The places where I stand

It’s early in the morning, no ones up yet, and I’m sitting here typing out my heart. Pretty standard for a Sunday morning for me, today I’m weighing whether I should attend Mass or not. I’m still struggling with the Catholic Church, and I can’t seem to get my arms around it just yet. Some parts I find are stunningly beautiful and others make little sense to me, and what frustrates me so much about all of them is that I have no one to talk to about my questions. Yes I’m in RCIA, and I have a sponsor, but I don’t think he understands me and my need to understand before I commit. So I’m left on this road, forging it alone.

I read and study what I can, there are a plethora of conversion stories out there to choose from. Some great resources for research, but research done in a vacuum will always get off track. I’m doing my Bibliology and Hermeneutics with Michael Patton, but he’s fully protestant (and a little Calvinist, but I don’t hold it against him) and of course he thinks I’m making a mistake. So I get little tidbits of things from him like how it’s a Mortal sin if you skip mass, he picked a good topic because I could see his point. His question to the Catholic community was if a Catholic skipped Mass, then died before they could repent. Would they go to hell?

Valid question, and the response on catholicanswers.com where all over board, while his argument may be a bit of a straw man, it’s still a good question and the answers quite frankly concerned me. It’s just another thing that I’m going to have to resolve before I move much further on this.

Michelle and I have decided that we are pretty much at the end of our ropes right now, there is no turning back to any of the protestant faiths. The more we study the more we realize how far off most of them are, and we are not interested in heading back in that direction. But at the same time we both have deep concerns about the Catholic Church, and to be quite honest it’s take a lot of time and effort to research this information. It’s a slow, expensive process. Expensive in that I probably have 30 books now on this issue and more on the way, we both are reading everything we can find. The council of Trent is coming up shortly, because the protestants that we know all go to trent to talk about why Catholicism is so bad.

There may be an answer to prayer in all this yet, we have struggled with the light nature of the RCIA and Michelle talked with Mary who is running it at Holy Apostles. She has setup an appointment with one of the Deacons to see if he can spend some time and help us come to an understanding of the issues that are hanging us up. At some point I’m going to have to validate what I’m finding and work with someone smarter than I (which should not be hard to find) to figure all this out. I can’t do it alone, that much I know for sure.

I think the core of the issue boils down to this:

I can submit myself to Christ, there’s no question about that in my mind.

But I’m not convinced that the Catholic Church has not been corrupted, added onto the Gospel and setup and institution of man with rules, regulations and extra biblical systems.

Until I or should I say we can resolve that, we will both be out here in the post-evangelical wasteland

-Paul-