A little about myself.
I am a 30 year old male who converted to the Church from
Evangelicalism. My journey started after the death of my daughter. In
my grief I started to draw closer to the Lord and quickly experienced
great growth in my faith. The closer I grew to God the more I wanted
to know about the faith and the more I learned about the faith the
more questions I had. Often times it seemed that the answers I got,
though themselves fine, did not square with the answers which had been
given for other things. This would start me looking at different
denominations I was not really looking for a denomination which I
totally agreed with because I did not think that there was one to be
found. However I was looking for the one which was closest to my own
ideas which I had developed through my Scripture studies. This was
certainly not the Catholic Church. Although I was never particularly
anti-catholic and I would even discover that some of my beliefs were
indeed closer to Catholic belief and that of my Protestant background.
(For example I had always taken the Lord's Supper to be literally the
body and blood of Jesus Christ.) There was however other things which
greatly offended my Protestant sensibilities such as the whole notion
of Tradition as well as many of the beliefs on the Virgin Mary. The
one thing I had to grant them though was that their arguments had a
certain internal consistency and this would cause me to be open to
looking further. Fortunately around this time I would also start to be
exposed to the Church Fathers.
I owe a great debt to RC Sproul and James White for the role they
played in my conversion. Sproul because he introduced me to a depth of
theology that I had not previously heard and would not hear again
until I started looking into the Catholic Church. It started a life
long love of theology which I have never gotten over and even more
importantly he was my first introduction to such names as St.
Augustine, St. Ambrose and St. Thomas Aquinas who he always spoke very
highly of. And as you can imagine the ball started too rolled out of
control from there. My debt to James White is a little different, it
comes in the form of his chapter in the book “Sola Scriptura” on the
Church Fathers and his inability to prove sola scriptura from the
Church Fathers which would convince me of the truth of Sacred
Tradition. And that was one of the last stumbling blocks to me
converting to the Catholic Church.
I also have a special spot in my heart for Eastern Catholics. When I
was considering the Church there was an Orthodox priest, who was also
a convert, that tried to convince me to go that way but I could not
because I have a strong belief in the office of the papacy. I ended up
entering the Church through the Latin Rite by way of the military
diocese. And although I love the Latin Rite I still have a strong
affection for the Eastern Rites as we Well this is already longer then
I had intended so I better end it
now. I hope this e-mail finds you well
and that you are at peace in
your journey.
God bless my friend.
Your fellow servant, Kyle
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