papacy.
 
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DavidFilmer:
There are only 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
Click to expand...
I love this! 👍 I’ll have to share this with my son’s “computer nerd” friends. 😃

Regarding the poll, I’d have to say: I was born Catholic - and I can’t deny the influence of my parent’s living faith - but it was my experience of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist - felt from my earliest childhood memories of going to Mass - that kept me Catholic “at heart” during my various detours into humanism, Mormonism and the Churches of Christ. It was a vision I had (while half asleep/half awake) of Christ’s Second Coming to judge the living and the dead that got me back on my knees praying the “Our Father” - “forgive us our trespasses” - and it was an encounter with an anti-Catholic “Campus Crusade for Christ” follower that got me on the road to recognizing the historical continuity of the Catholic Faith from Christ to the present day that finally got me back in the confessional and to Mass - and I think it was after I had learned about Our Lady of Fatima’s messages to the Church that I really became “confirmed” in the Catholic Faith.

So I guess I became Catholic through a convergence of reasons … as the Word of God affirms: “a three a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12)

Keep the Faith
jmt
 
Well once I realized that the papacy was right, I really had no choice other than to become Catholic. But it wasn’t only that, the Catholic Church just felt right. There’s really no other way to explain it.
 
John Taylor:
I love this! 👍 I’ll have to share this with my son’s “computer nerd” friends. 😃
Click to expand...
I’m glad you like it, but I can’t take credit for it. This “joke” has been around for a while in “nerd” circles.
 
There are only 10 types of people in the world:
Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
(if you don’t get it, you don’t understand binary)
Click to expand...
OHHH!!! I get it now, DUh! 😛
 
I put other because I think, actually, the Southern Baptist faith brought me to the True Faith :eek: ! I say this because that church, my grandfather, and others like him, were always saying horrible things about the Church. Part of me wondered why, and part of me knew this wasn’t true. So, they drove me into my search for the truth about the Faith! 👍
 
History and lack of sola scriptura being taught in the Bible. (making it a self-contradictory means of sole authority)
 
If I had to pick one, I’d say the Rosary. I always wanted one, finally bought one, taught myself to pray it and went from there. I have a deep love for the Blessed Virgin Mary and a great interest in the saints. Building on all of that I’ve spent hours on the forums and reading various books and now I’m in RCIA. Yay!

Amie
 
I answered “miracles” not because of the miracles of the church, but by miracles that I became Catholic. I had absolutely no interest. It was only by the power of God that I was able to listen to the priest that I despised and continued to return to the class that angered me every time I stepped foot into it. Only by the power of God and the patience of my husband. Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ :gopray2:
 
I voted “other”.

Nobody is born Catholic. I was baptised shortly after birth and my parents and teachers taught and showed me the Faith, but most others to whom that happened gave away their faith, in all but a nominal sense, in their adolescence. The main reason I decided to become a committed, active, practising adult Catholic is that I “read my way into it” by studying the evidence. Once I was convinced of the existence of God, the facts that Jesus Christ is the Saviour sent by God, and that he founded the Catholic Church, and that I must be a member of it and follow its teachings, follow inevitably in a logical process.
 
I voted other, and it’s because the answer for me is scripture. Now, it’s scripture, coupled with Apostolic succession and the writings of the early church, but scripture is entirely Catholic, and in my mind there is no denying this.

I credit my Evangelical girlfriend and her mother for challenging me on the Catholic faith with their objections, and giving me the impetus to seek it out, although it did open my eyes to how poorly catechized I am, being that I have been Catholic all my life.

I have to say though, that I believe that the Holy Spirit is the main reason I can cherish the Catholic faith, and discern truth from error. It’s so funny, but now, I feel as someone who is newly Confirmed, and I do my best to show others the example and beauty of my faith, to the point of correcting others in their mortal sins, geez, whats happened to me, lol. I truly feel like a Soldier for Christ.
 
If you had met me when I was in high school, I would probably be one of the people that would have been in the yearbook (had there been such a category) as “least likely to ever be Catholic”. I had grown up in various non-denominational Christian churches, some changes due to moves, others to doctrinal strife within the churches in question. My father had been an elder in most of the churches to which we belonged, I started playing piano for worship services when I was 14. I’d been a rather precocious child, who’d completed her first cover-to-cover read-through of Scripture in 1st grade and was baptized when I was 7. Due to my father’s position in the church, we had a lot of fairly deep (theologically speaking) reading material in the house, and I’d read through it all before I was 17. Whether I understood what I was reading or not might be argued, but there simply was no keeping me from reading–I’d read through everything at home, in the church library, and the town’s public library.

Still, I found myself in the state of mortal sin when I was 21. (The specifics of which are not needed.) At this time, I began making those daily drives I mentioned in the “praying out loud” thread, but instead of comfort, I began to hear voices in the car with me–clearly demons whose principal message was that I could never be forgiven for the particular sin, and since I belonged to them I might as well quit fighting and kill myself. (Yes, I realize that some might take me for insane at this point. However, I believe that demons are quite real and can try to exert influence over people. This was not possession, though, but rather what I think is more common–demonic oppression–they remain outside, but do not leave their target alone.) I don’t think that I’m particularly special, but that anyone who is in such a condition of sin can be targeted since if they get the person to seal that state of sin with despair, they’ve won a soul for hell. Needless to say, this quickly came to a head–I could not continue with the situation as it was, and the engagement that I was then in broke off, and not wanting to face questions about why we were no longer a couple (having been the only couple of marriageable age in that congregation), I decided to attend a different church the Sunday after the engagement was broken.

The church I settled on was an Episcopal church, chosen because it was a cathedral–and I figured that a cathedral had to be so big that I could go in and be anonymous. Instead, this particular church was a very friendly community, and I was near instantly recognized as someone new. This was a bit frightening, as I started to recognize the same sort of “identify a prospect” behavior that I knew from the church I grew up in (identifying a new person, making sure that an “old-timer” sat with them during worship, invitations and urging to return). The life-changing moment came during the worship service, during one of those rote prayers that I’d always been taught were meaningless (somehow, the possibility that ritual prayer could also be heartfelt had been overlooked)–the Confiteor (“I confess to Almighty God…”). During the silence between the prayer and absolution, I added my own prayer for forgiveness, that if I could be forgiven that I would be given a sign that I had been forgiven. As the bishop spoke the words of absolution, I literally felt a weight roll off my back. The next day when I returned to those daily drives, the demonic voices were gone–and never returned.

For some time after, I wavered between the two churches. I had never experienced God’s presence in such undeniable, dramatic form in the church I’d grown up in. Still, my parents would be hurt if I left that church for the Episcopal church, and so for some time I attended in both places. In the Episcopal church, they had a new round of the Inquirer’s Class start up right after my first visit, and I began attending. A whole new part of Christian history opened up in front of me. The final break with the church I grew up in came midway through the Inquirer’s Class, when I was headed into the church to practice the piano (I was going to accompany a friend singing a solo, and we’d arranged to meet there to practice together, but I’d arrived first). As I walked up to the piano, I noticed the carpet in front of the table where the communion trays were held during church services. The carpet was blue, but stained from many small spills, and I wept that something so precious could be treated with so little care. At this point, I realized (though not yet using the term “Real Presence”) that I did not believe in a symbolic-only presence, and at that point, my goal in the Inquirer’s class changed from “information only” to desiring to join. I officially joined the Episcopal church three months after my first visit.

(continued next post)
 
During my years as an Episcopalian, I delved into the lives of saints and with a renewed vigor into theology. It was during this time that I met my now-husband, who is a cradle Catholic. For the first few years of our marriage, we were able to make the mixed-marriage work–he went to Mass, I went to the Episcopal church. We had our first child, and he was baptized in the Episcopal church. During this time, my husband was quite adamant that he would never leave the Eucharist, but was otherwise not particularly observant.

The next change-point came when I was in church and one of the first women priests of the Episcopal church was our guest homilist. Her “homily” was one of the most vile, disgusting things that I had ever heard–all about how much women owed to the lesbian movement, how wonderful it was that women could work outside the home, and how horrible motherhood is. At this point, I could now see how letting doctrine be decided by popular vote had led to this particular homily, and that while God had undeniably used the Episcopal church in a time of great need, there was a moral bankruptcy in the core. I never went back.

I spent the next few months in a spiritual wilderness–I knew I could not go back, but was unwilling to go forward. For me, the crux of the issue was that I could not become Catholic unless I truly believed as a Catholic (which is to say everything, rather than continuing to pick and choose)–yet at this point, I knew that my faith journey was taking me to the Catholic Church. Until this time, my husband had never pushed for my conversion to the Catholic Church; however, he had often spoken of the power of the rosary.

So I read through St. Louis de Montfort’s “The Secret of the Rosary,” which among other things, teaches how to pray the rosary. (Yes, there goes that voracious reading habit again.) And decided to see what fruit came of offering a daily rosary–since by this time, I’d fallen into bad habits that could be generally described as lack of control over my tongue. I then began the devotion, offering the rosary for the intention of control over my tongue, and within two weeks, a habit that had been three years in the making was broken. Over the course of these two weeks, however, I became increasingly bothered by the Church’s position on the subject of birth control (really, the only major sticking point at that time)–and whether it might not be right. Well, admittedly, I didn’t think it was possible to understand why the Church’s teaching is as it is, but I decided to start offering my daily rosary for the intention of understanding this teaching.

It was on the third day of offering the rosary for this intention that I received a most unexpected answer. As I prayed, I heard a Voice–only one word: “obey”. Now, I’ll be honest–I did not like that answer. Nor, at that moment did I recognize exactly Who spoke (though by reading this, it’s probably clear before I get to the end of this segment)–and I protested: “But I want to understand.” The Voice had three more words to say to me: “I want obedience.” It’s hard to convey how the Voice sounded–but suffice to say I did not dare speak again, I don’t think anyone who heard the Voice would have, unless to echo St. Thomas’ “My Lord, and my God”–that is the best my poor words can do to describe the Voice.

I have said that on that day (May 17, 1997), I ceased to be Protestant even though the process of becoming officially Catholic was not complete until April 11, 1998.

(sorry, long answer)
 
I was born a Catholic but walked away from my faith as a teenager. Well, not a total denial, just sort of drifted away really and got interested in other things. After recognition of a constant spiritual yearning, it was academic study that really lead me to the conclusion that the Catholic Church was the only real answer if one accepted Jesus Christ as one’s Lord and saviour.
 
I was always Catholic, but was totally frustrated by my inability to defend the Faith. I was totally unable to have workable explanations of various tenets of the Faith, Church history incidents (Crusades, Inquisition, slavery, Pope Pius XII, etc.).

Finally one day, by “accident”, I “just happened” to come across a copy of the newspaper “The Wanderer” in the vestibule of a church where I had stopped off during the day to make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament.

By “coincidence” that particular issue contained a serialized chapter from Karl Keating’s book, “Catholicism & Fundamentalism”. [or the other way around]…

Anyway, I was impressed enought that I wrote to Mr. Keating and … stunningly … he wrote back. I started trying to buy the books he mentioned, but they were all out of print.

And one thing led to another.
 
I was born and raised Catholic but strayed for many years. There was a time when I “tried out” other churches but quickly became discouraged with that and gave up on religion completely. Even when I was discouraged with Catholicism and “trying out” other denominations, I kept questioning “by whose authority do they do these things?” Like the Lutherans for example–they didn’t have a mandate (for lack of a better word) from Jesus to do the things they did…same with Episcopalians or Methodists. I kept coming back to the thought that if Jesus Christ really was the Son of God and really did give us a church to guide us, that church must be the Catholic Church because no other religious group could trace themselves back directly to Jesus Christ. A few years ago, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I returned to the Catholic Church. I’m re-learning the faith (btw–these message boards have taught me so many things I didn’t know…and have caused me to question other things and research them on my own) and have never been happier.
 
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