What You Should Know about ULTIMATE REALITY
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What You Should Know about ME
Who am I? Where did I come from?
Why am I here? Where am I going?
These are the four most important questions you and I can ever ask ourselves about
ourselves.

We are persons, and so our Creator must be a superior Being, not less personal than ourselves. As
our Creator, God knows the answers to these questions better than we do.

Since Jesus is God, He has revealed God's mind in human words and deeds.

He teaches us that we are made in God's image. We have been born into this world in order to
love, serve, and obey God forever. Sin separates us from God, but Jesus has come to reconcile us
to God. We must repent of our sins and believe the truths that God has revealed to us.

Jesus guides the Catholic Church, which guides you and me into the truth.
Let me tell you how I found ULTIMATE REALITY.
In 1982 I became a Roman Catholic in order to become a better Christian, one more responsive to the whole truth as I had slowly come to understand it.
Let me explain exactly what I mean.

I grew up in a family whose members belonged to the United Church of Christ. I was five years old before the U.C.C. was born. I was baptized as a baby
in the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Every week our family went to church services and Sunday School, and every day we said our prayers. I had a
wonderful childhood at home and in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. But something seemed to go wrong when I came to junior-high-school
age. My Sunday School teachers seemed just as dedicated as before. But the official U.C.C. curriculum we used seemed to dishonor the Bible. We were
learning a lot about the mythical and unhistorical nature of the Genesis stories and the dubious status of many of Christ's miracles. I sensed there was
something radically wrong with this. Only later did I learn the name of this terrible beast --"liberalism." The big "L" word. I learned to despise liberal
sermons, liberal ministers, and yes, even liberal bulletin covers!

During these confusing days of my early teens, evangelical friends of my parents kindly lent me gospel tracts and booklets in order to show me God's
view of my sinfulness and selfish existence. Here seemed something worth believing, because it treated the Bible as worth believing. Deep down in the
very depths of my soul I somehow knew that the Bible is God's Word. As a result, I pledged in my heart a personal loyalty to the Risen Christ Who died
on the cross to save me from my sins. This decision changed my life. I spent much time during my teenage years reading fundamentalist literature,
listening to their radio broadcasts, and having frequent evening chats with God out in the open under the stars.

Soon I felt the Lord's call to full-time Christian ministry. The idea of going to a U.C.C. seminary never seriously crossed my mind. After all, I wanted to
be trained to proclaim a message really worth proclaiming, and so I decided to go to the non-denominational, conservative, fundamentalistic Moody
Bible Institute instead. About the same time, my brother Mark, my only sibling, had a similar calling but a different path. He entered the vocations
program of being under the financial care of the U.C.C. Penn Central Confere nce. This was right before the William Johnson affair. When Mark found
out that our denomination really wanted to ordain a practicing homosexual, this was too much for him. After much heart-searching, he resigned his in-care
status with the denomination. He went on to an evangelical seminary and paid his own seminary bills. Neither one of us thought that we should leave the
denomination, though. Somehow we always felt that a John 17 church should be and would be big enough to accommodate even us "Billy Graham-type"
evangelicals. All this, of course, was before it was known how much feminism would decimate within the U.C.C. the remnant of its commitment to a
classical Protestant view of biblical authority. Today my brother is a U.C.C. minister. By a round-about way, far too long for this short talk, he has
become a U.C.C. minister. But he is a U.C.C. minister in crisis. He sees himself in a John 17 church that may soon split over the "Open and Affirming"
movement for homosexual marriages, largely because it has abandoned the classical Protestant teaching of biblical authority. He has always been very
disturbed by denominational editorials like the one entitled, "Matthew and Mark Get Married At Church," in "Penn Central News," January--February,
1998.

But what was the alternative for me? For a long time I thought Catholicism to be a peculiar religion, a very indefensible form of Christianity. What I did
not know is that I had been given distorted views of what Catholics believe. G. K. Chesterton reminds us that it is impossible to be fair to Catholicism.
We can, he says, either accept, attack or ignore Catholicism, but the one thing we cannot do is to be fair to the Catholic Faith without steadily diminishing
the distance that separates us from it. For an evangelical to shed his anti-Catholic prejudices, what is needed most is fairness and a willingness to follow
truth wherever it leads. These precious gifts of God's grace made the impossible possible for me. I must honestly say, with some sadness, that a
commitment to an absolute truth rather than to relativism was not part of my U.C.C. heritage.

I completed course work at the Moody Bible Institute, the so-called "West Point of Christian Service," and a master's degree program in New Testament
studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. There I wrote a thesis proposing that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the New Eve. By then I was convinced
about much of Catholicism. But this was a far cry from my earlier thoughts during my senior year at Moody. At that time I had described the Catholic
Church's "slippery grip upon the masses." I wrote: "The genius of the [Catholic] system would commend itself, were it not so frightening. . . .The hope of
salvation in a people robbed of assurance is held out to them like the proverbial carrot on a stick, making them move from one sacrament to the other." I
concluded with the frightening statement that the Protestant-Catholic division is "a line which started in time and, no doubt, extends into eternity." Strong
words indeed!

But I also recall the first time at Moody that I read from a book by Martin Luther. I was shocked by his foul mouth. I said to myself that someday I would
have to investigate what his Catholic enemies thought and taught. About five years later, after I knew the Bible and church history better, I found myself
fearfully scanning book after book in the Catholic section of the Trinity seminary library. My fears subsided as I discovered that Catholics hold fast to
many biblical teachings, and that they have some very good reasons for their beliefs. I discovered that Catholics are not afraid to think, or at least that
they are free to think as hard as they like.

Moody and Trinity are in the Chicago area. Between my years at these schools, I returned to Pennsylvania to earn a bachelor's degree in history from a
private Protestant-run college. There I was surprised to find myself admiring Cardinal Newman's view of purgatory in his poem entitled "The Dream of
Gerontius," which I studied for a course in Victorian literature. Ironically, without a firm grasp of both the Bible and history, an understanding made
possible for me by my talented Protestant professors, I would have lacked the necessary conviction and courage to accept the high claims of the Roman
Catholic Church. Also, without the help of some intelligent friends on the journey with me, I might have overlooked some of the most important questions.

There are several truths I learned from HISTORY that led me to consider Catholic claims carefully.1) History is littered with innumerable sects, all
claiming to have the right interpretations of the Bible. This has always bothered me. And I will even go so far as to say that I owe this sensibility to a
large degree to my up-bringing in the U.C.C. vision of John 17. God hates needless divisions among Christians, yet there are over twenty thousand
Christian denominations in the world today! Some, like the U.C.C., have given up claiming to have the right interpretations of the Bible. That makes for
peace. But it does not make for truth! To become Catholic is to make the strongest, most realistic statement possible that such divisions are a sordid, ugly
abomination in God's sight, and that the solution IN THE TRUTH has always been with us because Jesus has always been with us according to His
promises (Matthew 16:18-19 and 28:20). 2) History shows us that this one church Jesus established and promised to protect became what is called the
Roman Catholic Church. The pages of history are full of proof that there have always been Catholics, but faith-alone," "Bible-alone" Protestants appear
to be an alien breed born in the sixteenth century. And "Open and Affirming" Protestants seem to be a breed apart from history itself Although there have
always been Christian groups who opposed something or other of what the Catholic bishops taught, none of them has existed from the days of the apostles
down to the present. Catholics have over a thousand years more history than any non-Catholic group in existence today. The church Jesus founded has
been a living, divinely guided, visible, international organism since the first half of the first century. Since the true church (the one that has a special
relationship with the historical Jesus) must be as old as the apostles, a sin-marred history is better than too short a history, be it ever so pure. I found
myself in a liberal denomination that was not even as old as myself! 3) The church down through the ages has been in constant need of reform, but
Protestant evangelicals fool themselves in calling their movements a "reformation." Instead of reforming the visible circle of all who profess Christ and
have been baptized into His Body, they draw a much smaller invisible circle and call it the church. This all-too-easy "reform" is only reformulation and
is no substitute for genuine reform by means of hard work and daily purification. The Catholic Church is ever seeking to correct any of her wicked
children, while she honestly claims them as her own. On the other hand, the U.C.C. seemed to me to be in such a frenzy for reform that their reforms were
largely out of control. Reforming theological ideas in the U.C.C. conjured up the frightful image for me of a cancerous tumor metastasizing. It seems that
each Protestant group really owes its vitality to something originally borrowed from the much older Catholic Church, especially the New Testament
Scriptures. A piece of Catholicism is better than none at all, but the whole is better than a part. While reading one of Martin Luther's works, I discovered
that he wrote the following remarkable words eleven years after the start of the Reformation. "We on our part confess that there is much that is Christian
and good under the papacy; indeed everything that is Christian and good is to be found there and has come to us from this source" (from "Concerning
Rebaptism," 1528). Since Martin Luther was not a relativist, these words grant a great deal and have much meaning. 5) No religion, not even a "Bible
only" one, can long endure without making some changes or without using a normative tradition that really goes beyond what the Bible says. In the
U.C.C., this seems to have mutated into a tradition against the conserving power of tradition itself! One needs only see what the "New Century Hymnal"
does to the original U.C.C. "Statement of Faith," let alone to the wording of many of the traditional hymns! 6) The Catholic Church displays more tangible
unity than non-Catholic groups. Catholics as well as Protestants are divided among themselves by many conflicting theological opinions. But Catholics
have much more agreement on the level of what God certainly wants us all to believe. By its visible oneness, the Catholic Church powerfully shows forth
the truth of the Incarnation of Jesus. Protestants can conceptualize but can scarcely incorporate this mystery of the Church as the very Body of Christ in
history. The U.C.C. talk much about unity but cannot deliver it. 7) Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, and other men appointed by the apostles to be
leaders insisted on strong sacramental interpretations of baptism and communion. A merely symbolic view of these rites, even the stronger Heidelberg
Catechism version of them, is largely the product of the sixteenth century. 8) In every generation since the days of the apostles, most professing Christians
have lived and died in congregations in communion with the Church of the popes. They have instinctively looked to her for unity and guidance. Even a
Protestant denomination as devoted to the idea of unity as the U.C.C. has not been able to become an effective rallying point for Christian unity.
There are several important truths about the BIBLE that pointed me decisively in the Catholic direction. 1) God used the Catholic Church to discern
which books belong in the Bible as inspired. All Christian groups today have the same twenty-seven books in their New Testament that Catholics do. But
there is no evidence in history for exactly this collection (or canon) before the year 367 A.D. An infallible "book of books" hardly makes sense without
an infallible collection of them. By abandoning biblical infallibility in its official Sunday School curriculums, the U.C.C. ironically appears to be
consistent in a way that "Billy-Graham-type" evangelicals do not. 2) The Bible does not teach that it is the only authority in the Christian life. If anything,
it teaches that what the apostles taught orally is as important as what they taught in writing (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Many thinkers in the U.C.C. today
sense that Sola Scriptura is wrong, but they supplement the Bible with contemporary experience instead of apostolic tradition. 3) Second Thessalonians
2:15 also shows that the Bible speaks of traditions in a good sense as well as in a bad sense (Mark 7:8). To reject normative tradition in every form is
unbiblical. 4) Almost every Christian group, even one claiming to follow the "Bible only," falls back upon tradition to clarify which Bible verses on a
given subject are the "clear" verses and which are the "hard" ones. Since this is an inescapable process, we should rightly expect to find the true church
claiming to have a divinely guided tradition. (The "Opening and Affirming" movement in the U.C.C., to the degree that it does not ignore the Holy
Scriptures, has taken some "clear" biblical verses against homosexuality and dubbed them to be "unclear.") 5) More of the Bible is read during Catholic
Masses than in the worship services of almost all Protestant groups, even evangelical sects. Yet it is better to know what the Bible means than to know
only what the Bible says. And it is better to know what the Bible says than to ignore most of the Bible as altogether irrelevant to modern living and
alternative lifestyles. 6) Catholics have a sort of supreme court for interpreting what the Bible and the Catholic Faith mean. Without an infallible Word of
God any form of Christianity is bankrupt. Yet an infallible Bible hardly makes sense without the possibility of an infallible interpretation of it. The
English Cardinal Henry Edward Manning reminds us in the following words that the gift of infallibility is crucial. "Either Christianity is divinely
preserved, or it is not. If it be divinely preserved, we have a divine certainty of faith. If it is not divinely preserved, its custody and its certainty now are
alike human, and we have no divine certainty that what we believe was divinely revealed." If I were still U.C.C., I probably would not see the point of
getting out of bed on Sunday mornings. 7) Without the need for salvation, Christianity would be bankrupt and without a Savior, Christ the Lord. Yet this
salvation is by means of simple, faithful, hopeful and loving devotion to Jesus and His people, not by knowledge of what the Bible says, be it ever so
profound. 8) The Bible contradicts certain notions cherished by many evangelicals, including a Second Coming in two phases separated by seven years,
the right to remarry after divorce for adultery, and the inability of a Christian in a state of grace to commit spiritual suicide. And at least some of what the
biblical writers affirm about homosexual activity contradicts the conclusions of the "Open and Affirming" movement in the U.C.C. Sadly, Protestants,
even evangelical, ignore biblical affirmations which cannot be made to fit into their doctrinal and (im)moral systems. 9) The Sacred Scriptures as a
whole teach Catholicism, or at least important aspects of the Catholic Faith, such as high honor for Mary, rejection of salvation by faith alone, the need
for the gift of spiritual perfection in order to enter heaven, salvation through one church and its sacraments, and the permissibility of religious statuary. I
also found in the Bible that being "born again" is normally accomplished in baptism, that the eucharist is really the sacrifice of the church of God, and that
communion is the body and blood of the Risen Christ. To my utter amazement, I could not discover any official Catholic doctrine or practice
contradicting the Bible beyond a reasonable doubt!


In short, the Catholic Church is the church most likely to endure until the end of time. It is the Church that is most like Jesus. He has given its leaders His
authority and has promised them His assistance. This was a thrilling discovery for me, but one that carried with it difficult decisions. After all, I was
putting the finishing touches on my training for the evangelical ministry. How could I surrender it all and begin again? Only with God's help. I discovered
that the U.C.C. was not a John 17 church big enough to accommodate a Roman Catholic. It was an impossible fit, even more impossible that the fitting of
the glove on O.J. Simpson's hand. And so, for the sake of the salvation of my soul, I decided to take the big step. Only later did I discover that most of my
fears of taking this step were unfounded. What I also discovered is that as a Catholic I have everything good that I ever had as a member of the U.C.C.,
and much more.

Archbishop Sheen's eloquent portrayal of the Church as of divine origin is also a portrait of the Jesus I came to love during my teenage years. It is the
Jesus who claimed to be "The Way, The Truth, and The Life." And it is a Catholic spiritual writer, Thomas a Kempis, who said so well, "Without the
Way there is no going; without the Truth, there is no knowing; without the Life, there is no living." Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes
to the Father but through Him. He offers Himself to us in the Catholic Church. It is this Jesus, in His Word and sacraments, Who makes the Roman
Catholic Church today so irresistible. This is why I became a Catholic, and why I love to defend the absolute truth of the Catholic Faith.

I was home at last. Now I had to find out what to do with my life. Becoming a Catholic caused me to pause, but it did not remove my conviction about
God's call to ministry. And so I became a Catholic priest.
What will you do with Jesus?
Neutral you cannot be.
Some day your heart will be asking,
"What will He do with me?"
   --A. B. Simpson
Turn away from sin, and be faithful to the gospel.