Transcript

Praying about it was kind of awkward.

You know, you prayed for illumination, but you're talking about wrestling between one brand of Christianity and another, so h- you know, you're gonna say, God, show me the way, and, 'cause you're not showing the other people the way?

I mean, I So it was less a matter of prayer than a matter of, so far as I can tell, the Holy Spirit working through other people and through my own mind.

My father was a Reformed Church in America minister, so sort of classically Dutch Calvinist.

And so I was a child growing up in a rural German community in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa.

Which is a great place to grow up.

We had this big cemetery in the backyard.

And so we were really out there.

So there was the church, the parsonage and the cemetery.

So I got to see the whole panoply of religious life.

We lived there until I was 13 then we moved to northern Michigan to another small town of 100.

Then I took leave of there, went to Dutch Calvinist college where I met my wife.

And I thought I was gonna be a Reformed Church in America minister, really.

So I was on the pre-seminary track in college.

Uh, but I was a sociology major.

And was on my honeymoon and I was starting to reread some of the books that I hadn't read in college, or I should have.

They were assigned.

But one of them was Habits Of The Heart, which is kind of probably the most best-selling, um, sociology book ever printed, which isn't saying much, I suspect.

But I really was attracted to the sort of scholarly, sociological life, so I bagged the idea of going to seminary.

Which didn't actually bother my parents at all.

I mean, they were very supportive of what I wanted to do.

And I went to graduate school in 1994, North Carolina.

And it was 1996 when I met my first serious Catholic.

So I was, what, 25.

Before, I th- I think, or at least I was conscious of meeting my first serious Catholic, who remains a f- friend today.

So 1996 all the way up to, when did we enter the church?

I think it was 2011.

That's a long time, right?

A- a- and so most of that is were- was off, right?

I mean some of there was, there was a pattern.

I sort of got interested, read about it for a while, talked to some people, and then bagged it for six months.

So that was a pattern that lasted probably five or six years.

Um, but the first barrier fell in 1996 when I met this Catholic, whose piety, personal piety was dwarfed mine, right?

So I had to get rid of the idea that Catholics were universally unserious about their faith.

I had thought so until that time.

Not for any good reason, just because I was they were not in my social circles, really.

Moved to Texas, to the University of Texas for a faculty position in 2002.

Sometime after I got here, I crossed Jay Budziszewski's orbit.

And I could tell my graduate school advisor, Christian Smith, was talking Catholic, uh, several years before he converted with his family.

But it probably wasn't until John Paul II passed away, and I really look at that as a turning point.

And I think a lot of people look at John Paul II's life and ministry and legacy as sort of breeding lots of Catholics in some ways, including conversions.

So when he died, I think it was 2005, I had been a sociologist of religion, which kind of meant sociologist of Evangelical Protestantism really.

I didn't know that much about Catholicism even though I purported to study American religion.

I picked up a biography of John Paul II and that was kind of the beginning of the more serious dialogue internally about what the church was about.

So that was the beginning of the- the more intense cycle of thinking, reading.

Praying about it was kind of awkward, you know, you prayed for illumination, but you're talking about wrestling between one brand of Christianity and another.

So h- you know, you're gonna say, God, show me the way, and 'Cause you're not showing the other people the way?

I mean, I so it was less a matter of prayer than a matter of, so far as I can tell, the Holy Spirit working through other people and through my own mind and, uh, intellectual activity.

I- I also had, uh, snuck into Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago one time when we were visiting family and picked up a book by Peter Kreeft, Catechism of the Catholic Church, kind of popularly written.

Started working through that and I remember thinking after I had read most of it that, I'm on board with 93% of this.

I don't know why I said 93, just it wasn't everything.

There were some significant things.

Um, one of the things I've noticed about converts is there's always something that's a barrier and something that's a- a- a big draw.

And they can be very different for different people.

I mean, so I think as a Dutch Calvinist, Mary was this big barrier to me.

Whereas for other converts, it's the key draw.

I remember having lunch with, uh, Professor Budziszewski here at UT's campus.

And every once in a while, I'm asking him questions about some of these crazy doctrines , like this perpetual virginity.

Like, Well, what's up with that?

And why do people obsess about that?

And, um, the Immaculate Conception, I mean, Protestants usually think, oh, this is about Jesus.

It's, it's about Mary.

What?

So I would go and ask him, and he would give these remarkable explanations of, of the doctrine.

And I remember w- I'd leave that lunch thinking, Huh, that's an interesting explanation, and being impressed at his ability to articulate in a way that was rational.

And I would walk away thinking, Well, I'm not on board with that, but that's a better explanation than I thought they had.

So that happened with some regularity, and then I'd go away for months at a time.

One of the things I found prevented me from moving forward and becoming Catholic was just sort of a kind of it's M- Protestant momentum.

Like, you've always done this.

It seems like a bigger problem to, to mess with it than to, to do it, right?

So there's this comes this point where, you know, I'm on board with 93% of this stuff, or 95, or 96, which is a lot, right?

So why don't you join?

Well, you be, you, you, you enter this sort of limbo stage, where the pull of your existing evangelical life is still significant and the, the, the but the push forces out has just sort of they've come to this equilibrium where you're just gonna stay, right?

So you need some sort of final pull or push to move it forward.

The big push actually came in the form of my wife, who had not done the same kind of intellectual wrestling that I had.

She's, she's not an intellectual, which has worked out great in our marriage.

Um, she's more the, the mover of things.

And so I, I, I recognized that I had been intellectually mulling this over for years, but never socially willing to move it forward.

She sort of got tired of hearing me talk about this at some point.

Christian Smith had converted in Easter Vigil of 2010 and had sent me a few manuscripts about this, and I really resonated with them and so I would share them with my wife over dinner table, et cetera.

And finally she got to the point where, Marc, if we're gonna do something, let's do it.

Right?

And I said, Well, let's not talk crazy here.

This is we have to be patient about this process, even though I had been s- very patient.

And I was teaching a Sunday school class at the Presbyterian Church we were at, and, um, she had said one weekday in s- that summer, uh, This Sunday I'm na' take, uh, the kids and we're gonna go to the cathedral downtown, which is where Jay and Sandra Budziszewski had gone.

We knew that.

And we respected them.

And I said, Okay.

I can't go, I've got to teach Sunday school.

So I went and tea- taught Sunday school.

And, and, you know, wondering that morning, like, What is she going to think?

Right?

I had never been to a Sunday mass.

I will say I had been to m- many, many mid-week masses with the friend that I met back in 1996 when we would travel out of town for conferences.

We'd often go to daily mass at 7:00 in the morning and, you know, five or six people in the audience in some strange city.

But I had never seen the, like the, the beauty of a Sunday mass .

I just hadn't.

At some at, at one level though, like if you've I was impressed with sort of the portability of the mass, right?

I mean, this is something you can celebrate in a lot of different places and you don't have to love the priest.

The priest doesn't have to have great homilies or sermons 'cause the mass is, uh, not about the homily as much as it is about the celebration of the Eucharist.

We had already come to that conclusion as Presbyterians, that the bigger deal was the Lord's Supper, not, um, the sermon.

And I think it ha- had alienated us a little bit that, um, evangelicals church shopped and we had done that too at different times and kind of just got sick of both it, and didn't like the idea that there's something to shop for here.

Like that just it, it was not supposed to be like that, right?

So she went to mass that Sunday and was stunned by the reverence of it and the beauty of it, the material beauty of it, materiality of Catholic worship, right?

There's holy water, there's oils, there's bread and wine, incense.

You know, there's it appeals to the senses and this is about, you know, a, a God who became man, right, who came down to Earth and walked among us in the flesh in a material way, right?

So she had a positive experience with that.

I started going with her on Sunday mornings.

That was August.

Conveniently in September, they were starting up an RCIA class.Uh, so intellectually, I was on board, but socially, it was all too quick.

So we started RCIA September of 2010, not because I think I needed convincing, but because I still needed some more time in getting to know the place.

RCIA, you know, is hit and miss in various places.

And people, people, Catholic friends of ours always said, How's your RCIA?

And it was fine.

You know, it was, um, fine.

And, and socially, I, I needed that time and the, the time to, to ask questions and just sit in church for several months.

And, and that year, Easter vigil Easter was way out, it was like late April.

I'm like, Okay, good, I've got an extra month too to think about this stuff.

Another turning point came, I think it was 2006.

I was working on my first book which was called Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers.

And I was writing a chapter on what different American religious traditions said and thought about sex and marriage and family.

Evangelical piece I could write pretty quick.

Uh, Mormons, I had to, to inquire about that, read about that.

Interesting.

The Catholic piece, like, Wow, what do the Catholics think about s- sex and marriage?

And I know, I knew they were against contraception and things like that, and I didn't know why.

And I knew that they were against divorce, and I was always impressed with that because, uh, I always thought, um, my Protestant brothers and sisters often didn't take marriage seriously enough.

And, and my own marriage, like, we had covenanted to throw away the key, take the nuclear option off the table, which made, you know, fighting a lot less, uh, significant, right?

'Cause you knew that you could have squabble and still the thing was secure, right?

So I was always impressed with their sort of position on divorce.

Uh, but I didn't really understand the whole thing about sex and contraception, things like that.

So it was after John Paul II had passed away and I had picked up George Weigel's biography that I thumbed through, like, what John Paul II had talked about sex and marriage, and that's when I was introduced to the Theology of the Body.

And just reading his short treatment of it was really impressive to me.

I remember thinking the first 10 to 15 pages I had read about Theology of the Body kind of blew away what little evangelicals had been saying about this stuff for many years.

So I got it pretty quickly, the, the essence of, of this.

You know, then I started picking up John Paul II's stuff about Theology of the Body and elsewhere and, uh, and other books of his.

I'm no expert on it, you know, and he's a pretty inscrutable guy to get through on that, so it helps to have interpreters, but I think it's a winsome thing.

And at that point, I was writing that book, and, you know, I was still a Protestant for four more years.

But at that point, I knew that the Catholics were right on matters of sex and marriage and how they thought about it.

I wasn't there yet, but I knew that they were right and I was not.

Uh, but it's part of that sort of 93% thing.

They still had this obsession with Mary, and I couldn't couldn't get over that.

And in the end, it's kind of funny how Mary was a stumbling block.

Why would Mary be a stumbling block?

I get it, but, you know, this gentle servant, uh, Be it done unto me according to your will.

Do whatever he tells you.

Like, this is not really a stumbling block kind of character when you investigate her more thoroughly.

Um, but I was on board with Theology of the Body well before we became, uh, Catholic.

It was winsome, um, and sociologically I could see the effects of sort of the wide uptake of contraception on what I call the mating market and how that has affected how people meet and, um, the rapid sexualization of relationships and things like that.

So, and, you know, he had, he did some shout-outs to Pope Paul VI, uh, who kind of held the line on contraception when there was pressure to, to, to not, to, to get with the times kinda thing.

And looking back, it's just impressive that, uh, he had the foresight to see the world, um, that contraception helped to bring about.

So Uh, I had es- equated kind of the Catholic position on contraception back to Paul VI's Humanae Vitae about, as being about personal usage of it, and, like, they just have problems with personal usage.

And I didn't care a hill of beans about people's personal usage at that point.

What I cared about was I saw in sort of the wider mating market, how people meet and fall in love and get married, I had seen its sort of, uh, effects.

I mean, it had, it slowed relationships down.

Men were unwilling to commit.Women felt pressure to have sex before they might prefer to in a relationship, so he saw that coming.

I mean, a- and it's somewhat logical, right, how this works, right?

So even though individuals can opt out and say, I'm not gonna do it that way, um, the wide uptake, not just of the actual use of the pill, but the mentality that sex and pregnancy really just, they don't really go together that much anymore is widespread.

And it affects how people think about, uh, the meaning of sex and the place of sex in relationships.

Um, so relationships become sexual quicker, I suspect, than they once used to.

In part because to flirt with sex meant, you know, somebody was going to get pregnant here pretty quick if we keep doing this.

And then we're gonna have to make a decision about are we gonna get married?

And so that world doesn't really exist anymore, because he has the power in some ways in the relationship to say, You need to get on the pill, right?

Or she feels pressured to get on the pill.

Because if she withholds sex, he has more options in the local mating market.

So she feels pressure to do this, and she feels competition from other women, right?

In a way that prior to the wide uptake of contraception, she would not have felt competition from her peers.

She would have felt solidarity with her peers, right?

Because the cartel of women, so to speak, uh, had each other's backs.

And, um, to sort of offer sex too early in a relationship was threatening to everybody, women basically, in the, the community.

So they had their own means of social pressure to sort of charge more, so to speak, in their relationships.

But the wide uptake of contraception sort of undermines that, right?

Women turn into each other's competition, because sex no longer is predictably linked to pregnancy.

Right?

So she got to control her fertility.

He got charge of the pace with which relationships became sexual much quicker than in the past.

So, that's kind of the grand bargain of contraception's uptake, which is sort of somewhat distinctive from the intentions of the creators of it, right?

So they intended it for married women who wished to have, say, three or four children instead of five, six, or seven.

Uh, but there was no way in the American legal and cultural system that that was going to be kept within marriage.

And pretty rapidly, it wasn't.

So Paul VI saw that, right?

There's a big upswell of interest in this newfound wonder pill, right?

Uh, and he has to have the nerve to push back against it.

Um, and was widely criticized for that.

Some of that comes back to sort of the authority structure, right?

Which I had recognized well before we converted.

You know, sola scriptura was a big deal as a Dutch Calvinist, right, and, and as a Protestant general.

I had lost faith eventually in my ability to figure out the Bible, right?

I mean, I was a pretty decent armchair biblical scholar.

Uh, you could span the books on my shelf and say, Wow, this guy has read a lot about this stuff, right?

But the more I read, the more I was convinced that you can make arguments for everything from the Bible, right?

Some of them are gonna be bad arguments, easily swept aside, but it was always gonna be a matter of interpretation, right?

And so at that point I kind of wrestled with the idea of teaching authority and the idea of the magisterium and concluded, with help, that Protestants had a magisterium.

And some will call Luther and Calvin magisterial reformers, which is an accurate term, because they were the ones who had the teaching authority.

At the same time, sola scriptura kinda undermines the idea that there are particular human authorities in this, right?

Everybody has a magisterium of a sort, even though they may not admit it.

I look around evangelical churches, and who's, who's the privileged interpreter?

It's the minister, typically speaking.

In some megachurches, a lot of people listen to this and invest a lot of authority in, um, a particular person's interpretation.

They might privately dispute it, et cetera, uh, but I came to realize that everybody's got a magisterium of some sort.

And was I willing to sort of go with either my own teaching authority on this stuff or other people's?

And I'll At that same time, you know, I'm thinking about I, I was Presbyterian, uh, PCUSA.

You know, every summer, they would have a, an annual meeting and wrestle with major issues.

And, uh, just at some level it got to be, um, ridiculous that things are up for grabs like this on an annual basis, right?

And I had no confidence in my Presbyterian magisterium.

Um, uh, you know, we And so we dabbled with the Baptists for a year and briefly with the Anglicans, very briefly, um, during this wrestling process over, uh, Catholicism, but came to the realization that everybody has a magisterium.

And wow, wouldn't it be nice to have one that had some unbroken- line back to the beginning of Christianity.

So, the idea of one holy Catholic and Apostolic church made sense.

I came to the realization that there were a lot of teachings in the Catholic Church that I was already on board with.

Um, sort of this thinner veneer between heaven a- and Earth made sense to me.

Purgatory, which, when I was younger would have been a ridiculous idea, I'd already come to terms with that, you know?

The Baptist obsession with deathbed conversions, which is a good thing.

Um, I had a hard time believing like, okay, so Uncle Joe who lived his life entirely resistant to Christianity is ready to stand in the presence of holy God because before he gasped his last, he prayed the sinner's prayer.

I was glad he did, but I didn't believe like, he's ready!

Right?

I didn't believe I was ready, right?

I, I mean, I was Calvinist enough to be very in touch with the depravity of my own heart and how even the process of sanctification takes time.

Maybe God's willing and able to wipe it away in a instant, but there's a lot of unlearning that I ought to be doing in my life.

And so, it didn't strike me as odd that, you know, there's something like heaven's waiting room, where you get washed up a little bit.

I kind of came across that in C.S.

Lewis' The Great Divorce, that some people just aren't ready for heaven yet, and I started seeing it in the scriptures.

Protestants are quick to sort of say, Where is that in the Bible?

Right?

I don't see the name, Purgatory.

It's, it's not named there, but you get a sense from Paul where there's definitely a sense of, uh, you know, being saved as one escapes through the flames kind of thing, right?

By the skin of your teeth, so to speak.

And that But without holiness, no one will see God, and I could affirm that even though I was saved, I wasn't very holy.

I still know the depths of my depravity, right?

And recognize that, like Father Barron says, The goal of life is to become more saintly, to work on one's sanctification, to work out one's own salvation.

So that 93% thing, there was a, a moment after we started RCIA that And, and it, it was, it was after I had wrestled with and thought hard about sort of Catholic Church teachings on marriage and family and sexuality.

I thought, Wow, they're right on this stuff.

About the rest of it, trust your mother, right?

That, the idea came Trust your mother church, and somebody's like, how You know, you can't always see how your parents are right about some things, but we say our kids trust us, okay?

I th- decided at that point that I needed to trust them on the 7% that I wasn't quite sure about, including their profound esteem for Mary.

Uh, I probably will never be Marianist in the sense of really have this sort of passion for our, Our Lady, um, but I recognize that, you know, uh, I, I don't have a problem with how the church esteems her anymore.

I trusted them, and I grew in affection for her.

And I realize that a lot of the things I thought about what Catholics thought about Mary were not true.

Uh, or where they are true, where people have sort of an idolatrous worship of her, I mean, the church doesn't ass- affirm that, right?

They're careful about what they say, right?

So, it's not what the church teaches that is outrageous.

It's what people think the church teaches.

That's the outrageous thing, right?

And I'd come to realize that I had been buying into myths about the church, rather than accuracies.

Once you sort of look into the accuracies, the myths lose some of their power.