What If Catholics Are Right?

What if the claims of the Catholic Church are true?

What if Catholics are right?

What would you do?

What if you were humming along in your faith journey—a happy Evangelical Christian—when a warm encounter with a nun, a friar, or a Catholic priest suddenly stopped you in your tracks?

What if their genuine faith and humility was the sudden jolt your soul needed to stop and wonder about what made Catholics tick?

And what if you dug a little deeper?

What if something you read in passing, about the beauty of the human person—from conception to natural death—made you stop and consider your own views; consider what your own denomination says about end-of-life care.

Is it enough?

Or what if you were afforded some random opportunity to sit in on a Catholic Mass sung by sweet old religious sisters, rosaries in hand, and you were struck by the unspeakable beauty of the thing.

And what if you returned the next day? And the day after that?

Because, to be fair, Catholic Church makes some pretty outrageous claims.

The Church claims that the Eucharist—what I used to call “Communion” as an Evangelical—is meant to be the actual body, soul, and divinity of Christ.

The Church claims that we can, and should, pray to the dead; that there is power in their prayers.

The Church claims an unbroken chain of authority right back to the apostles, appointed by Jesus; a comprehensive theological framework; the ability to impart grace and forgive sins through confession; and that Mary, the Mother of God, is legitimately at work in the world.

To my formerly evangelical ears these things would’ve sounded nuts.

But what if the Catholic Church is right?

These are, after all, claims of a thousand plus years old.

What if they’re true?

Is it enough to soldier on; to grow where we’re planted?

Or should we, like Zacchaeus, invite Jesus to come into our home tonight and to see what happens?

To pray, and ask, and seek?

What if Catholics are right?

What if there’s more grace out there than you imagined as an Evangelical? The ability to really consume our Lord in the Eucharist? To truly be able to feel forgiveness for sins wiped away? To live and love in communion of Christians who lived, died, and loved God from the very beginning of time?

Wouldn’t you want to know more about that?

Ultimately, I like to think that if there’s even the hair’s chance that the ancient claims of the Catholic Church are true, it’s something worth investigating.

That there is more to the Christian faith than belied by the current evangelical ecosystem might be shocking to many evangelicals; that 2 million young Catholics turned out in the middle of the night to worship Jesus may be even more shocking still.

Catholicism is huge, and beautiful.

But, that these youth, and billions more, atest to the beauty and truth of the Catholic Church is something not to be taken too lightly.

It’s something, in the least, to consider.

What if Catholics are right?

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