I left my Heavenly Father’s house for 18 years before I returned. 18 years is a long time to eat with the pigs and sleep in the mud. In those 18 years I wandered as a sheep from the safety of The Good Shepherd and was constantly attacked by wolves, I was nearly dead before He came and brought me back.
I was baptized into the Catholic Church at 8 months old, which I am forever grateful for. I made my First Holy Communion when I was 11 years old, and it was soon after this that I left the Church. It wasn’t a conscious decision I made at that moment, it was really more that my family stopped going. Once I made my First Holy Communion at age 11, it was as if the box was checked and I was free to move on. We were never by any means a family that went every Sunday as we had very irregular attendance.
At this age the only Catholics in my life, which were very few, confused me. They professed Catholicism and prayed a rosary, yet used tarot cards and said that all religions were salvific. Now I wasn’t catechized very well, but even at this young age I could sense that this was contradictory. And I thought
“Well, if this is what Catholicism is, I don’t want any part of it.”
Unfortunately, this time of my life overlapped with the aftermath of sexual abuse that I was dealing with. I was wrestling with the thought of feeling abandoned and I truly thought,
“Why did this happen if God is love? Does He not love me?”
It was a lethal combination of poor catechesis, a lack of true Catholic example, zero spiritual guidance, and struggling with hard questions about the love of God that caused me to truly decide to walk away. I left my Heavenly Father’s house and I ran full sprint into the world, and I got into major trouble pretty fast.
Just so you can understand how poor my spiritual formation was, I honestly can’t even remember ever knowing the name of the Priest at my parish.
Now when you’re poorly catechized, especially as a child, you don’t know that. You really don’t know what you don’t know. So I took my .01% knowledge of the Catholic faith with me as I left into the world but at the time I really thought I knew what it was all about. (Sigh.) This fact will become important later in the story.
I became a teenager and quickly only cared about moody teenage music and my friend group and my focus was on what it meant to be liked at school. The further I went from God, the more I disdained my parents authority, and my arrogance grew. Like many teenagers, I thought I really had life figured out and everyone else was just ignorant.
This will become quite apparent soon, but I was not closely monitored as a teenager. And I certainly took advantage of that fact, to my spiritually and physical destruction.
At this time I did not have a healed perspective on sexuality because of my childhood abuse, and I truly felt like I was “used goods”, just unwanted trash. I felt completely unlovable. I desperately wanted love and attention and someone to notice I was hurting and to help me. That kind of desperation was taken advantage of by teenage boys as you can imagine. I was looking for love in all the wrong places, and became promiscuous because of it.
At 16 I was diagnosed with PTSD from the childhood abuse, and chronic anxiety. I was just a mess of a human being with no hope. And as time went on, the angrier and more anxious I became.
There is a brilliant C.S. Lewis quote that says “I sat with my anger long enough, and she told me her real name was grief.” And this was certainly my case. The rage I had was coming from a place of pain and brokenness, and after high school I realized that all the boyfriends in the world couldn’t make me happy. There had to be something more, and I desperately wanted to be helped from the hell I was living in…
On the first day of World Religions class in college, the Professor said, “Now I do belong to a religion, but I will not tell you what it is until the last day of class.”
The class was intense and so interesting to me as I was desperately hoping to find proof of God, especially a loving one. That semester we studied everything from ancient religions to modern day ones, and by the end of it I had no idea what religion my professor was! On his slideshows he had pictures of himself visiting all the major pilgrimage sites across the world religions and it was apparent to me how sincere this man was in his study of this topic. He was a man who left no stone unturned.
Finally the last day of class came, and everyone waited with bated breath as he said “I am Catholic.”
WHAT?! Catholic?? I thought, this must be a fluke! How could you be an expert on the history of religions and then pick Catholicism? I was pretty let down at that moment.
Summer time came and I now had a fully hardened heart full of rage and rebellion. I gravitated to the New Age and began learning occult knowledge as I had seen it practiced in my house growing up with tarot and other similar things. I was craving control, and thats exactly the illusion of the occult. You think you have control, but really you don’t. It has control of you.
I have made plenty of horrible decisions in my life, but getting involved with the occult and New Age was truly the worst thing I ever did.
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Important note– Participating in Tarot, psychic readings, or any other occult practice is a grave sin in the Catholic Church. One cannot receive the Eucharist while in grave sin. Read what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches on this subject below:
2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to “unveil” the future. 48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others — even if this were for the sake of restoring their health — are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another’s credulity.
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That terrible Summer, I used a homemade ouija board almost every single night. I used tarot cards every morning, and truly believed my horoscope gave me authentic information, (cringe). I saw a psychic medium and fell down the rabbit hole to hell big time. The ouija board experiences proved to me without a doubt that the supernatural existed, there was something out there communicating with me. I got information from the board about other people I couldn’t have otherwise known, and other events that had no material explanation. I was searching for knowledge outside of God, and little did I know how catastrophic it was for my soul. I know now that who I was communicating with was not benevolent, it was demonic. And these demonic entities did not want to let me go so easily. Now at this time in my life I started getting very sick. I was dealing with sudden onset autoimmune issues and my body was falling apart.
I met who would become my husband when I was 19 years old and he was a practicing Protestant at the time (Pentecostal to be exact) and he asked to pray with me since he could see the absolute anxious hell I was living in. When he prayed for me, I felt an intense and personal peace that I hadn’t felt since I was a young child, and it was really powerful.
This is when God began to draw me back to His Son. I threw away all of the occult paraphernalia I had and thats when spiritual warfare began to happen like never before. I moved out of my parents home and into the home my husband and I had.
I began reading the Bible and seeing how much God hated the occult practices, and it resolved me more to move away from all of my former practices.
One night many months later we visited my parents home and stayed the night. I awoke in the middle of the night to the feeling of being choked. I opened my eyes, and saw just a deep darkness that is hard to explain, my chest was heavy as if there were a huge weight on it, and I start gasping for air and swinging my arms trying to get whoever this was off of me. I finally was able to scream and I yelled so loud it woke up my husband who fell off the bed, (I feel so bad, I really must have scared him so much!) and then he turned the light on.
“Someone is in here!!! They were choking me!!!” I screamed in panic.
My husband dropped to the floor and looked under the bed and then in the closet before looking at me and saying, “There is no one in here!”
Then it dawned on me, this was my old bedroom. This was my old house. The one where I used a ouija board every single night and used tarot every morning. The place I hadn’t been back to since leaving the occult, and thats exactly when I realized that whatever I had made connections with was not wanting to let me go so easily.
I was desperate for Jesus to help me, but I was overwhelmed with all the church “options” I saw on a daily basis. Remember when I said that we would get back to the part about how you don’t know what you don’t know? And that I thought I knew what Catholicism was about? Thats where this gets really important.
Since the few Catholics I knew were involved in occult activity, I knew I wanted to be as far away as possible from that and so I wrote off all of Catholicism as insincere, and illiterate of the Bible since how could you practice this type of stuff knowing that the Bible clearly condemns it? I actually believed that all catholics were occultists, yikes.
God had taken me out of the Egypt of occultism and then began my 9 years in the Protestant wilderness.
I visited my husband’s Pentecostal church a few times, and then we ended up moving and being invited to a Plymouth Brethren church for a while. We then moved out of state and this is where we attended a Baptist church. (As you can tell, we moved around a lot) And at each new place, there seemed to be a major disconnect for me. We’re being taught “Sola Scriptura” while simultaneously being taught things that were not found in scripture at all. It’s also important to note here that anti-Catholic beliefs were being viscously reinforced by each denomination.
Now, I am a nerd with a big emphasis on getting the correct answer of things. When driving down the street and seeing the Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Non-Denominationals, Methodists, Church of Christs, etc. I needed to investigate for myself and figure out what they really believed and not just accept what other people told me that they believed.
This investigation would eventually lead me to revert to Catholicism, though I would have never guessed that could ever be the case.
There are some major pillars of Protestant belief that I was taught early on: Once Saved Always Saved, Pre-trib Rapture, Believer’s baptism as a symbol or profession of faith, and the Lord’s Supper as a purely symbolic memorial. There are, of course, other flavors of Protestantism like the Calvinistic pillars: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints.
I tried every flavor and will briefly go through some of these issues here, though if I were to go through them all this post would go on forever so I will try to keep this brief. I won’t really get into my 2 year brush with Calvinism here in depth as it would take too much time, though I plan to make a dedicated post on the subject since the theology of Calvinism almost shipwrecked my faith completely.
As I read the Bible and visited various denominations each of those pillars fell one by one like dominos over time. The first one to go was Once Saved Always Saved which honestly is like a sacred cow to many Protestant denominations. Mind you, I was not looking to disprove any of these pillars! I wanted to be where the truth was and where what I was reading in the Bible was clearly matching up with what I heard from the pulpit. It was very convenient to hear and believe that Once Saved Always Saved is true, I know that it’s a very comforting belief to want to hold on to. However, Once Saved Always Saved, I’m now fully convinced, is a lie that will send more people to hell than probably anything else in American Christianity today. It is a wicked and evil deception that lulls people into a complacent “faith” that deceives only themselves but not God. It teaches that faith in Christ is a one time ticket that is stamped, and a lifetime of holiness and repentance is not necessary. One does not have to take up their cross, deny themselves, and follow Christ all the days of their life.
It took a long time for me to come to this conclusion but I couldn’t deny what I clearly saw when comparing all of Scripture and not just isolating certain verses that were used to prop up Once Saved Always Saved (OSAS). The final blow to OSAS was for the first time ever, reading the Early Church Father’s beliefs on this topic. It was undeniable to me that the form of American Christianity we see rampant today is truly a modern invention of the last few hundred years with beliefs that never held a meaningful consensus throughout all of the Church’s history.
Once OSAS falls it automatically cancels out the Perseverance of the Saints and therefore crumbles the entire scaffolding of TULIP altogether, but more on that another time.
“To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”
This quote is by Cardinal John Henry Newman who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and is now a Doctor of the Church. I read that quote as a Protestant and it made me annoyed every time I came across it. Little did I know how true this quote would ring true in my life.
The next domino to fall was the Pre-trib rapture doctrine. Again, another comforting falsehood just like Once Saved Always Saved. Really for these major protestant pillars you have to take a very carefully constructed framework like dispensationalism, or TULIP, and place it on top of Scripture to explain away why some verses don’t mean what they plainly say while still claiming to “take the Bible literally”.
(Many) Protestants claim to “Take the Bible literally” yet deny:
- “Baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21)
- “This is my body and this is my blood” (Matthew 26:25-27, John 6:41-68)
- Every single conditional statement regarding salvation (Matthew 24:13, Colossians 1:22-23) ….. just to name a few.
Pretrib rapture is obviously false and it takes a long time to unpack that so I will leave you with a playlist below that has a bunch of videos on these topics that you can check out.
Next, this one is huge, is the understanding of Baptism and The Lord’s Supper a.k.a. the Eucharist.
The biggest change for me on this entire protestant journey wasn’t my understanding of OSAS (which always was a little suspicious to me) or the pretrib rapture doctrine, but baptism. But once you are in church history and can see for yourself what the majority believed for 1500 years until the reformation, you have to ask yourself the following question:
Was the church in error for 1500 years, or is the modern form of American Christianity in error?
We will come back to this question shortly but for now just chew on it for a bit.
I read this document which is a great compilation of Early Church father quotes regarding baptism and it’s not even close to what is being taught in America today. This absolutely blew my mind. I didn’t go into the baptism debate thinking my mind would change, rather I thought my beliefs would be reinforced, but I was very wrong about that, and you know what they say about assuming…
Once you believe in the sacrament and efficacy of Baptism, that it actually is a means of grace that God chooses to work through, the Eucharist is a logically fast domino to fall next. More on the Eucharist soon.
Remember that these realizations happened over 9 years, not 9 days. So as the scales fell off of my eyes, I realized I’m basically running out of Protestant denominations. When OSAS, Pretrib rapture, Symbolic Baptism and symbolic Lords Supper, and TULIP are out of the picture whats left?
Anglicanism and Confessional Lutheranism. That’s it. I did actually only think it was Anglicanism, but an AI search let me know that Confessional Lutherans existed and it was then I knew that I had to check them out. Remember, no stone unturned!
Anglicanism didn’t pan out since I found out that the closest church, which was pretty far away, was part of a group that ordained women and this was a fast and immediate no for me. If you can’t get that simple question correct regarding the ordination of women, I don’t believe you can be trusted to be careful and serious with the rest of scripture. I know that not all Anglican groups do this, just as many Lutheran groups ordain women as well, but the fact that there were no faithful Anglican churches near me cut them out of the running pretty fast. So begun my final protestant experience: Confessional Lutheranism.
I had come a long way in my protestant journey, yet there were still a few things I had against the Catholic Church at this point: Intercession of the Saints, Mary, and The Papacy.
I was fully convinced that Lutheranism was the final destination in my faith. I did not ever see myself budging on the three topics in question namely the Saints, Mary, and the Papacy. Not in a million years! My anti-Catholic understanding was definitely deepened in Lutheranism too as one can imagine.
Well, after being Confirmed as a Lutheran my Brother in Law let me know that he was reverting to Catholicism- and it absolutely made my blood boil.
In hindsight, I find it interesting how most Protestants will not bat an eye if you move from one denomination to Baptist, or to non-denominational or to whatever you want, fill in the blank here, as long as you stay protestant but once you dare to become a “filthy Papist”, you have crossed the line.
My automatic reaction was to attack.
I unloaded so many attacks and questions on him so fast and with such ferocity, truly believing he would have no defense or Biblical ground to stand on, because I was right, remember? Our debates, or back and forth conversation, got so intense and long form we had to switch from text to email. Yet to my utter seething, he would actually respond back, at length, with his explanations that to my horror slowly started to make sense. All of the assumptions I had about Catholicism and lies I was spoon fed as a protestant were falling down before me as straw men. I had been throwing things at him that were actually not true. Remember when I said this earlier?
I needed to investigate for myself and figure out what they really believed and not just accept what other people told me that they believed.
I realized that I had given everyone the dignity and grace to hear them out, except for Catholics. But I was just so stubborn still. I had believed in the Semper Virgo (ever virginity of Mary) as a Lutheran, but now started to research deeply the Intercession of the Saints as well as the Immaculate conception and Bodily Assumption beliefs as well.
I’d like to point out here that most protestant denominations see Martin Luther as a theological hero, even a liberator of sorts. But they don’t really know what he actually believed. Martin Luther believed in the Ever Virginity of Mary, Her sinlessness, Baptismal regeneration, and the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Protestant theology has run far afield from its theological origins.
My Brother in law, who has the literal patience of a Saint by the way to deal with me, sent me quotes directly from the Catechism and other official teachings and I was dumbstruck. I could feel my heart starting to soften (even if I didn’t admit it yet). Yet I was still desperate for Catholicism to not be true, so I watched countless hours of Lutheran apologists debate these very questions and over time I could no longer agree with the Lutherans as I compared what the Catholic Church officially taught alongside the witness of early church fathers and Scripture.
I will add really helpful videos about Intercession of the Saints and Marian doctrine on the resources playlist.
And yet I had one big question left: The Papacy. Now it was truly time to face that big question from earlier:
Was the church in error for 1500 years, or is the modern form of American Christianity in error?
Was I going to take Jesus seriously when He said that the gates of Hell would not prevail against His church (Matthew 16:18) or was I going to believe like the mormons and the protestants that Jesus’ true teachings were lost or corrupted? Were the incredible early Church Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas just damsels in distress until Martin Luther jumped on the scene? Did Jesus leave His disciples without any authority knowing that everything He worked hard to build would burn to the ground immediately? Or did He know everything would fall to dust, or to thousands of denominations rather, unless He did leave an authority?
I dove into the Papacy big time. After all, if the Papacy is true that immediately addresses the question of Eastern Orthodoxy. This topic was very important to me and I wanted to be very careful with it, because I had sworn in my Protestant angst to never be part of the church riddled with sexual abuse scandals and “sketchy” authority. I watched Catholics debate Eastern Orthodox on this question, I watched the best of the best Protestants debate this one as well and found my heart continually softening and siding with the Catholics as they carefully examined Church history.
(The book Bad Shepherds by Rod Bennett does an incredible job of examining church history and showing why the very obvious cases of bad apples in the Catholic Church do not make null and void the Church’s God given authority. Just like the succession of many bad kings of Israel (there were actually more bad Kings than good ones), a bad ruler doesn’t mean that the throne and its succession becomes void of authority. You can dive deeper into this concept in the book which I will link here.)
I was now in full blown panic mode, what is happening?? Surely this cannot be happening. I still, in my hard headedness, tried every single way to convince myself out of this until three very odd things happened.
When I was confirmed as a Lutheran, I was given a very nice and heavy duty key chain that I had attached to my everyday bag. One side was a Luther’s Rose coin, and the other side is a coin with the acronym VDMA (Latin for The Word of the Lord Endures forever). I took it with me everywhere, and one day during these debates with my Brother in law, I had come home one day and put my bag down like usual and all of a sudden the side of Luther’s Rose completely and dramatically broke off, prophetically only leaving “The Word of the Lord Endures forever” remaining.
That was the first thing that I honestly didn’t pay much mind to until two other things happened. I went to bed one night and had the most vivid and beautiful dream of a monstrance. Now, I did not know that’s what it was called at the time, but I recognized it as being a Catholic item that held the Eucharist. Lastly, I dreamed again of going to Sunday Mass at the Catholic Church around the corner from my house.
I woke up this time freaking out. I even texted my brother in law in a panic, I asked him “Are you praying a rosary for me or something?? I don’t know what’s going on but God is very loudly and clearly speaking to me.”
One of the following days, a video popped up on my recommended feed titled “Every Scientifically Proven Eucharistic Miracle” by Truthly which I will link here since it is so incredible, you absolutely must watch this. That video sealed the deal for me. There was no question, I was sure of it. I had nothing left to protest, I had to be in the church that Christ began. I was reverting to Catholicism because I needed to partake of the Eucharist.
I had come full circle. In that long circuitous route, I learned that no, practicing paganism and occultism is in fact a grave sin for Catholics and is not endorsed in any way whatsoever. I learned that Catholics don’t worship Mary. I learned that just like every Protestant church that exists everywhere, there are bad apples in the bunch, but their existence in the Catholic Church doesn’t nullify Christ’s own promise to protect His Church. There will be a Judas (maybe one out of twelve!) but I must persevere to the end. I learned that no, Catholics do not believe they earn their own salvation (like so many protestants are absolutely adamant of). And I learned that Catholicism is the true Church that Christ established two thousand years ago.
If you’re still reading this, thank you. I wrote this to document the witness of God’s work in my life for His greater glory. Thanks be to God who saved my poor soul and brought me back to Himself after I wandered for so long and even slandered His church, thereby persecuting Him (Acts 9:4). God is merciful and He is love, and through it all I can see His hand in every single part of my life.
Until next time,
Ash
Diary of a Catholic Revert 
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