My conversion to Catholicism was marked by many small, imperceptible movements of the Holy Spirit, as is the case for all conversions, but there are some big moments and realizations that help me trace the path that got me from there to here. A “giant leap” in my journey was the realization that one of the fundamental dogmas of my Protestant faith was not only false, but self-refuting. At the time, Trent Beattie (now a writer and interviewer) and I had been exchanging emails in a debate that lasted more than a year. The question of the Holy Eucharist came up, and I was put in the position of having to defend my belief that the bread and wine are meant only to be symbols of the body and blood of Christ. So I turned to my Protestant apologetics books and was surprised to find essentially no place where the Bible positively says the Eucharist is only a symbol. It occurred to me that the next place to look would perhaps be the Church Fathers since they were the closest to the Apostles. Surely some remnant of what the original Church did was still present in the writings of these first generations of Christians. I was surprised to find that they all supported the Catholic belief in the Real Presence. I should point out that this process took months, and it would have taken longer had I not already been reading some of the Church Fathers. In defense of my conviction about the symbolic nature of Communion, I attempted to brush aside the testimony of the Church Fathers with the thought, “Why should I rely on the Church Fathers anyway? They are not authoritative. I believe in Sola Scriptura.” That last phrase is the Latin for “by Scripture alone,” a fundamental tenet and popular slogan of Protestant theology.
This Protestant Dogma Helped Open My Eyes to the Truth of the Catholic Church| National Catholic Register
This Protestant Dogma Helped Open My Eyes to the Truth of the Catholic Church| National Catholic Register
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