and so do I
it is a great read
You've most probably heard of him, but I just read Marcus Grodi's story of converting from Presbyterian Pastor to Catholic. I have been enjoying watching the shows he hosts on EWTN called 'The Journey Home' here:
https://www.ewtn.com/tv/live/journeyhome.asp in which he interviews many Pastors, Ministers etc who converted to Catholicism (as a result it appears of mostly of researching the origins of the biblical canon and Church, the sayings of the Church Fathers etc).
I was intrigued to see the same book we mentioned and which I am reading,
''Catholicism and Fundamentalism, the attack on 'Romanism' by 'Bible Believing Christians'' was partly instrumental in his conversion. Here's his great testimony, it might help those on the same path as myself:
Dead Duck
Marcus Grodi grew up in a somewhat liberal Lutheran church near Toledo, Ohio. He was active in the youth group, catechized and confirmed. "I knew many things," he says, "but they hadn't gotten into my heart." The church summer camps were "like being prepared to be involved with SDS, rather than spiritual'.
Grodi's high school acquaintance included students from many denominations, but no Catholics—"other than across an athletic field. My view of Catholicism was not extremely negative, but we had lots of mythological understandings of the Catholic church on the other side of town. We figured it was full of superstition, and people being almost enslaved to the priests and nuns."He began to wonder, though, about the differences among the Protestant denominations.
Grodi studied engineering at Case Western Reserve. "I went three years without entering a church door," he recalls. "I was involved in fraternity life and all that brings with it. Then in the summer before my senior year I had a deep renewal of my faith through the testimony of a friend—really a 180-degree turn in my life. "
Grodi went back to his Lutheran church and found that the words of the liturgy made sense for the first time. "But as I looked down the pew I saw high school students, like myself when I was that age, reciting the things without meaning. I decided that traditional liturgicalism was dead, that it produced nominal, almost mindless Christians. I figured God wanted to hear something different, not the same thing every Sunday.
"Upon graduating, Grodi began his first engineering job—and a youth ministry. He chose Congregationalism. "Every Congregational church is autonomous and can decide what it wants to do. It can write its own creed. It's amazing what some Congregational churches really believe."
In 1978, after four years of engineering and part-time ministry, Grodi entered Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He gained much from his years there."I don't bash my evangelical background. It brought me back to Jesus Christ. It put in my heart a sincere desire to give my life totally to Him; and I do believe that it was because of that conviction that I'm now a Catholic.
Even Gordon-Conwell, with its commitment to Scripture, to the truth—because it's interdenominational it avoids the denominational slants of the Baptist Church, or the Methodist or Presbyterian Church—I think that trajectory is what ended up bringing a lot of us into the Catholic Church."
Grodi went out to his first church with enthusiasm and conviction. It was a Congregational church in Florida. "I hadn't been there six months when I realized there was something wrong with Congregationalism. I couldn't put my finger on it."He entered the Presbyterian Church as a pastor, but the doubts continued. "How could I be sure that our Presbyterian slant was the best slant, compared to my Methodist brothers, my Assembly of God, Church of Christ and Episcopalian brothers—even to the Catholics? How could I know that my interpretation of Scripture had any connection whatever with what Jesus really said?"
I wanted to be faithful. I knew I would one day stand before Jesus Christ, my Lord, and be accountable for the souls of the people I led. I knew I had to make sure that what I was teaching was true, and that what I was doing was true."Grodi couldn't turn for help to the leadership of the Presbyterian Church. "I had almost universally rejected their perspectives. Most of them were very liberal. They were pro-choice. Nine out of ten things that came across my desk from the head office ended up in the wastebasket."
"There were no rules; I was re-inventing the wheel. It didn't make sense that Jesus would have planted a church and then left everything up for grabs." Grodi considered trying a more conservative denomination, but what he calls the "poll-taking" aspect of denominationalism still bothered him. He resigned his pastorale and returned to Case Western Reserve, intending to earn a Ph.D. in molecular biology and then to combine his science and religion backgrounds into bioethics. "I figured I'd end up being a genetics professor or an ethicist somewhere."
He wasn't far into his doctoral work when one morning a newspaper advertisement caught his eye. "Catholic theologian Scott Hahn to speak at local parish."<Catholic> theologian Scott Hahn? "We hadn't seen each other for eight years. So I went to hear him speak, and listened to his tape, and read Karl Keating's book,
<Catholicism and Fundamentalism.> By the end of that, just those three things, I was a dead duck."
Grodi began to read the early Church Fathers, and Church history. He knew he could not remain a Protestant. "My problem was that I couldn't be a Catholic. There were too many weird things. When you've been a Protestant for forty years, face it: the Infant of Prague is really strange. And I had grown up with those prejudices. The Catholic Church and the Mafia were the same thing. Catholics drank and smoked."
But I knew that if I could trust the authority of the Magisterium centered on the See of Peter, then everything else would fall into place. It was Newman's <Development of Christian Doctrine> that convinced me of that. And then I was a Catholic."
Marcus Grodi was received into the Catholic Church in 1993.
