Home At Last!

Almost three years ago my wonderful husband and I inadvertently began our journey into the Roman Catholic church. Had we known at that time where this path would lead we would have turned around and run in the opposite direction. But our loving Father, aware of our ignorance of and biases towards His church, allowed us to continue on for some time blissfully thinking we were gaining information with which to help our "confused" Catholic friends discover the truth and freedom of Protestantism. I will never stop praising Him for leading us so slowly and gently. We now understand what so many others before us meant when they said they've "come home". What follows is the letter we sent to our family and friends briefly synopsizing our journey in the Lord Jesus Christ's Church.

Dear Family and Friends,

Deb and I are writing this letter to let everyone know of a momentous decision that we have made. We have decided to join the Catholic Church. We understand that this will be difficult for many of you to accept, much less understand. This decision, though, has not been made hastily, nor without the potential ramifications prayerfully considered.
As most of you know, Debbie and I had been convinced for several years that the Bible was very clear in its teachings about artificial birth control. About 2-½ years ago we read a book by a former Protestant pastor detailing his journey into the Roman Catholic Church. We were shocked to find that the Catholic Church was the only Christian denomination that has firmly held to what we had seen as a very clear Biblical mandate. Any denomination that has existed as long as the Catholic Church has is bound to end up being right about at least one doctrine, so our agreement with this particular doctrine didn’t send the slightest tremor through our solidly-built Protestant foundation. We began researching the teachings and beliefs of the Catholic Church from Vatican approved sources in an attempt to discover where this highly intelligent, yet clearly confused, pastor misstepped. There is a plethora of “authoritative” teaching on Catholic doctrine in most book stores, but the only way to know what the church really teaches is to read what she writes to her own followers. To our shock and dismay though, we found that Catholic doctrine lines up perfectly with scripture and looks nothing like what we thought it did. Our understanding of what the Catholic Church teaches had been based on nothing but misconceptions and misunderstandings. Debbie has always been anti-Catholic and jumped in with both feet to prove the inaccuracies in the Catholic teachings. As we read and studied we looked up countless Protestant arguments for the various Catholic claims, and time and again the arguments fell flat in the face mounds of clear historical and Biblical evidence. We both had to admit that we had been operating under many misconceptions and in all fairness should give the Catholic Church a more honest look. Even considering such an idea sent tremors through what we considered our “immovable Protestant foundation“. We have since spoken with life-long Catholics, former Protestant Catholics and former Catholic Protestants. We’ve read countless books written by both Protestants and Catholics, dug deeply into the Bible and spent hours in prayer.
After several months of taking this approach we realized we were trying to understand what the first Christians believed by seeking out the opinions of people, rather than going straight to the sources themselves. We discovered an amazingly rich treasure trove of Christian faith in the writings of the Early Church Fathers, those followers and contemporaries of Christ’s Apostles, and our foundation really began to shake. In reading the writings of the early Christian leaders we saw clearly that their beliefs and practices were very different from ours on many crucial points of doctrine. We were stunned by how “Catholic” the Early Fathers were. Our reading of Church history had always begun at the Reformation. It had never dawned on us that we were neglecting the first 1500 years of history. Why is it that we seldom, if ever, delve past the mid 16th century when studying church history? Everything in our historical, religious education began at the time of Luther and focused on the undeniably heinous abuses being practiced by many of the Catholic bishops at that time. We were very familiar with the Pope’s un-Christian response to Luther’s Thesis and the ensuing chaos that resulted from Luther’s unwillingness to recant his position. There is no doubt that reform needed to take place within the church; over the years many evil men had held positions of leadership for no other reason than to garner personal power and wealth. Luther certainly had every reason to be outraged at what he witnessed, as do we all. But, to our surprise, we discovered that there were many godly leaders within the church, who were equally outraged by the many abuses and were actively working, through much prayer and networking to bring about the necessary reform. God was not separated from this church we’d never understood. The writings of Clement, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Iraneus, and others shone a light on the continuity of doctrinal fidelity from the time of Christ to the present within the Catholic church. Despite the best efforts of several bad, even evil, priests, bishops, and popes the core doctrines of the church had remained untouched for nearly two thousand years. We couldn’t dismiss that as coincidence. In Matthew Jesus promised to preserve His church and said that “the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.“ God’s supernatural protection had clearly been at work preserving the doctrines of this church. When we traveled back to the second through seventh centuries our “solid” foundation split wide open and Deb and I both knew we were heading to Rome.

Throughout our studying we saw, for the first time, that the cornerstone of every religion or denomination is authority. We’d always claimed and wholeheartedly believed that the Bible alone was our sole authority; but as much as we tenaciously clung to that essential Evangelical Protestant belief, we had already seen its problems. That the Bible is an inerrant, inspired, authoritative source of communication from God to us is without question. The problems we’d seen were in the interpretation of that Holy communication. Being in the military has afforded us opportunities to see and experience so much more than we otherwise would have been able to. We have spent time worshiping with and inquiring about countless different Protestant denominations and saw first-hand how sadly unfulfilled is Christ’s Gethsemane prayer for the unity of His believers. We routinely dismissed the seriousness of the disunity reflected in the tens of thousands of Christian denominations by stating that the body of believers is diverse and requires diversity in worship to meet the various needs. We insisted that the only thing that really matters is a belief in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ and it’s efficacy in our regeneration. Beyond that, everything from styles of worship to practicing the gifts of the Holy Spirit are merely window dressing. Minor points that shouldn’t be majored on at the expense of disrupting our unity. But we weren’t able to reconcile the instructions from Paul (in Romans , I Corinthians, and Philippians) for believers to be of “one mind” with all the divisions. In His Gethsemane prayer Jesus repeatedly prays for our total unity. Not just unity in purpose, but complete oneness as He and the Father are one. Over the years we’d both became increasingly uncomfortable with the practice of finding a church. Moving to a new town required weeks of spiritual reconnaissance as we visited church after church and read each one’s Statement of Faith. We checked out what ministry programs they offered, what the worship music was like, and most importantly we scrutinized the preacher’s messages to see if his interpretation of scripture was in agreement with our own. The latter was done without any conscious pride or arrogance, but that was our bottom line. Does this preacher’s and church’s theology line up with our own? If so, we rejoiced that “the Lord had led us to our new home church”; if not, we continued our search. We didn’t realize how all about “us” it had become. Programs that fit our family, religious curriculums we agreed with, music we liked, a blend of people we were comfortable with, a preacher who interpreted the Word the way we did. Heaven help our Baptist preacher in Texas if he stood up one week and announced that he’d received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and had been graced with the gift of tongues! Or our Pentecostal preacher in New York if he announced that after fasting and prayerful study of scripture he’d determined that the gifts of tongues, prophecy, and healing were no longer valid gifts in the church, but were only intended for the First Century growth of the church! If our pastor was to preach something we felt ran contrary to our personal interpretation of scripture and the congregation as a whole didn’t ask him to resign, we would have left that church to seek one that wasn’t afraid to speak the “truth”. The truth according to Matt and Debbie Rose, though. We found the fact that two spiritually mature, discerning Christians could prayerfully come to two different conclusions about specific points of scripture disconcerting. If my Lutheran friend believes in the supernatural regenerative powers of the waters of baptism absolutely necessary for salvation, and my non-denominational friend believes that baptism is merely an outward sign of an inward change and not a necessary act , who’s right? We couldn’t dismiss this as one of the “minor” points that divide denominations; this is a salvation issue. So who’s right? Book stores are full of books written by the most brilliant theological minds in history, some of them espousing very divergent theologies. Again, who’s right? Does it matter? Our perfect, loving Father was very specific in His instructions to Israel about how He wanted to be worshipped. He chose the day, the location, the order of the sacrifices and prayers and the situations in which to offer each one, even the clothes His ministers were to wear. He obviously knows how He wants to be approached, but we’d found ourselves approaching Him in the way that felt the most comfortable to us, assuming that all that mattered was that we came. We discovered that several of our basic beliefs were less than 600 years old! Imagine how shocked we were to realized that for the first 1400 years of Christianity certain of our key beliefs were not accepted by the followers of Christ. Some even unabashedly shot down as heresy by the Early Fathers.
As we went back to the writings of those first Christians and read again what was professed in the earliest faith statements, we began to work our way forward and found a continuity of teaching and beliefs that clearly connected early church to that of Rome. It was almost like connecting the dots in a puzzle. We were amazed to see that over a nearly 2000 year span of time not a single “doctrine” of the Church had been changed or omitted, regardless of the occasional less-than-stellar intents of those in leadership. Each and every doctrine has been more fully developed, and at times clarified as needed, as the Church has matured; but not one has been altered. Considering the degree and variety of doctrinal changes that have marked Protestantism these past 500 years, that’s astounding! We could find no other explanation than divine intervention . The fulfillment of Christ’s promise to preserve His Church.
We come to the end of this part of our journey convinced that the Roman Catholic Church is what Jesus set up. We believe that the Gospel of Matthew clearly shows that Jesus placed Peter in a position of leadership over all of the other Apostles and the Church as a whole. In time Peter became known as the Bishop of Rome and his successors have continued in that Christ given authority, as is well documented in the writings of the Early Church Fathers. We have come to believe that this Christ given authority has been passed down through the last 2000 years and currently resides in the person of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. This authority gives the Catholic church a stability and order that has enabled it to stay true to the doctrines that Christ put forth two millenniums ago.
The doctrine that has been the most troubling, frightening, and ultimately most satisfying and fulfilling is that of Transubstantiation, the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In the Gospel of John, chapter 6, Jesus is exceptionally clear as he introduces the disciples to this crucial teaching. The writings of the Early Fathers as far back as the first century AD testify to this belief being paramount to early Christian theology. When we opted to take Jesus’ words at face value, suddenly Paul’s strong admonition to the church in 1 Corinthians 11 made perfect sense. How could we sin against the body and blood of our Lord, and eat and drink judgment on ourselves unless Jesus meant exactly what He said in John 6. Deb and I have come to understand that this directive is fulfilled through the miraculous transformation of the bread and wine into the physical body and blood of Christ. The beauty of this teaching has drawn us like no other; and the reality has fundamentally transformed our family.
We understand that this change in our lives will seem completely out-of-the-blue for most of you. This has been a long, 2-½ year journey for us, but one we felt we needed to take slowly and completely on our own with the Lord. We deeply love and respect so many of you and did not want our desires to please any of you to influence us. Our initial, nearly paralyzing fear of losing relationships should this path lead where it appeared to be heading, has been replaced with a peace that doesn’t come naturally to people-pleasers like us. This has been a deeply personal, and at times very emotional, journey with the most amazing outcome. We are humbled beyond words to be called His children, knowing we could never deserve what He chooses to shower on us. Deb and I feel very secure in the Lord’s leading in this decision. We are more than willing to dialogue with any of you and will gladly attempt to answer any of your questions. As confusing or frightening as you may find this decision, please be assured that our love for Jesus our Savior, and our trust in his sacrificial death for our salvation has only been strengthened. His Word, which we both have always passionately loved, is even more alive and beautiful to us now.


In Christ’s Redemptive Love,

Matt and Debbie