Transcript

David Curry, author of the classic work Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, will share his powerful conversion story from a fundamentalist Protestant background to the Catholic faith and much more today on The Simple Truth.

It is Testimony Tuesday on The Simple Truth, where we bring you real-life, first-hand testimonial accounts of the life-giving reality of Jesus and His Catholic Church.

We consecrate everything to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the pure, strong, chaste heart of St. Joseph.

Again, our guest today is David Curry.

He's a Catholic husband, father, grandfather, and also the author of Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

That's the book I know him by; it was very helpful to my journey back to the Catholic faith almost 25 years ago now.

But he's the author of some other books as well.

He's going to share some of his good work with us as we go, but we want to start in the beginning.

But first, we want to welcome him in.

David Curry, welcome to The Simple Truth.

Thank you for being with us today.

How are you?

I'm doing very well, thank you for having me, Jim.

It's always good to talk.

Yeah, excellent!

It's a great blessing to have you with us, and we always begin the testimonies with the beginning.

We start with childhood.

What was your early life like, your family, the culture that you grew up in?

Okay, well, maybe I can start with a story about my childhood.

It's one of my most vivid memories as a child, and I start the book with the same story because it sort of puts everything into perspective.

I think I was a PK; I was a preacher's kid, and I had three sisters and a very loving family.

But one of my most vivid memories was when I was in 6th grade.

I was on the playground in 6th grade.

Messing around like 6th grade boys do, they called us in a little early and told us that the president had been shot.

At that time, they didn't have any details, but it sort of put a darkness over the whole afternoon.

And of course, we're talking about President Kennedy.

I'm old enough to remember that, believe it or not, Jim.

After they actually ended up dismissing school a little bit early that day, they told us, We want you to go home.

From all appearances, it appears that our president has been successfully assassinated; he's no longer with us.

I remember walking home; we lived about a mile from school, and back then there weren't buses, you just walked to school.

As I was walking home, big tears were dripping down my cheek because, as a fundamentalist sixth grader, there was no doubt in my mind that there was no hope for John F. Kennedy—that he was in hell.

I just knew it.

I knew, as a Catholic, he was trying to work his way, or I thought that I knew he was trying to work his way to heaven.

He didn't accept sola fide, salvation by faith alone, and that was a pivotal moment in my life because it was just so much sorrow, so much sorrow that our president was gone and that there was no hope for him for all eternity.

But that's the kind of theology I was raised in.

I was raised in a fundamentalist preacher's kid's home.

We were very loving; we loved people.

But there were some things that were just non-negotiable.

We believed in sola fide; you are saved by faith alone.

We thought we knew that Catholics worked their way to heaven because they talked about works, so obviously we felt that it was pretty obvious they couldn't believe in sola fide.

We also believed that Scripture was our only authority—sola scriptura.

If we needed to know something to get to heaven, it would be in Scripture, and we did not need to worry about any earthly authority.

Which is sort of funny when I look back on it because every preacher—and if you spent some time, Jim, in fundamentalist or any kind of Protestant circles, you know that really the preacher is the authority, you know, because he opens Scripture and he teaches Scripture.

But it's his perspective on Scripture that he gives us.

But we believed very strongly that Scripture was the only authority.

Now, there were other things that we believed as well, some of which kept me away from Catholicism.

We believed in the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement.

The true death, burial, and resurrection three days later of Jesus Christ—that was a time back then when that was questioned by a lot of liberal Protestants and even a few liberal Catholics.

But one of the things that kept me from the Catholic Church for decades was the whole idea of the future times.

How is this world going to wrap up?

We were quite convinced that there was still ahead of us a secret rapture that most people didn't know was coming.

People would be taken at the split second, in a moment, to heaven, while other people would be plunged into a seven-year horrible time called the Great Tribulation, during which Israel would come to the forefront again of God's plan for salvation.

At the end of that seven years, there would be this massive war, and Jesus would come back the second time.

We called it the second time, but actually, if you count the rapture, it's really like the third time.

Then we would go into a thousand-year millennium—in other words, one thousand years of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

So we rejected the Catholic claim that the Kingdom of God was already established at Christ's first advent, and that kept me away from Catholicism.

We were all friendly with Catholics; we were very friendly with Catholics, but I had no Catholic friends.

I knew Catholics at school, obviously; I went to public school.

But we were very, very separatist; we kept ourselves.

If we were talking to a Catholic about religion, we were usually trying to get them to understand how Catholicism was wrong.

The other big thing that kept me away from Catholicism for a long time—and Jim, this is not going to surprise you at all—is Mary.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary.

We always had problems with Catholics' views on that, but particularly for me, it seemed to me that the Church's teaching on Mary conflicted with what the Bible taught.

When you say that the Bible is your only authority, and then if the Church is disagreeing with the Bible on something, it seems like that means the Church has to be wrong.

Specifically, it was about—it's such a minor issue, but it was a huge issue to me—did Jesus have any brothers and sisters?

In other words, did Mary have other children after Jesus?

Those two things had to fall into place before I could even really look seriously at Catholicism.

So that's my youngest memories.

I have some rather weird ones that you probably would look at me and say, Dave, did you really think that?

I remember one time I came home, and my mom wasn't home, and none of my sisters were home.

And remember, we believed that at any moment, Jesus could come back with the secret rapture.

If you didn't go with the people that were in the secret rapture, you were going to be left behind for seven horrible years.

Well, I was probably in about third or fourth grade at that time, and I became convinced in those minutes, while I was looking for my mom and my sisters, who were nowhere to be found at home, that they had been taken and I had been left.

I thought, What am I going to do for seven years?

The fear that I had at that moment was incredible.

But I found eventually that they'd all gone over to the neighbor's house and were having a nice, friendly cup of coffee in the afternoon when I got home from school that day.

I just didn't know what the agenda was.

As a result of my convictions, I felt like I really didn't want to ever be anything other than what my dad was, which was a fundamentalist preacher.

So I went to Bible school, then I went to Christian college, then I went to Trinity Seminary, and entered full-time Christian service.

It was about that time that I started having problems with the system that I was taught.

My problem was I was finding verses that didn't make sense in Protestantism.

The one I remember most vividly is the first one I remember: Colossians chapter 1, verse 20, where Paul talks about the fact that he adds his suffering to the suffering of Christ for the salvation of the world.

That's not a Protestant idea; you know we can't add anything to the sufferings of Christ.

So I was only about sixth grade at that—no, no, I was a little older.

I was probably about eighth grade at that time, and I asked my dad about it.

I could tell he didn't have a real good answer because he wouldn't answer the question.

He said, Well, Dr. John Walvoord, who is president of Dallas Seminary, is going to be over for dinner this Sunday.

Why don't you ask that question to Dr. Walvoord?

So I thought, Okay, yeah, Dr. Walvoord will have a good answer to that.

Dallas Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College—those were sort of the schools that we associated with.

So I asked Dr. Walvoord, and at the end of that, he looked at me and said, Dave, there are some things that we can't base our theology on.

It sounds like maybe we're going into a break here, Jim, so I can place this story on the other end of the page.

Yeah, yeah, we'll pause there.

But yeah, great stuff here with David Curry.

And he is the author of Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, and I do want to encourage you to get at least one copy of the book if you don't have it.

It's just an incredible read, and David does go into his story really in the first chapter of the book, laying out quite a bit of it there, and then really just going down the list, knocking down all of the misconceptions and areas of things he just didn't know about with regard to Catholic teaching, and then how he came to know them.

It's a great book to come to know these truths better and stronger ourselves and also to hand them on better.

We're going to be right back with more, so stay tuned.

Prayer of Deliverance: Almighty God and Father, we beg Thee, through the intercession and help of the archangels St. Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, for the deliverance of our brothers and sisters who are enslaved by the evil one.

From anxiety, sadness, and obsession, we implore Thee, deliver us, O Lord.

From hatred, fornication, and envy, we implore Thee, deliver us, O Lord.

From thoughts of jealousy, rage, and death, we implore Thee, deliver us, O Lord.

From every thought of suicide and abortion, we implore Thee, deliver us, O Lord.

From every form of sinful sexuality, we implore Thee, deliver us, O Lord.

From every division in our family and every harmful friendship, we implore Thee, deliver us, O Lord.

From every sort of spell, malice, witchcraft, and every form of the occult, we implore Thee, deliver us, O Lord.

Thou who said, Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you, grant that through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, we may be liberated from every demonic influence and enjoy Thy peace always, in the name of Christ our Lord.

Amen.

I might have gone to church, you know, at Christmas time, but gradually I quit going.

It's not as scary as I thought it was; it's a much more warm and open place, and God really is about love.

It's not about the rules and the things that I remember as a child.

It really is about the love that God has for each one of us that’s so deep and wonderful.

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Welcome back to The Simple Truth.

Jim Havens here with our special guest today, David Curry.

He is the author of Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

I highly recommend this book.

David, you were sharing a story with us, and I want to get back to that story, but first, I’m wondering if you can just share with the audience, in case there’s anybody out there that just isn’t very sure or doesn’t know much about the various divisions within Protestantism, what exactly does it mean to be a fundamentalist?

Where does this land in context with Protestantism overall?

That’s a very good question, Jim.

First of all, we did not consider ourselves Protestants.

Protestants, we believed, had left the Catholic Church in the 1500s—Luther and the other Protestants.

We considered ourselves the true Christians that had been since Christ's beginning and never joined the Catholic Church; that the Catholic Church left us, so to speak.

That’s sort of a unique thing about Protestants.

They talk about this golden thread that goes all the way back to the very, very beginning of the Church.

Just between you and me, Jim, don’t tell anybody this, but it’s utter nonsense.

There is absolutely no historical or biblical evidence for that at all, but that’s what we believed.

During the 1800s, Protestantism went through the Enlightenment, which started to affect Protestantism, where they began to reject all the supernatural.

They started to call into question the biblical inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility of Scripture itself.

They began to call into question the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

They started to call into question the virgin birth, all of these different beliefs that, actually, as fundamentalists, we protected and shared with Catholics.

I never thought about that, but we were much more akin to Catholics than we were to liberal Protestants.

So when they went that direction, the fundamentalists became more of a movement.

Before that, they weren't as much of a movement, but it happened up in New York.

They got together and came up with the five fundamentals of the faith, and that’s where the word fundamentalist started to be applied to religions.

The fundamentals of the faith included the virgin birth, inspiration of Scripture, the death and resurrection of Christ, the second coming of Christ, and salvation by faith alone.

They enumerated those, and that was what we believed.

It was a very, very sparse religion.

The church we went to had no cross anywhere in the church; there was never an image anywhere.

We were very iconoclastic; there was no image of anyone in the church.

The only thing—and it was a beautiful building, a huge church that my dad was pastor of—was that it had beautiful arched ceilings.

But there was not an image anywhere.

The only thing in the church, as you sat and looked at the front, that you saw that was not just plain paint or a plant or paneling of wood were two Bible verses that were printed at the very top on each side of the pulpit.

Then there was a baptismal in between them, but there was nothing other than that in the church.

We sang a lot; we had a great organ, and the main thing that we did during the service was listen to a sermon.

I would chuckle to myself when my kids or my grandkids complain about a 12, 13, or 14-minute homily because we usually had 45 to 50-minute sermons.

Yeah, my mind did tend to wander sometimes in 45 to 50 minutes, but that’s what our worship was like.

We went to church three times on Sunday, once on Wednesday, and then we had youth group on Friday, so it pretty much capitalized your social calendar.

That’s why I really didn’t have many non-fundamentalist friends growing up, because we were so involved in what we were doing at church.

Good people.

I’m thankful for the knowledge and the love of God that was imparted to me by my family and by my church, the knowledge of Scripture.

I’m very, very thankful for that.

What I came to the conclusion was that they were just wrong on some very basic issues.

Does that sort of answer your question, Jim, or do you want me to go into more of that?

No, very much so.

And yeah, really, it's a foundation that—because you were really willing.

My sense is, when I read your story in the book and then read through the book and just the overall sense of things, and even as you begin to share your story with us here, there was a certain—I would call it, I guess, a humility about you to say, Hey, if I'm seeing something here that doesn't go together, then I'm not going to just ignore it and move on and forget about it.

I'm going to try to look deeper into it.

And that led you down the road that allowed you to be open to receive greater truth and greater graces, I think, that God was pouring out for you.

I think this is really something that is a lesson for every person, right?

If we can have a fundamental disposition of humility, then the Lord is going to be able to really build us up in truth and grace as He wants to.

But that fundamental disposition of humility is key.

And so the story that you were sharing right before the break is really, I think, a good example of that.

So you were saying you were a preacher's kid, you were in that pipeline to become a preacher yourself, but you see how you have this belief in sola scriptura—Scripture alone, the Bible alone—and yet you're coming across Scripture passages that don't line up with the fundamentalist teachings that you had come to understand.

So there's something that doesn't go together here; you're asking questions.

Eventually, you have a big guy over from Moody Bible College, I think you said, at dinner.

Yeah, continue on with that story.

Tell us what happened next.

Yeah, during the break, I just looked up the verse so I can read the verse to you exactly so that there's no confusion.

It's Colossians chapter 1, verse 24, and it says, Paul is speaking: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, the Church.

I just couldn't figure out how that could possibly fit into anything that I believed.

I didn't understand how it could be.

Not only would fundamentalists have trouble with that, but all Protestants would have trouble with that.

So yes, it was Dr. Walvoord.

He was actually the president of Dallas Seminary down in Dallas, Texas, but very much like Moody Bible Institute, and the theology would be hand in glove.

I asked him that question, and he turned to me—here I am, about an eighth grader trying to struggle through this verse—and he said, Dave, you don't ever want to base your theology on an unclear verse.

And this is an unclear verse?

Well, I was in eighth grade, and he was the president of a seminary, but I knew that verse wasn't unclear.

The problem wasn't that the verse was unclear; the problem was I didn't agree with the verse, and that's a totally different issue.

So I didn't say anything, but I put that verse into the back of my head, along with lots of verses—a verse in Zechariah that I found when I was in high school.

There are verses all over the place, and I went to seminary partly to get all those verses sorted out and put together.

What I found when I got to seminary, Trinity Seminary, is I believe the largest evangelical Protestant seminary in the world—it was at least at the time that I was there—and they have people from all different theological backgrounds.

They're all Protestant, but I couldn't find any professors that could answer any of the verses that were giving me problems.

So that was a problem, Jim.

I didn't know how to handle that, but I went into Christian service, and I wasn't in Christian service for a real long time—a few years—when I decided, You know what?

I’ve got to figure this out.

I’ve got to figure this out for myself.

And that’s what sort of started the whole journey down Catholicism.

I was studying the Bible; I was still active in the church, but I wasn't in full-time service.

I was a deacon at a Baptist church, and I had the best gig that you can have in a Baptist church.

I was the adult Sunday school teacher.

Now, you talk to anybody that’s involved in any Protestant church; that’s the best gig.

It’s a better gig than the pastor because you get to prepare one really intensive one-hour-long Bible study on whatever you decide to talk about, and you have people that are there that really want to be there, and it’s a discussion format.

I loved it.

I had been teaching it for a while, and we were coming to the end, I believe, of the Gospel of Luke or something.

I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I said, What do you guys want to study next week?

There were usually about 50 to 60 adults, all with their Bibles geared up to study, and they decided that they wanted to study the Book of Daniel.

Well, I didn’t want to teach the Book of Daniel because Daniel had a lot of the verses that I was having trouble with that I hadn’t been able to figure out, and I didn’t think that Daniel agreed at all with Protestantism.

But I got overruled, and Jim, it was within about a year and a half of that Sunday school class that I was being accepted into the Roman Catholic Church because I said, Okay, if I’m going to teach this, I’m going to have to study this really closely because I can’t go up and say, 'Well, I don’t understand this verse, guys.'

And as I started to study it in depth in a way that I’d never studied before—and Jim, a lot of this is grace too.

I want to make that real clear.

I don’t know why all of a sudden I was studying these verses, and they started to make sense to me in a different way.

The only thing I can say is God just had the scales dropped from my eyes.

I just started to see things that I had never seen before.

I came to the end of that class and realized that I was no longer premillennial; I couldn’t accept the whole idea that the kingdom was going to come in the future sometime and that we were going to go through this seven-year tribulation before we got there.

I didn’t know where that left me, but I knew I couldn’t be there.

And it looks like we’ve got another break coming up.

Yeah, we do.

We do.

David Curry is with us, author of Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, sharing some of his personal testimony with us today.

So powerful!

Again, you can find it in chapter 1 of that book, but we’re getting some special little aspects of it here with him live with us today.

Very blessed.

And yeah, David points out there the grace that is involved here, and yet again, the lesson of the response to that grace being one of receiving it and participating with it—not rejecting it, not running away from it because you don’t want to see it, you don’t want to deal with what it might mean—but to say yes and to participate and to take that next step with God’s grace.

We’re going to talk about that next step when we get back.

Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to The Simple Truth.

Jim Havens here with our guest today, David Curry, author of Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

Get the book again, Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

You will be very glad that you got this great resource for ongoing formation and ongoing conversion.

We always want to be getting better and better at our ability to transmit the faith, especially to many children, grandchildren, or anybody in our midst.

So we have a great blessing here in this book, the way that David lays it all out for us in Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

But David, share with us a little bit more in terms of just connecting the dots to that coming into the Catholic faith.

So you start to see that things aren't lining up; you start to take a deeper look.

Is there anything that you want to share that connects the dots from there?

I remember reading this in the book; I recently read it again not long ago.

There’s the difficulty of, once you do come to realize, Well, the Catholic Church is the one true Church; I've got to become Catholic, and the fact that coming from a fundamentalist background, now you’ve got a different conflict going on.

It’s not so easy, even when you see the truth of it, to actually take that action.

There’s a lot that is very troublesome about that with respect to family, friends, everything.

So is there anything that you want to share to get us to that point?

And then I definitely want to hear more about how you handled that and how you were able really to get over that threshold, even with all the many obstacles.

Sure, sure!

Yeah, I’d say probably the moment at which I decided I had to be Catholic was after I did a careful study of John chapter 6. It was exactly a year before the Passover, before Jesus died.

We all know those verses, you know, where Jesus says, You have to feed on my body; you have to eat my body.

He lost all kinds of disciples over that, and He turned to the other disciples, the twelve, and said, Are you going to leave too?

And they said—sort of what they said is, Well, we would, except we don’t know where we’d go.

That’s sort of what they said.

So I realized that I wasn’t the only person having problems with this.

But I studied John the Baptist, and I realized, You know what?

The Catholic Church is probably right or wrong about every other doctrine that they teach, but they’re right about the Eucharist.

That was the first part of Catholic theology that I said, No, they’re right about this.

They are absolutely right about the Eucharist.

I tell people if there was just one verse that made me become a Catholic, it was John 6, verse 51: You have to eat my body, and that body is my flesh.

You know, He’s so clear—so clear!

I studied in Greek in seminary and missed it.

You know, that’s why I say, Jim, there are scales that have to come off of you.

We have to pray for people because God’s grace is the only one that really gets us to have those scales fall off.

I started to read the early Church Fathers.

I started to read Pope John Paul II, and I started to compare that.

I started to read Church history from a Catholic perspective—things which I had never done.

I took a patristics class in seminary, but looking back, it was just little snippets that they took out of the patristics.

I started to read the patristics; I started to read the Church Fathers, and what I came to realize is that they were right on everything.

They were right on absolutely everything.

And that’s what I cover in the book because they fell one by one by one, and I realized I have to become Catholic.

I remember I woke up one day; it was a Saturday.

Because they didn't have to go to work, I turned to my wife, who was just waking up also, and I said, Colleen, I really believe—I really believe it's true.

It was the first time I really knew that I knew that I believed that the Eucharist was what the Catholic Church said.

I didn't even need to tell her I was talking about the Eucharist because we had talked so much about things, but she knew I was talking about the Eucharist—that I believed that at that Catholic Church, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ was present and available if I just joined the Church.

Now, one thing we always agreed with Catholics about is that we didn't have that at the Baptist Church.

In other words, the Catholic priest would say, No, you don't have the body of Christ at the Baptist Church, and we would agree, You're right, we don't, because we thought it was only a symbol.

My wife, bless her heart, had told me earlier, Dave, if I had wanted to be married to a Catholic, I would have dated Catholics, and I didn't date Catholics.

So she was struggling, you know, herself through all these issues.

But bless her heart, that day in bed, she said, You know, Dave, if you really feel that way, you need to go to the Catholic priest down the block and talk to him.

I said, Yeah, I guess I do.

So I made an appointment and went down to talk to Father Terry.

He told me, Dave, I don't think you should do this.

I think it's going to be too hard.

I said, Yeah, it's going to be hard.

I know it's going to be hard.

I may get disowned over this, which I did end up being; my dad disowned me over it.

But I said, Yeah, I know it's going to be hard, but if it's the truth, I want to do that.

He said, Well, no, I don't think it's too hard.

Don't do it.

I went back, and I was more discouraged, Jim, at that point than at any other time in my journey because I was trying to follow the truth, and then I just found out that I wasn't even Catholic, but I believed in the Catholic faith more than the parish priest on the block.

So I didn't know exactly what to do, and God brought into my life two lawyers who were very, very firm, solid, knowledgeable Catholics, and they put me in contact with a priest, Father Peter, who has ended up being my spiritual director for 30 years.

For the first time, I had people tell me, Dave, what's happening to you is grace.

This is the grace of God; that's what's happening to you.

Embrace it, follow it, do it!

Well, I knew I couldn't do it without my wife.

I couldn't; I just couldn't. I'm too weak.

So I started getting her to read books.

The book that made the most sense to her was Tom Howard's Evangelical Is Not Enough.

I told Tom before he died once that he gave me my wife back because she said, Yeah, this makes sense to me now.

So we studied with the kids, and it took about six months to get the whole family together about this decision.

We all came into the Church on the same day.

We had six kids at that time; my oldest was in eighth grade, so he was making his own decision.

My sixth grader was making his own decision.

We had two more kids after we became Catholic.

And Jim, I can tell you this much: it is the best decision I have ever made.

The best decision I've ever made was to come into the Church.

I say that realizing that it wasn't just my decision; there was this tremendous amount of grace that was poured out on me, my wife, and my kids so that we all could come in together.

But what a wonderful place this Church is to raise kids and to just travel in our pilgrimage to heaven.

The only stipulation my wife said was, Okay, Dave, if we're going to be Catholic, she goes, I think you're right.

I think the Catholic Church is what we need to do.

I think it is true.

We're not going to be Protestants; we're not going to shop around for a Catholic parish we like.

If we're going to be Catholics, we're going to be Catholics, and that means we're going to go to the parish down the block.

I said, But that's where Father Terry is; he told me I couldn't come in.

She said, Well, you need to go talk to him.

You need to convince him that he needs to let you come in.

So I did, and we had a long conversation.

We talked for hours, and at the end of that, he said, Dave, we haven't had anybody come into this parish in years.

I thought to myself, Yeah, I know why that is, Father Terry.

But he said, So we don't really have an RCIA program, but you're under spiritual direction.

I was meeting with Father Peter like every week, and he said, When Father Peter thinks you're ready to come in, we'll accept you into the Church.

So we all came in together—my six kids, my wife, and I. We all came into the Church together.

My kids were baptized shortly thereafter, and I was confirmed with my son.

My oldest, eighth-grade son, was due for confirmation, so my wife and I—and I'd already been baptized as a child or as a teenager—had a blessed, wonderful experience coming into this Church.

Just a blessed, wonderful experience.

Was it hard?

Oh yeah, it was really hard.

We lost all of our friends; we were disowned by my family.

Everything eventually got better with family, but it was hard.

And it was, Jim, it was worth every minute of the pain.

God has blessed us so much because we followed the truth that’s in the Bible.

Because guess what?

It is a Catholic book!

As I kept finding, there were parts in it that I couldn't get to agree with Protestantism.

It's a Catholic book, but there's so much more to the Church than just this book.

God gave us an authority to interpret the books of the Bible; He gave us the sacraments.

I've tried to live this Christian faith seriously, with and without the sacraments, and Jim, I'll tell you, I think it's virtually impossible without the sacraments.

With the sacraments, it's really, really hard, but it's not impossible.

You know, every once in a while, I have a week where I go, Yeah, I actually think I lived the way I'm supposed to this week, and then the next week I have to go to confession again because I didn't. But without the sacraments, it's just incredibly difficult to even try to live the Christian life.

We have so many gifts in the Catholic Church.

All my kids are practicing Catholics; all my grandkids are baptized.

God has been very, very gracious to our family.

Not that we haven't gone through hard times.

I had one of my kids come home in 10th grade and tell me he was an atheist, and that was some tough years.

I found the same thing with him; he's back in the Church.

I found the same thing with him that I found with my own heart, and that is prayer, Jim, is what makes the difference.

I just prayed for him sometimes all night.

I choked up a little bit here, but sorry.

I realized God wanted to answer that prayer more than I wanted Him to answer that prayer.

God wanted me to come into the Catholic Church more than I wanted to come into the Church.

And believe me, I really wanted to come into the Catholic Church, but God wanted me to do it more than I did.

I just needed to have that faith and rest in the grace that He can bestow.

It's a great way to live, Jim.

Anything else I didn't cover?

No, it's amazing!

Yeah, I mean, when you mentioned at the end, you know, the sacramental life and the authoritative teachings, the magisterial teachings, the ability to authoritatively interpret the Scriptures—which, by the way, were authoritatively put together by the Catholic Church to say which books are in and which books are out back in the early centuries.

So yes, this is a Catholic book.

And so, yet authority—to me, that was the big thing.

My story would be born Catholic, born again Catholic, and it was being lost.

Then on my way to coming back, I realized, Okay, Jesus is real, but then, Where is He? There are all these different places claiming to be churches, and this is the real Church.

So even though I was born Catholic, I thought, Well, maybe I was just born that way.

Let’s figure out what really is—where is He? As I started to think about that question and dig into that some, your book is one that I came across, and what you write there about authority was eye-opening to me.

This, to me, was what everything hinged on for me.

There’s only one Church that has authority; there’s only one Church that has apostolic succession, which I don’t think I had ever heard of until I read about it in your book.

That’s a pretty vital truth to be aware of.

So once I started learning these things—and again, thank you for writing this book—I realized, Okay, no, I wasn’t just born Catholic; this is the one true Church, and I need to go back.

We’re going to be right back.

Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to The Simple Truth.

Jim Havens here with David Curry, sharing some of his personal testimony with us today.

He’s the author of Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

Great book!

Get your hands on this book and share it with others as well.

David, I wish we had more time.

We’ve got this last segment to go.

We’d love to have you back so we can dig in more into this book and perhaps other books that you have.

But as far as today goes, is there anything else that you want to share on anything that I was saying there about authority at the end of the last break—how important that is?

Also, maybe share something of the story around how this book, Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, came to be and what you’ve noticed in terms of the fruits that have come from this book?

Well, that’s a lot of different questions, Jim.

I’ll give it a shot.

Authority was an issue for me.

I mean, it was an important issue, but it wasn’t... And everybody has their own specific, really important issue.

A friend of mine that I knew from Trinity Seminary came into the Church about three months after we did.

After we came in, we talked a lot, and he ended up coming into it.

For him, authority was really the biggest issue.

For me, authority was huge, especially as it related to sola scriptura.

But for me, the biggest issue was the Eucharist.

When I realized that the Church was right about the Eucharist, then all I needed to do with everything else, Jim, was find out that they weren't wrong.

I assumed that if they were right about the Eucharist and they weren't wrong about everything else, then I was wrong.

So I went about trying to prove that the authority of the Church and all the other issues besides the Eucharist—which I had already decided on—somehow there was a mistake somewhere in there.

That somewhere the Catholic Church had been wrong.

They were wrong about their authority; they were wrong about apostolic succession; they were wrong about Mary.

I went through every one of the issues to try to see where they were wrong.

And Jim, you know the answer: I couldn't find anything that they were wrong about.

Everything was a better way to explain what I knew already was true, and it made sense when I stopped to think about that.

Of course, Jesus would not just give us a book.

He didn't give us the book, but He wouldn't just give us a book and say, Here, do the best you can.

What happens when you have just the book, the Bible, and everybody does the best they can?

You end up with thousands of different denominations, like Protestantism is in right now.

You have to have a unifying authority that tells you, Yes, this is not exactly what that verse means; it means this, or This is what we believe about this.

I worked through all those different kinds of things.

For example, with the authority of the Church, I realized that there were different levels of authority.

Notice we've been given the deposit, which was stuff that had actually happened—the truth that the apostles were given from the very mouth of Jesus.

Then there was the dogma that the Church had established throughout the years with councils and all the Church documents that this stuff is really true.

Those two things never change.

But then there were some things that do change.

For example, devotions like the Rosary can change.

It's changed in our lifetime, right, Jim?

I mean, Pope John Paul II, what was it, about 20 years ago, said, Hey, we're going to add some more mysteries to this.

It was interesting because by then I was Catholic, and I had no problem with the fact that he had the authority.

It was a devotion; you didn't even have to say the Rosary.

So the authority just really, really made a whole lot of sense to me.

As far as the book itself, I didn't really, Jim, set out to write a book.

I wrote it for two primary reasons.

The biggest reason was I wanted to explain to my dad why his son had done this totally unacceptable thing, as far as he was concerned.

It would have been better if I’d left the Church altogether or left Christianity altogether.

So I tried to explain that to him, and I also wanted to tell my kids in the future so that they would know, but mainly my dad.

I brought it to my spiritual director, the priest that had helped me come into the Church, whom I was seeing about once every two weeks.

I said, Father Peter, I'm just a new Catholic, and I'm trying to explain the Catholic faith to my father, and I'm wondering, would you be willing to just proofread this real quick and tell me if I'm really off on any of this stuff?

He said, Sure.

So about two weeks later, he said, Dave, everything says fine, but we've got to get this published because I think this will help other people besides just your dad.

So I thought, Okay, well, I'm going to have to change it.

I mean, some of it was very personal, so I put it into more of something that would be acceptable for anybody to pick up off the shelf and read.

And Jim, I had no idea the graces that were going to flow from that decision.

I can hardly go into a parish where somebody doesn't come up to me and say, Oh, you're Dave Curry?

Oh, I read your book 15 years ago or 10 years ago or last year, and I'm here because of that.

We moved from Chicago, where we’d been my whole life, out here to Iowa about four years ago because half of our kids moved out here to Iowa.

So we thought, Well, I retired and moved out to Iowa.

It was incredible because at the church, I've had at least four or five families come up to me and say, Oh, I was wondering—they told me Dave Curry had come to the church in the parish, and I just was wondering who you are.

It’s such a blessing; it’s a grace.

It’s not something I ever deserved; it’s not something I can take credit for.

God has used the book phenomenally.

I've had two deacons out here in our diocese that have said, Hey, I just wanted to let you know I came back to the Church, and I'm a deacon now.

So God has used it to bring people not just into the Church but back into the Church, like with you.

And it’s not the only thing doing it, but God’s grace has been really, really wonderful.

I never really expected that.

The publisher tells me about a quarter of a million people have read the book, so I'm sort of surprised about that.

But I just try to stay out of the way, Jim.

I just try to stay out of the way and let the Holy Spirit work.

That's a good strategy!

Yeah, David Curry is with us again, author of Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

Check out the book for yourself if you haven't already; you will greatly appreciate the fact that you did.

And again, it's something to share—a great resource to share with others as well.

Hopefully, we can all get out of the way and let the Holy Spirit do what He wants to do.

David, in the final minutes here, is there anything else that you want to share with us today?

Any other books, any other work, any other resources that you’d want to share with folks before we go?

Well, I’m sort of semi-retired, Jim.

I used to go out and speak and do stuff like that, but I don’t do a whole lot of that just because I’m getting a little old, to be honest with you.

But I’m working on my fifth book.

You asked me what the other four were.

The first one that we talked about—when I got done with that book, a lot of people asked me, Hey, could you tell us more about this whole tribulation premillennial stuff?

I don’t understand what the Church teaches; I don’t understand why Protestants are so angry at us for what the Church teaches.

So I wrote this book right here, Rapture: The End Times Error.

A lot of people have told me, Hey, this really made sense.

The first time I went out and spoke about this book, believe it or not, we did an all-day Saturday seven-hour seminar on the end times.

What I try to do is deal with the end times, and a lady at the end of it came up to me and said, Where's the confessional?

I've been gone from the Church for 20 years over this issue; I need to come back.

So I praise God for the kind of grace that He bestows on us.

We don't deserve it.

Yeah, and that’s the best fruit of all—humble repentance, turning back to our Lord Jesus and His Catholic Church.

This is what He died to give us in the fullness.

He is drawing all of us to come to Him in the Catholic Church, especially in the Holy Eucharist.

Yes, read John chapter 6; read about it in David's book, Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.

Dave Curry, what a blessing to have you with us today.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Well, thank you for having me, Jim.

I really enjoyed it.

All right, God bless you all!