A few years before we converted my to be brother-in-law was spending time with my mother. You see, my mom is the neighborhood matronly figure that many of my friends adopted as their second mom. It was not unusual to me to hear of my friends talking to my mom and breaking down in tears over some personal struggle in their lives. Its different talking to someone else's mom. There are times when you are not really quite sure you want your own mother to know about something in your life -- not yet -- but you still want sage advice from those who have been through the fire already. Other friends parents often fit the bill quite nicely. Over the course of normal discussions my mom simply handed him a copy of popular Catholic apologetics book. The thought of converting to Catholicism was quite far from his mind at the time.

The time following this is somewhat of a mystery to us. Eventually he announced to his family that he intended to convert to Catholicism. We had no idea what was going on. He was pretty much dismissed by my wife and I as being an angst ridden and defiant -- so typical of men his age. At the time the concept of returning to the Church was so foreign to me that I fell prey to one of the most common anti-Catholic assumptions about conversion. I thought "He just didn't KNOW what he was giving up." Today I read people, especially Presbyterians, say this about Scott Hahn quite a lot. The thought of someone converting for a REASON is just poppycock to them. So it was with me and my brother-in-law. When you are in that mindset there HAS to be another, more irrational reason. What sane person would so such a thing as to give up the freedom of grace based Protestantism for works based, archaic, and heavily rule-laden faith such as Catholicism? Time passed, and it became something of a novelty when we would mention it to our Protestant friends. The response was almost always "Why I've never heard of such!" "Me either", I would retort. We all fell blind to that assumption. Everyone knows that faithful Christians only leave the Catholic Church. My poor deceived brother-in-law, turned over into a religion of bondage. Still, I had sympathy for him. I had never thought too poorly of the Catholic Church. I at least gave them the title Christian, just an odd sort of faith with lots of useless rubrics added to it.

Eventually my wife had a discussion with him about it. "Why on earth?" -- His response was quite simple. "If the Catholic Church is who it claims to be, then I had to be part of it." I was thinking when I heard of this -- 'Oh, do tell, what is it that the Church claims to be?" He told my wife that the Catholic Church claimed to be THE Church founded by Jesus Christ. Over time he had come to the conclusion that it was and furthermore that it was disobedience to Christ to remain apart from it. The thought was interesting but as far as I was concerned it was preposterous to think that any Christian Church had all of the truth. The reason people changed churches is because, just like the Catholic Church did during reformation times, they tend to become corrupt under the influence of the traditions of men running them. Eventually we all have to judge them against Scripture and when they err we simply find some other group more in line with what the good book says. (Little did I know this would play out in our lives in the near future) ... Further discussion with him also led him to pointing out that the real kicker for him was a chapter in the book "Catholicism vs. Fundamentalism" on the canon of the New Testament and history of the Bible.

All in all it was intriguing to understand why someone would do so. It seemed sensible but we had our own experience to show us otherwise. In reality, it was another seed. The occasions to discuss it became occasions to demonstrate the irrational understanding of others about what the Catholic faith was really about.