Hi!! I'm Dave Lichius, owner of St. Francis de Sales Catholic Books and Gifts, and I have a story of religious pilgrimage that is very common to people of my age (50) and my background (Roman Catholic).

I was raised in the Catholic Church and went to all twelve years of Catholic grade school and high school. However my faith was purely a cultural phenomenon for me and not a personal commitment. Upon my graduation, I emerged from my Catholic ghetto and made my entrance onto the very cosmopolitan campus of the University of Pittsburgh. I was easily influenced there by the aggressive evangelistic preaching of the "born again" Christians on campus. They were a winsome group of people, a high-energy youthful expression of Christ's love. They were optimistic, prayerful, loving of each other, devout, and ready to sacrifice anything to make Christ known to others. None of the Catholics that I knew or grew up with fit that description. It simply seemed obvious to me that the commitment level, enthusiasm, spirituality, and knowledge of Christ was very impressive in the Protestant camp and non existent in the Catholic camp. Therefore, the Protestants must be right in their Bible centered, Christ centered, free spirited way of approaching the faith. I left the Catholic Church easily for what I considered a more serious discipleship and gave the Church only an occasional thought over the next twenty years. I busied myself in youth ministry and other outreaches through parachurch groups such as Young Life and also the P.C.U.S.A. and later the P.C.A. In 1987, I began teaching Youth Ministry and Community Outreach at Geneva College, a Reformed Presbyterian school.

About five years into my Protestant experience, I started to be sensitized to the social implications of the gospel and other questions dealing with corporate sin. In youth ministry it was obvious to me that most of the things that affected young people adversely had corporate dimensions. Materialism, hedonism, entertainment, divorce, abortion, new sexual mores, moral relativism, and popular culture were all having negative effects on them, and for the most part Protestant churches had nothing to say about it. I don't mean to say that individuals did not have strong opinions, but the Church denomination seemed powerless in the lives of its members in these areas. It had no authority. A person's relationship with God was personal, the Church's concerns were spiritual, and social gospelling was frowned upon. The hard sayings of Jesus demanded a radical response which was simply not forthcoming in a culture where Christians were well off and had plenty to lose. The only Church that seemed to have the courage to tell it's people what to do was the Catholic Church, since it was not an egalitarian, democratic expression of historic Christianity, and since it's members could not simply leave when the sledding got rough, at least not without consequences. As I was studying for my masters' degree at Fuller Seminary, the only case studies that were forthcoming in a course in moral theology were Pope John Paul, Oscar Ramirez, and Mother Theresa. Mmmm! I began reading the papal encyclicals with relish as well as the Church Fathers, and some of the famous converts to the faith like Newman and Chesterton, and found the Catholic church to be as relevant and vital an instrument of God in Godless times as it had ever been. Finally, a church with courage! Some books by St. Francis de Sales were also very instrumental in helping me to address the questions that my studies in Calvinism naturally posed to the Catholic Church. St. Francis de Sales reevangleized the entire region of the Chablais after the Reformation took the region. 70,000 people were won back to the Church through his compassion and reasoned step by step rebuttal of Calvin's theology.

In addition to this, I noticed that I had been a born again Christian for 20 years and was simply not making any progress in holiness. Sins that were a part of me at my conversion were still problematic. One morning I simply decided for whatever reason that I would go to Mass. I have gone almost every day since. The Mass spoke to my heart and called me home on more than just an intellectual level. Chesterton wrote that a person becomes a Catholic for only two reasons: the Truth and the need to be forgiven. Both were true in my case. I knew that I had rediscovered something very special, but this time it was my choice. My new Catholicism was my secret for two years because I was in a situation where my continued employment depended on my adherence to evangelical Protestant belief. I was in no way prepared to lose my job over it. But everything finally it came to a head over the Eucharist. When I became aware that the host and wine were the actual Body and Blood of Christ according to Church teaching (don't ask me how I missed this in Catholic School), then it simply became hypocritical to conceal a conviction of this magnitude for the sake of a job, so I detailed my beliefs in a letter to the president and was dismissed shortly thereafter.

Well, that was certainly a simplistic overview, but a key point to my conversion is that I found the Catholic Church to be a very different religion and a very different way of thinking about things than I had been used to in Protestantism. Protestants were "either/ or" Catholics were "both/ and". Protestants were existential. Catholics sacramental and mystical. Protestants were individualists; Catholics wed to community and authority. There I go being simplistic again, but in retrospect it is easy to see Protestantism as being the predictable outcome of the emerging Renaissance values of humanism, individualism, relativism, and rationalism. It is the more modern, more sophisticated person seeking to redefine the traditional Christian mysteries in a way that does not require the faith of a child and the submission of a peasant.

So then, when in response to my conversion, people would say, "It's so nice that you have found a more meaningful way to worship for you. The important thing is that we all worship the same God", I would try to explain the fallacy of that. If that were all it was, I certainly wouldn't commit professional suicide over it. It's a whole new way of belonging to, relating to, and receiving God. And the Church is not simply a voluntary association of the saved, but the hallowed physical space in which the consummation of our one flesh union with God takes place. The Eucharist is something that every Catholic must deal with. Chesterton says that the Church is a huge round building with many doors for entering. One may enter through any of these doors. My door was the social teachings. But in the center of that building is a table. Eventually one must approach the table in the center of the building. The Eucharist. The substance and summit of all that the Church is. Understanding that changed everything for me. That God would be available to me in this way, and that this Church was His Body and Voice in the world gave me a whole new view of what it was to be a Christian. It was like being "born again" again.

That's the Cliffs Notes version of a pretty complicated conversion that had personal, professional, spiritual, and family implications that were sometimes hard to deal with. If your story is something like mine, or if you simply have questions about the Catholic Faith or how to return if you have been away, please give me a call or email me. I will be glad to give you any help I can. If you are a Protestant professional in ministry and your desire to become Catholic means serious professional problems for you, there is a group dedicated to helping you through that process. Please visit www.chnetwork.org.