How a Baptist Fell in Love with the Catholic Church

I fell in love with the Catholic Church when I was still a Baptist.  It wasn’t that I saw a Catholic church one day and was immediately smitten.  To be honest, it happened gradually over several years. Perhaps it began with seeing Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley in The Bells of St. Mary.  Whatever it was, it made an impression.  So that even though I attended a Southern Baptist church every week with my family, I felt an attraction to the Catholic Church that I couldn’t explain.

I am more certain about four distinct events during my early life that put me firmly on the road to the Catholic Church.  These events were: (1) an invitation, (2) a liturgical encounter, (3) a discovery from Church history, and (4) learning a new way to read Scripture.   
 

An Invitation.  The first event occurred when a young social studies teacher I met in the ninth grade invited me to go with her to a Friday night meeting at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle.  Father Dennis Bennet was the pastor there, and he was leading a massive Charismatic Renewal among churches throughout the greater Seattle area.  At this meeting, I saw lot of people wearing clerical collars.  I learned that some were Episcopalian priests and some were Roman Catholic.  And then there was the church itself.  It was beautiful, serene, reverent, and holy.  Never had I been inside such a beautiful church. 

A Liturgical Encounter.  The second event followed from the first.  For I soon joined an enthusiastic group of Baptist and evangelical high schoolers like myself who were joyously celebrating the Charismatic Renewal.  Our group’s leaders had learned of the Renewal taking hold at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Seattle.  So one Sunday evening we all attended Mass at Blessed Sacrament to see what was going on.  The Mass was in Latin, beautiful, and amazing.  After Mass, we attended their charismatic prayer meeting.  But it was the liturgy of the Mass that made a deep impression.  I loved it and never forgot it.
 

A Discovery from History.  The third event happened during my freshman year of college.  I attended LeTourneau College in Texas that year.  LeTourneau was and still is a fundamentalist Evangelical institution. Its students and faculty are mostly Baptist but also come from many other denominations.  Not surprisingly then, we were required to complete Old Testament and New Testament survey courses that first year.  In the New Testament course, I learned that the first Christians continued the liturgical form of worship they had inherited from the Jewish synagogues of the time.

This discovery was a shock because I had always been taught that the first Christians had worshiped the way we Baptists did.  In fact, that was what we Baptists were supposed to be all about:  restoring the worship and beliefs of the “primitive” first century church.  Suddenly I knew that what I had been taught on that point was wrong.  Naturally, I began to wonder if there were other things from my Baptist upbringing that I should question.  At the same time, I also felt liberated in a way, because it now seemed the way was open to the beautiful Catholic form of worship I had seen earlier.
 

Learning a New Way to Read Scripture.  As a Baptist, I had been taught Scripture from the time I was old enough to sit still in Sunday School.  I had memorized many Bible verses, so many in fact that I felt pretty sure I knew the Bible.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that, while I could recite many Bible verses, I really didn’t understand how those verses fit into their surrounding Biblical narratives.  For example, I had no idea that the sixth chapter in the Gospel of John was about the Eucharist, John’s version of the Last Supper.  Similarly, while I knew the story of Jesus on the cross giving his mother to the Beloved Disciple (John 19:25-29), it had never occurred to me that John meant I was the Beloved Disciple too.
 

That all changed when I decided to visit Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Seattle.  Why an Episcopal rather than a Catholic Church?  The answer is simple:  How could I tell my family I had “gone Catholic?”  It was much easier to tell them I had become Episcopalian because Episcopalians after all were Protestant!  I didn’t know at the time that Saint Paul’s was Seattle’s Anglo-Catholic parish.  But it was, and there I came to know the pastor quite well, the late Father Roy Coulter.  Fr Coulter took me under his wing and, through many generous hours of his time, answered my never-ending questions and walked me through Scripture.  He opened my eyes to what was really going on in the Gospel of John as well as in many other of the books and letters of Scripture.
 

A Decision to Be Made: At that point, I was torn.  I had come to embrace a Catholic view of Scripture, and though I understood the Anglican view on the Pope, I had also come to see that the Pope, being more than just the first among equals, really was the visible symbol of the unity of the Catholic Church.  I even thought of him as my Pope and thought that I should become a Roman Catholic.  But there was that old question again:  how do I explain becoming a Catholic to my dyed-in-the-wool Southern Baptist family?
 

My younger brother almost helped me out on that one:  he married a Roman Catholic woman and so became Catholic himself.  But my mother told me she cried and cried when she learned he had done that.  So I held back, and life went on.
 

Until I met Esperanza, a Filipino nurse working in New York City and a devout Roman Catholic.  I fell head-over-heels in love and eventually proposed to marry her.  I was in the military at the time, so I went to the Catholic chaplain on base and asked what I needed to do to enter the Catholic Church.  A few months later, on 21 July 1991, I was confirmed in the Catholic Church with my fiancée by my side as my sponsor.

That’s my story – except for one last detail.  At the Easter Vigil in 2007, my mother – who had grieved so when my brother became Catholic -- was herself confirmed and received into the Catholic Church.

Martin Fracker is a Catholic of the Anglican tradition and involved with the Ordinariate Members & Friends of Austin, Texas.