Can A Christian Become a Catholic?

Now, Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from the Associated Press, May 24^th, 2004, with a headline: “Christian Coalition Head Moves to Catholicism.”

“As President of The Christian Coalition of Alabama, John Giles is no stranger to a pew. Yet, he remembers well the time he got lost in a Roman Catholic Church. ‘I couldn’t even follow the order of service, it was so foreign to me,’ Giles says of that day some six years ago. Since then, he’s found his way and a new home in the Roman Catholic Church, a home that might seem foreign to the overwhelmingly Protestant church population of Alabama.

‘I have to admit to you that the whole time that I was in the church service I was reduced to tears and I couldn’t explain it,’ Giles said Monday in an interview with the Associated Press. ‘In fact,’ he jokes, ‘you would have thought I would have been spending the whole weekend down at the House of the Rising Sun down in New Orleans, that I had all this sin in my life that I had to get out.’

“In any case, Giles and his wife Deborah, were confirmed at St. Peter’s Parish in Montgomery on Easter Sunday. Such a decision normally wouldn’t be a matter of public interest, but Giles says he anticipated the questions that have followed his conversion from the Protestant faith. “It would be nice if my private Christian walk could be my private Christian walk, but it’s very difficult in my job for that to be the case,’ he says.

“But once he visited the Roman Catholic Church he found himself in awe of it’s history and ritual, particularly it’s use of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in each service. Trips to Israel and Rome spurred his curiosity and the deeper he looked into the faith, which is the largest in the United States, but lags behind Southern Baptists and other Protestant denominations in the South, the more he says he realized that many of his beliefs about Catholicism had been wrong.

‘There is a perception among Protestants. You kind of have this perception that if you’re Episcopal or Catholic, you’re not even saved, you’re not born again, which is totally a myth,’ he says. He recalls one example from the New Year’s holiday which he spent in Florida with the chairman of his board. He had told the chairman of his and Deborah’s plans to convert and he says they were well-received. ‘But we went to some other friends of theirs house on one of the nights we were down there,’ Giles remembers, ‘and so we were sitting around visiting and this one lady was teaching a Sunday School class on cults and she began to name off all the cults that she’d be teaching and named Catholic in there.’

He acknowledges that the reaction by his Protestant constituents may be mixed, but he hopes they, like he and his wife, will keep an open mind. ‘We hope that we could have a small contribution to building bridges where there weren’t any bridges,’ he says, ‘because Christians are Christians. There’s no such thing as Christians and Catholics.’”

Tom: Dave, boy there’s so much about this. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this article—it’s an Associated Press article—and once again it presents ideas, it presents thoughts, emotions and so on that convince people that this is so dead wrong, inaccurate. This person in the Christian Coalition, I mean, this is a political movement. I’m concerned about what decisions this individual might make otherwise, because he has so many things dead wrong and he’s moved on the basis of emotionalism.

Dave: Right, I noted that. He says, “I have to admit the whole time I was in that church service I was reduced to tears and I couldn’t explain it.” Now, this is a pretty sad situation.

Tom: What does that have to do with truth?

Dave: Yeah, you’re crying and you don’t know why.

Tom: Right.

Dave: So there’s some power there, he says.

Tom: Yeah, and he’s attracted to that. Later he says, “Visiting the Catholic Church, he just loved the use of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.” This is experientialism, emotionalism.

Dave: Well, Tom, it’s materialism actually and that is a very important subject. When Jesus said to the woman at the well, “You drink of this water, you will thirst again. The water that I will give you, you will never thirst again.”

What is He trying to say? Has He got some kind of holy H₂O? When He said, “I am the true vine and you are the branches,” does He really mean that literally? When the Scripture says and Jesus quoted in His temptation in the wilderness, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” does that mean we tear pages out of the Bible and chew it and swallow it down? No! He is using physical examples, because we live in physical bodies and a physical world to teach spiritual truth. And the truth of the word of God is not physical, it’s spiritual, but the Catholic Church has turned it around. And when Jesus says “Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you,” they think, Oh, we’ve got to turn this little wafer into the body and blood of Christ. You’re going to miss the whole thing, because now you have reduced this from a spiritual truth to some physical performance, some physical act, and you have missed exactly what Jesus is talking about.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Dave, I’m quoting him. He says, “There’s a perception among Protestants. You kind of have this perception that if you’re Episcopal or Catholic, you’re not even saved, you’re not born again, which is totally a myth,” he says.

Now wait a minute, first of all, if you believe you’re saved, you don’t understand Catholicism. It’s a process. And anyone who believes they’re saved has committed the sin of presumption, so that’s dead wrong.

Secondly, Catholics make claim to be born-again, but they’re not born again by faith alone, they’re born again when they’re baptized as infants.

Dave: Right. Tom, he says he converted from Protestantism to the Roman Catholic Church. Now ,what is that? Is that a different gospel? Where does the Bible say that I must become a Catholic to get to heaven? Is there some gospel for Catholics and some gospel for Protestants?

Tom: Well, there is, in fact.

Dave: Yes, in fact, he’s contradicting himself. He converted from Protestant to Catholic and yet he says they are all the same, they’re all saved. So is there a difference?

Tom: Well, he bought into the line that the richness—the Catholic Church, historically, the smells, the bells and all of these things. It’s a richness, the liturgy and so on. That’s what he’s attracted to, but he doesn’t understand the gospel it seems.

Dave: I would say so. So, he’s looking to a church. It’s the oldest and largest—no, not actually, because there was a church always that the Roman Catholic Church persecuted to the death. The Waldensians, the Albigensians, they slaughtered them by the millions, actually.

Tom: Well, Anabaptists.

Dave: Yeah. So, Tom, he’s emotionally attracted to the sights and smells and bells, as he says, of the Catholic Church. To it’s rich history, to the robes and so forth. None of which has anything to do with salvation. And I guarantee you from God’s Word that the fancy robes that the Pope wears, the priests wear, the fancy rituals and so forth, they do not impress God one iota.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Yet the delusion here, Dave, he says, “We hope that we could have a small contribution to building bridges where there weren’t bridges.” Dave, it’s a bridge that more and more people are walking across, but I think the bridge is out. It’s going to lead to destruction.