My Journey to Catholicism

I was raised in a great Protestant family and have always been a Christian. Even from my early years, I was introduced to the fundamentals of Christianity, and I have many fond memories of discovering the faith throughout my childhood and upbringing. In my later teens, I was furthermore introduced to the Charismatic Renewal, which was a pivotal experience for me. These experiences helped the truths I already acknowledged come alive for me on a deeper level. They transformed my faith from a set of theoretical ideas into a personal relationship with Jesus and made me want to commit my future years as an adult to the Lord.

As I continued on this path, I sought to deepen my faith further. A natural instinct for me in that process was to look back in history, longing for a Christianity that was historically grounded and had stood the test of time. I didn’t emerge from my Protestant background with significant anti-Catholic tendencies, so I was quickly intrigued by what I discovered in the historical churches. At this point, I was also fortunate to have a couple of friends well-versed in both Catholic and Orthodox traditions who helped me uncover the treasures of these ancient stems of Christianity.

Teaching Authority

At the same time, I continued to be a part of various Protestant settings and, while I appreciated many aspects, I increasingly wrestled with certain theological and structural challenges within the Protestant tradition. The primary issue boiled down to the lack of a teaching authority within the Protestant churches. In the Protestant setting, all kinds of people made all kinds of claims about the Christian faith. They all claimed to be biblical, yet arrived at widely different and often contradictory conclusions. How was I to know who to trust? What was true, and who should I listen to? Ultimately, I came to recognise the challenging reality that, within the Protestant setting, I bore the responsibility of interpreting God’s revelation to humanity. Surely, this was not how God had intended things to be.

In contrast, I discovered that the Catholic Church operated in a completely different way. In the Catholic setting, I, as an individual, wasn’t the centre of divine revelation or the one that God had made the supreme authority of the Christian faith. Instead, it was all about Jesus and the Church that He had founded. I didn’t need to write my own catechism or be the ultimate source of Christian truth. Instead, Jesus had given me His Church as a firm foundation for my faith, with Peter, the apostles, and a 2000-year magisterium that had accumulated the glorious truths of Christian revelation, ready for me to dive into and embrace.

The Bible

This discovery also addressed other fundamental issues I encountered in the Protestant churches. One significant problem was the inability to explain why the Bible is the Word of God. Most Protestants passionately upheld the Bible’s authority, yet when it came to explaining its infallibility, no one could provide any convincing arguments. It was clear that the Bible contained astonishingly reliable texts from a historical standpoint, but that wasn’t the critical claim. The critical claim was that the Bible has divine authority, and that was a different matter altogether. This authority, it turned out, came from a Catholic Church council in the 4th century—the very authority that we as Protestants were protesting against. Not only couldn’t we as Protestants provide a sufficient ground for who or how we should interpret the Bible, we couldn’t even explain the Bible’s viability in the first place.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, provided a coherent answer to why the Bible is the Word of God, as well as the proper framework for a truly biblical Christianity. Jesus hadn’t just given His people a book that we as Christians, at random, were left to fight out among ourselves how to interpret. No, He had founded His Church, which had given us the biblical texts as well as the authority by which we knew how to interpret and make use of these divine texts.

The Eucharist

Another area where the inconsistencies of Protestantism were highlighted for me was regarding Communion and the Eucharist. I was always drawn to communion and recognised that something particular was happening there. Growing up, I spent quite a bit of time in high church Protestant settings where communion was revered and, in some ways, treated as more than just a symbol. However, this reverence was what increasingly began to trouble me. Why go through the spectacle of treating the bread and the wine as something special while simultaneously denying any such reality? Something in me longed for the sacramental and supernatural realms that the liturgies somehow conveyed, yet with no actual substance at their heart, the Protestant celebrations began to seem more and more confused, misled, and empty.

Instead, I came to realise that the reason for the drama of the liturgies was not for the liturgies themselves, but because the most precious gift of all, Christ himself, was indeed fully present. However fantastical this claim seemed to the human mind, what the Catholic Church had faithfully held on to, declared, and celebrated throughout the millennia was indeed true.

Historical Consistency

This historical consistency within the Catholic Church was another aspect that became significant for me. In my Protestant settings, we made various claims about Christianity that contradicted the Catholic Church, and on every single issue, we were the ones lacking historical congruency. How could it be that fundamental Christian claims were true for 1500 years, then suddenly one single German priest comes along, and they are all overturned? If something was true in the times of St. Peter, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, surely it must be true today as well. If Protestantism was right, it implied that God had failed to reveal the truth to His people for most of Christian history, leading to the same devastating relativism where divine revelation ultimately depended on my individual interpretation.

All of these discoveries, alongside many others, led me to ultimately leave my Protestant faith and embrace Catholicism instead. I had many profound experiences and encounters with God in my Protestant settings that I cherish to this day. However, becoming Catholic was not about giving up the good parts of my Christianity that I already had; it was about adding even more. All the good things about my Christian life were found in the Catholic Church as well. Instead, I stepped into an even greater fullness of Christianity that simply wasn’t possible within the Protestant project—a faith that was historically grounded, far more intellectually consistent, and with Jesus himself physically present under the voice of, and at the hand of, every priest at every Mass.

Lund Cathedral, built in the 1100's, where I was baptised as a one-month-old.

St Laurentii Lutheran church where I went to Mass growing up.

Chrism Mass with Cardinal Vincent at Westminster Cathedral, London.