The Necessity of the Church
The
Church is One
Dr. Scott Hahn
My
Journey Home
Dr. Eduardo
J. Echeverria
The
Catholic Church: The Church of the Early Fathers
Jim Anderson
Before
You Object
Fr. Ray
Ryland
The
Church is Catholic
Jim Anderson
The
Necessity of Being Catholic
James Akin
In
Search of the New Testament Church
Mark D.
Steele
John
Paul II's "Ecumenical Passion"
Msgr. John
O. Barres
Other Journals
My Journey Home
By Dr. Eduardo J. Echeverria
“You made us for Yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in You.” In this statement, the philosopher theologian St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354 430) claimed that nothing less than God can completely satisfy the restless quest of man for peace—for the truth, for the good, for happiness. In other words, God is our ultimate fulfillment. This was also the sentiment of the openning question and answer of the Baltimore Catechism: “‘Why did God make you?’ God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in the next.” I did not, however, always know the answer to that question.
In 1950, I was born into a Catholic family, the second of five children.
We lived in Merida, the capital city of Yucatan, Mexico, until we immigrated
to the eastern part of the United States when I was almost two years old.
Living for a short time in Manhattan, I spent my first three years of
grammar school at Our Lady of Lourdes. When I was eight years old we moved
up north to the Bronx, where I attended Immaculate Conception School.
My parents were firm believers in the importance of Catholic education,
so when I graduated in 1964, they sent me to Mount Saint Michael Academy,
an all boy’s high school run by Marist Brothers. I graduated in
1969.
I had been baptized, confirmed, and catechized a Catholic, yet I do not
remember ever thinking seriously, during my high school years, about personally
turning toward God and away from sin by making a heartfelt commitment
to Christ. Like many teens, the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel
of Jesus Christ just didn’t seem relevant to my life. I didn’t
actually think this through, or make a conscious choice to be an atheist.
Rather I just assumed that the Church had nothing to say to me. Aside
from the usual things that teens experienced, I lived my late teens in
the “adversary culture” of the late 1960s - the Woodstock
generation, the protests against US involvement in Vietnam, and the counter-culture’s
spiritual and moral critiques of the emptiness and inauthenticity of the
established society.
Many of my boyhood friends were swept up into the “adversary culture,”
with its drugs and music, and its philosophy of ‘free love,’
absolute freedom, and self-expression. Thankfully, I and several close
friends resisted the dynamic of this culture. I knew that drugs, sex (and
more sex), and rock n’roll was not the answer to life’s meaning
and purpose.
In my resistance, I began to ask myself the questions, “Does God
exist?” and “If He does, why did He make me?” Not knowing
where to turn for answers to these questions, I read some of the literary
works of French authors like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and popular
writers like Herman Hesse, among others. I was searching for some direction
to my life, for answers to the questions, “Who am I?” and
“Why am I here?” It was the summer of 1970.
That summer I went to Europe for the first time. In Amsterdam, I met a
girl at a youth hostel who told me about a community in Switzerland called
L’Abri Fellowship. What I remember mostly from our conversation
this one summer evening is simply this—L’Abri was a center
where people, mostly young, came from diverse cultures and religious backgrounds
searching for answers to questions about God, man, the world, and the
meaning of life. I don’t remember her telling me that L’Abri
was an Evangelical Christian community. Oh yes, I especially remember
her saying that staying at L’Abri was free for the first ten days,
and for a guy who was on a tight budget, L’Abri was the place to
be. So a few days later I left for Huemoz, Switzerland, a little village
about seven miles up into the Swiss Alps, near the city of Montreux, about
two hours from Geneva.
The first person I met at L’Abri was Os Guinness, whom I later came
to know as a first-rate thinker and deeply committed Christian. While
he was deciding where I would I stay, he invited me to lunch and gave
me a copy of Francis Schaeffer’s classic book, The God Who is There.
Schaeffer, along with his wife Edith, founded L’Abri Fellowship
in 1955. They established L’Abri for the purpose of evangelizing
people for Jesus Christ by demonstrating the character and reality of
God by the way the community lived, taught, and prayed. You can imagine
my surprise, more exactly, my bewilderment, when I got to L’Abri
and learned that the singularly unique purpose of this community was to
present the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the answer to all of life’s
basic questions, and hence that nothing less than God, they claimed, could
completely satisfy my restless quest for truth, for the good, for happiness.
After ten days at L’Abri, I responded by fleeing the place. More
exactly, I was fleeing God. I rationalized leaving by telling others and
myself that Christian faith required a demanding change of life that wasn’t
really for me. Thus I left, hitchhiking to Rome with a friend who had
met up with me at L’Abri.
But God was not going to let me get away from Him that easily. Exhausted
from hitchhiking and running out of money, I found myself a couple of
weeks later unable to get into Spain without a visa. One night in a French
town bordering Spain, I met two American guys. I found myself telling
them about L’Abri. It suddenly struck me that I was persuading them
to accompany me back, and the L’Abri community, with genuine, Christian
charity, welcomed me with open arms.
From that moment on, I never looked back. I spent the rest of the summer
there and I came to respond in faith through God’s grace to the
fundamental Truth that the ultimate fulfillment of life to which God calls
us is in Jesus Christ—the love of the Father manifested in the gift
of the Son and communicated by the Holy Spirit. I now knew the truth that
God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve Him. This is true
not just as a matter of faith, for in contrast to those who say that there
are no rational grounds for such believing, I discovered that Christian
commitment was reasonable. It involved an assent of the mind, which meant
intellectually accepting that certain things are true, and that faith
and reason are not antagonists, but rather allies—that there are
sound arguments for the reasonableness of the Christian faith. However,
this was just the beginning of my journey home.
In the summer of 1970, I came wholeheartedly to acknowledge, assent to,
and believe in Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord. I responded in faith,
repentance, and obedience to what was done for me at my infant baptism
some 20 years earlier. The sacrament of baptism had “incorporated”
me into the Church, that is, into Christ when the new life of grace was
communicated to me by the Church. This heartfelt appropriation of salvation,
therefore, ratified what had been done for me at my baptism when Jesus
Christ received me into His Church, and I was “born again”
into the Body of Christ.
At that, however, in 1970 I did not see any essential connection between
the sacrament of baptism, spiritual rebirth, and salvation. In fact, Francis
Schaeffer insisted that I be baptized again when I made my public confession
of faith before the L’Abri community. Being a neophyte, I trusted
Schaeffer’s judgment. He taught that baptism as an external rite
actually effects nothing, and plays no role in determining our spiritual
state before God in Christ. Years later, when I was more theologically
mature, I realized that Schaeffer, a Presbyterian Calvinist, like the
Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, the Anglican, and the Lutheran,
understood the rite of baptism to have some covenantal meaning. Still,
he did not believe, what I later came to accept as the truth of Catholic
teaching, that the act of baptism itself actually effected the grace of
regeneration, washing away the stain of Adam’s original sin which
we, as children of Adam, inherited.
Shortly after returning to the USA, I moved to Chicago with a good Christian
friend I had met at L’Abri. My Christian experience at L’Abri
had given direction to my life in more than one sense. It was there that
I discerned my calling to the academic life, particularly to studying
philosophy and theology. With two years of college work to finish, however,
where was I to go?
Through this concatination of Christian friends, I enrolled at Trinity
Christian College, in suburban Chicago, in the fall of 1971. Once at Trinity,
I was introduced to the neo-Calvinist Amsterdam school of philosophy and
theology, and began to study the great theological writings of Herman
Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, and G.C. Berkouwer. I graduated
from Trinity in June 1973, having spent my last semester abroad in the
Netherlands participating in a Trinity program at the University of Leiden.
My plan was to do graduate studies at the Free University of Amsterdam,
the bastion of the Amsterdam school of philosophy and theology. It was
the summer of 1973, and I was now a committed Christian in the Reformed
tradition of Dutch neo-Calvinism.
At this point in my journey home, I understood the one Christian faith
to have many interpretations and expressions: Roman Catholic, Eastern
Orthodox, Lutheran, Evangelical, etc. I had come to accept the Reformed
tradition as the most authentic interpretation of the Christian faith.
Central in this tradition were the writings of the Protestant reformer
John Calvin (1509-64) and Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), theologian, politician,
and founder of the Free University of Amsterdam.
This tradition’s unique understanding of the biblical themes of
creation, fall, and redemption built upon the intellectual formation I
had received at L’Abri. The world, including man and his works,
is an actual manifestation and exercise of God’s goodness and gift
of creation. At the same time, there is also fallenness, evil, destructive
powers, idols, and yes, sin, as violation of the will and purpose of God.
The whole of creation is fallen. Thanks be to God, however, His work of
redemption was cosmic in scope, restoring life in its fullness and delivering
the whole creation, including man and all his works, not the least of
which is the life of the mind, from sin. Furthermore, God called us in
Christ to be His co-workers by cooperating in His mission for renewal,
for realizing His Kingdom, for making the world holy. In the phrase of
Nicholas Wolterstorff, neo-Calvinism is a world-formative Christianity,
a tradition of holy worldliness.
After eight years in Amsterdam, I received my Ph. D. in September 1981.
I had become steeped in the Amsterdam school of philosophy and theology.
Still, I was restless. The liturgical life of the church in the Reformed
tradition was deeply unsatisfying. My studies of the history of the Catholic
Church led me to discover that the Church had an ancient liturgy that
was rooted in her sacramental life, a life that was wholly biblical and
evangelical, that is, flowing directly from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I became convinced that the Reformed tradition wrongly rejected the Catholic
Church’s teaching about the sacraments, the liturgy, especially
the sacrifice of the Mass, and her piety, as it was chiefly expressed
in the Council of Trent. This was a first but nonetheless decisive break
for me with some aspects of the Reformed tradition.
Over the next eight years I examined, and found wanting, other aspects
of classical Reformed Protestantism, particularly the doctrines of sola
fide and sola scriptura. St. Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman and John
Paul II helped me move even closer to Roman Catholicism—I became
an Anglo-Catholic.
By fall 1991, I had held teaching posts in South Africa, the USA, and
Canada, and by the next spring, 1992, everything in my mind and heart
was converging to Rome. I was ready to heed Christ’s call to embrace
His Body, the Catholic Church, as the One True Fold-her antiquity; her
unity; her orthodoxy; her Magisterium, or teaching authority, manifested
in all teachings about faith and morals, that Christ had founded in Peter
and his apostolic successors; her episcopal hierarchy; and her mission
to teach all nations and to preach the gospel to every creature, so that
all men may attain salvation, faith, baptism, and the fulfillment of the
commandments. All of this I now accepted as wholly evangelical. As I put
it to my last Anglican pastor, everything that drew me to Anglo-Catholicism
was Roman Catholic in origin, and the Holy Spirit was now guiding me to
accept the fullness of Truth in the Catholic Church. “Rome sweet
home” (to quote the title of Scott and Kimberly Hahn’s popular
book).
The Apostle Paul had written to Timothy that “the Church of the
living God” was “the pillar and ground of the Truth,”
(I Timothy 3:15). For twenty-two years of Christian searching, I had been
trying to discover the truth about this Church revealed by God in His
written Word. It was only later that I discovered a prayer of the Church
which, using different words, accurately expressed my longing to come
to a fuller knowledge of God in Christ. I record now in this chronicle
the prayer for others who are searching for the truth about Christ’s
Church:
Lord God, since by the adoption of grace, you have made us children of
light: do not let false doctrine darken our minds, but grant that your
light may shine within us and we may always live in the brightness of
truth.
I knew that the Christian life could only be grounded in authentic Christian
doctrine, that is, in truth. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Newman,
and John Paul II had taught me this, and early on in my Christian experience,
Francis Schaeffer. Thus, I could not accept, no more than Newman, the
doctrine he called religious liberalism, namely, “that truth and
falsehood in religion are but matter of opinion; that one doctrine is
as good as another; that the Governor of the world does not intend that
we should gain the truth; that there is no truth; that it is enough if
we sincerely hold what we profess.” These claims, as Newman saw,
were incompatible with any recognition of the Christian faith as true.
In this light, I understood my conversion to be both a personal commitment
and a free assent to the whole truth God has revealed about His Church.
Significantly, this conversion was my response in faith and obedience
to Christ’s High Priestly prayer to the Father, “May they
all be one, just as You Father, are in Me, and I am in You; so that they
also may be one in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me”
(John 17-21). The inter-personal communion of Persons that characterizes
the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spin is the ultimate source
of the Church’s unity. So I now knew in truth that if I were to
enter more deeply into the life of God I must enter into fuller communion
with the Church of Christ.
The ecclesiology of Vatican II is that the “Church [of Jesus Christ],
constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic
Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops
in union with that successor.” The Catholic Church in a singularly
unique way is the fully and rightly ordered expression of the Church of
Jesus Christ.
Vatican II also taught that all Christians, all those who are “in
Christ” are truly, genuinely, but imperfectly, in communion with
the Catholic Church. “In some real way they are joined with us in
the Holy Spirit, for to them also He gives His gifts and graces, and is
thereby operative among them with His sanctifying power.” This very
important teaching helped me to make sense of the “many elements
of sanctification and of truth” that I found throughout my Christian
experience—from L’Abri to the Reformed and Anglo-Catholic
traditions of Protestant Christianity. Indeed, I now knew them to be gifts
and graces that the Spirit of Christ used as instruments to bring me home.
At the same time, the teaching of Vatican II, recently reiterated in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, “does not treat these [elements
of sanctification and of truth] as autonomous and free-floating,”
as Dominican Fr. Aidan Nichols puts it. “[R]ather do they derive
from the fullness of gracious truth Christ has given his holy Catholic
Church, and coming from that source, carry a built-in gravitational pull
back - or on! -towards the Church’s unity.”
The inner dynamism of these gifts and graces toward Catholic unity, that
essential mark of the Church as Christ willed her to be, is what brought
me home. In this sense, my conversion essentially involved bringing to
fulfillment in my own life a unity already given by God as His gift in
founding His Church. In the spring of 1992, I became a member of Our Lady
of Lourdes Catholic Church, Massapequa Park, Long Island.
For about three years after my return to the Catholic Church I continued
to teach at Molly College, a Catholic liberal arts college in Long Island
founded by the Dominican Sisters of Amityville. I longed to be more directly
involved in serving Christ and His Church, however. I could not imagine
what He had in store for me. By January 1996, I was teaching philosophy
at Conception Seminary College, Conception, Missouri. I rejoiced in God’s
blessing for this new opportunity to trust and serve Him.
The singularly most important thing about teaching at Conception Seminary
College is being of service to Christ and His Church by helping the seminarians
to discern, in the process of priestly formation, whether Christ is calling
them to the sacramental priesthood. A priest is above all a faithful servant
of Christ and a steward of the mystery of salvation, the new life of grace
communicated by the Church in her sacramental life—the love of the
Father manifested in the gift of the Son and communicated by the Holy
Spirit, which is present fully and unsurpassably in Christ’s redemptive
sacrifice on the cross (I John 4:9-10). My own contribution in this process
of discernment is, chiefly, in the realm of philosophical formation, a
critical and creative engagement with the history and problems of philosophy
in the light of revelation
So I found my way home by means of the gifts and graces of the Spirit
of Christ. I have used the image of journeying home as the guiding theme
in this chronicle of my return to the Catholic Church to describe my life’s
walk with God. Yet the journey home has still not ended for me and all
those who are, as the New Testament puts it, “in Christ,”
that is, in communion with the body of Christ that is the Church. We are
the journeying People of God, the Pilgrim Church, and the Church promises
to bring us to our home in Heaven (Philippians 3:20; Hebrews 11:10, 13:
14). “This eschatological hope also embraces the fallen creation,
now redeemed in Christ and headed toward the fullness of the kingdom,
which is the new heaven and the new earth (Revelation 21:1-8) realized
in glory at the end of time.
We have not yet reached our final destination, however. Meanwhile our
present life is not a mere waiting room. As Christ’s faithful people,
we are called to announce and extend the kingdom here on earth. In the
words of Lumen Gentium,
The Church, consequently, equipped with the gifts of her Founder and faithfully
guarding His precepts of charity, humility, and self-sacrifice, receives
the mission to proclaim and to establish among all peoples the kingdom
of Christ and of God. She becomes on earth the initial budding forth of
that kingdom. While she grows, the Church strains toward the consummation
of the kingdom and, with all her strength, hopes and desires to be united
in glory with her King” (#5).
Thus, we are still on the road yearning to know the love of Christ, sharing
in His glory, which surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with
all the fullness of God, “with the joy native to the life of the
Trinitarian Persons,” as Fr. Nichols puts it, in our heavenly home
(Ephesians 3:19).
Dr. Eduardo J. Echeverria is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Conception Seminary College, Conception, Missouri. Dr. Echeverria is a revert to the Catholic faith from the Reformed and Anglican traditions.
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