Witnessing to a Wavering Catholic

A young man tells me that he has been attending a Protestant church but he has not been telling his family, who is strongly Catholic. He tells me that he had received a call from God to serve Him more and felt that this was a call to be ordained a minister in the Protestant church and asks me what I think. I ask him if he had asked a spiritual director about it, and he said, only the pastor whom he considers his spiritual father, but no, he is not a priest. I felt happy for him for his desire to serve the Lord, but kinda sad in most other things, but I gave him hope: You are and remain a baptized Catholic. Do not forget the privilege God has granted you, which is the chance to belong to the Church that Christ instituted. That Christ Himself has founded and nothing else.

I tell him that only the Catholic Church qualifies as a church and that others are prayer communities, by virtue of the definition that a church is headed by a priest and only the Catholic Church has priests which can only be from apostolic succession and submit to the authority of the successors of St. Peter. I tell him that by this very nature, only the Catholic Church has the fullness of the faith, the Real Presence of God, the Body and Blood of our Lord in the Eucharistic Bread and Wine by which eternal life is availed and nothing else. Every thing is an imitation or a representation.

Only in the Catholic faith is the real deal. How can you expect people to be transformed, to fully live if they are only getting shadows of the truth, fakeries of the body of Christ, plain bread, watered doctrine? I tell him that I never was always like this--in fact was an opponent of the Church and all things churchy. "What happened?" he asked. I had my conversion some years ago. I tell him in capsule form my liberal upbringing typical of many professional and aspirational families. Ultimately the rat race became a indicator for defeat, because I was dead to things holy and fully alive, but I didn't know any better, until I walked out of my job and having nothing to do and despairing, started attending daily Mass. It purged me from pride and ambition. I didn't even get to the healing that came with the adoration, the prayer time, the rosary. It was a great removal of attachment, junk and death. I suddenly put happiness and peace in the same sentence as my name, something totally unthinkable. I even worried I was going crazy, so unused I am to lack of anxiety and worry, that I asked a priest in Confession, "What is wrong with me? Why so much peace?" And he, not knowing me at all for it was a newly visited parish, said prophetically, "it is the Eucharist".

Now hearing this boy desire serving the Lord, but in a way that divides him from Christ's Blood and Body, I tell him an analogy. Every woman I know that has jumped ship from a covenantal marriage--whether to search for better pastures in America or to fulfill their cheating whims--ended up in situations akin to human trafficking (poorly treated, bullied, dead, etc.). They were already in the care of the Father by virtue of the husband given to them and whom they are forever yoked to--whether good or not-so good--and they walked away. They do not live out their vows, they miss out on achieving heaven for themselves or for their spouse in this vocational manner. Naturally, a variety of dangers await those who go outside of God's will. It is expected. I tell him this comparison.

The superiority of advisement from the Catholic Church was exemplified when I was having problems in family life due to lack of boundaries. Some people didn't think the husband and wife relationship was paramount. The priests were giving encouragement towards mercy and forgiveness and dying to self; non-Catholic folks were babbling divorce and self-actualization. This is where the priests got it right. We have only one life to live and if we live it according to the world, according to our selfishness, according to popular standard, we do not live according to Christ, we even miss the real vocation of every human being which is holiness and sacrifice.

To some extent, I saw where the Wonder Woman movie got it right and why it resonated with many: people respond to the example of total sacrifice. It is seeing the good in dying from our smallness to give something more enduring for the common good, like Captain Trevor. Mary didn't withhold Her Son anymore than God the Father did. Jesus would have to die to expiate for humanity's sin and thus, even He chose to do so. Only God the Son dying as an innocent in the most cruel of tortures can do just satisfaction for the sins of man from time immemorial.

Sometimes too, sacrifice entails on a human emotion that is expected of us--like anger, fear, revenge or despair--but man chooses to rise above it, and this is the mark of a fine man, whatever the age may be. Sts. Francisco and Jacinta, the Church's youngest saints, were threatened with boiling in oil and other horrors, but refused to reveal the secret of Fatima to the government officials that kidnapped them. They continued penances to save souls--a fine and powerful example of redemptive suffering, which all should know and use, for the good that trials do is immense, only if we know how to use it. Sadly, smarties like Christian Barnaard do not know the value of suffering (Christ or other's) and deride the cross. 

This is what I tell my young friend: do not be deceived by lesser goods. A friend of mine who was already a bishop in one of the Protestant denominations was asked, knowing that the Real Presence rests only in the Catholic Church, would he want ministry or truth? He settled for truth, became a Catholic and even evangelized more and widely (tv, RCIA, Bible teaching, preaching in our prayer meetings) than he ever did as a Protestant minister. People, who have won the faith in a hard way, will never settle. It involved so much peril to the soul as they had been familiar with, and thus proclaim the truth whenever they can.

It is only Catholics, moving in the fullness of their faith, that effect real good anyway. I told him that if you do your very best in your faith tradition, well and good, but what I find is lacking that foundation and tradition that is truly faithful to God, dilutions of the truths and the moral law have trickled in policy and public life that Baptists favor abortion and Episcopalians believe in assisted suicide. He thanked me and I handed him a prayer card with Mama Mary's injunctions from Medjugorge: daily rosary, daily Eucharist, daily Scripture, biweekly fasting and monthly Confession. Ask a priest, I said, questions that besiege your faith in the context of Confession and in that way, he would speak and answer you in persona Christi. This is possible through having sacraments, which only exist in the Catholic faith.