It Begins with Holy Baptism

I was baptized forty years ago today at St Mary’s Episcopal Church in High Point, North Carolina, and my sponsors in Baptism were a Methodist man and a Lutheran woman. My conversion to the Lord Jesus had come three months before after a tumultuous year of searching for the Face of God, and in that search my friends and mentors were of central importance. The witness of their faith cast light on my path, and they were evenly divided between Protestants and Catholics, all of whom I would now describe as Evangelicals, meaning Christians who followed their religion not because of cultural custom, ethnicity, or familial inheritance but because of their personal conviction that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and that the Gospel of Jesus Christ “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” (Romans 1:16)

Ten months after my Baptism I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church by making a Profession of Faith and receiving the sacraments of Chrismation and the Most Holy Eucharist. Those were also tumultuous months during which I was confronted with the scandal of divisions among Christians, including the horrors of the Wars of Religion which in many ways gave birth to Modernity and set the stage for our age of unbelief and apostasy. 

A turning point in my long pilgrimage to the Catholic Church came on 13 May 1981 when John Paul II was gunned down in St Peter’s Square. I was still an atheist then, but I was struck by the oddity that anyone would try to murder such a man and my curiosity was piqued by the odd grandeur of that tragedy. A little over six years later, I stood in St Peter’s Square for the first time with my classmates from the Pontifical North American College. We had just arrived in Rome to begin our studies for the priesthood, and at that moment the Way of the Cross seemed to be a wide and magnificent avenue, at once gentle, broad, smooth, swift, and paved in splendor. 

Forty years on from my Baptism, I have learned from many failures (my own and those of others) that the Way of the Cross is always hard, narrow, rough, and plodding, no matter with what grandeur the Church and her ministers are clothed. And for Christians there is no other Way. My personal story stands as the point of departure for the essays ahead on the shape of A New Catholic Reformation, and here at the beginning I stipulate that what follows will be partial and incomplete and unsatisfactory. But I hope that the thoughts to come will be of some use to others in finding a path forward to holiness of life by the obedience of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and fidelity to his Gospel lived in full, visible communion with the Church which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.