I remember the first time I felt the high that Catholic apologetics offered those who loved being right, or in my case, those who compulsively needed to be right in order to feel validated.
I had heard a systematic presentation of the various dates and names of founders of different Protestant denominations (e.g. Church of England founded in 1534 by King Henry VIII) with the list ending with the Catholic Church being founded in the year 33 by Jesus Christ. The message was clear: the Catholic Church was the only Church with apostolic succession. Only we could trace our origins directly to Jesus Christ while other denominations were founded by human beings who had failed to be faithful to the Church that God himself founded.
The speaker was a charismatic, fiery and knowledgeable young priest in his thirties, and he had delivered the presentation with an aura of authority and certainty. I was seventeen years old and I was awed, both by his knowledge and by the electrifying sensation of hearing evidence from an authoritative source that I belonged to the one and only true Church that Jesus Christ founded.
That dopamine hit of knowing that I belonged to a tribe that was the one and only true Church was so heady that it plunged me into Catholic apologetics. I read Scott Hahn's conversion story in "Rome Sweet Home" which the priest had recommended to us, and for the next few years (1996-2002) I devoured Catholic Answers, all the "Surprised by Truth" conversion series of books and other books detailing stories of Protestants who had "crossed the Tiber" into the one true Catholic Church. I read books about the Primacy of Peter (and the papacy) and books responding to the Sola Scriptura / Fide arguments that Protestants often made against Catholics.
I read and re-read Kevin Orlin Johnson's "Why Do Catholics Do That? A Guide to the Teachings and Practices of the Catholic Church" and bought my own copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to read and refer to when I went abroad for university studies. I became so adapt at defending and explaining the Catholic faith that Protestant friends (including one who became a pastor) could not out-argue me and often said they would need to check further with their pastor before getting back to me.
This period of my youth and young adulthood played an extremely important role in my formation as a Catholic and as a young person. Not only had my personal encounters with God convinced me that God was real and that he loved me, Catholic apologetics made me absolutely convicted in the absolute truth of the Church I had been baptised into and that gave me a sense of belonging and pride I never experienced anywhere else. In that season of my life which lasted till my early thirties, I firmly believed that the ultimate goal of evangelisation was to bring people to know Jesus Christ AND into the visible Catholic Church.
During that period of time I never understood what "inter-religious dialogue" or ecumenism was about. Was it truly dialogue if I was going in with the intent of winning others over to the Catholic faith? And if the point was not about winning others over to the Catholic faith, then why were we not evangelising them?
I have always been someone for whom clarity of intention and integrity were extremely important, and for this reason, I avoided participating in interreligious and ecumenical dialogue not because I did not believe they served an important purpose, but because I did not know how to get involved without being disingenuous.
In my youthful passion and idealism about this particular form of Catholicism that put great emphasis on intellectual knowledge and conviction that my faith is the only true religion, I found the stability and certainty I lacked interiorly as a complex trauma survivor. I had no sense of selfhood, but in the Catholic Church I was given an identity that was affirmed, fortified and valued above others.
Zeal burned in my heart for my Catholic faith. On hindsight now, I realise that this zeal that I struggled to temper with compassion came not only from love for God but from a desperate inner drive to be right and be approved of by God. That zeal expressed itself as a striving to always be in the right and stamping out what was evil in God's sight.
My Catholic faith gave me identity, purpose and direction at a time when I was aching to know who I was. I truly believed that if it was of God, if it was endorsed by the Catholic Church, then something was trustworthy and good. Life and faith was simpler then - obey whatever the Church says, and I will be safe in God's love. Stray, and I will be in danger of losing my soul.
In all those years where I felt such belonging and pride for being Catholic, I never fully realised that one could be zealous for God and the faith, participate in the sacramental, liturgical and "missionary" life of the Church and yet not know God personally, and not be transformed into Christ.
During those years, whenever I learned of scandal in the Church, whether it was from history or what was happening presently, I always thought it was a matter of "bad apples" who failed to live up to the Catholic ideal. It never occurred to me that there could be something systemic and cultural within Catholicism itself that was anti-gospel or antithetical to Christ.
This blindness was in large part because the Catholic faith that I knew and experienced was disembodied, intellectualised, and spiritualised. This made it easy to preserve "Catholicism" in its conceptually ideal form while never holding it accountable for the harmful or abusive ways that the faith was enacted in the world. It also made it easy to confuse ideological purity and performative orthodoxy with actual discipleship that makes a Christian more wholly human, more fully themselves, and more free to live and love like Christ.
In those years when I believed ideological purity and orthodoxy were the preeminent concerns of being Catholic, I could not easily recognise God's presence in the world. Reality was dualistic and divided between sacred and secular, holy and unholy, good and evil. That was also how I viewed myself - either I was good or I was bad, and my actions determined if I was good or bad regardless of what might have led me to act in certain ways. There was no stable, loveable "me" underneath my actions. I struggled greatly with compassion for myself and for others. I could not "get" the mercy of God.
Even another huge life-changing conversion experience when I was thirty years old which led me to experience the unconditional mercy of God was not enough to fundamentally change the way my nervous system responded to God. I still could not fully trust God with my whole self because I was still disembodied, and the way of being Catholic that I have known my whole life kept me hypervigilant about being holy and blameless.
Orthodoxy and the approval of eccelsial authority was the standard by which I strove to live by because I had no interior security in God's love and relied on the Church's approval to "know" that God found me acceptable. I yearned to grow in virtue and holiness but a big part of the reason was because I needed to earn a right to be safe with God so that I would not be rejected by him.
Because so much of my conviction about Catholicism was about my own unmet, unacknowledged need for security, identity, purpose and direction, I was extremely defensive and protective about the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith. This meant that during this season of my life, I unconsciously separated the world into "Catholic vs non-Catholic", "for God vs against God", "saints vs sinners", "us vs them".
Because so much of the zeal I had for my faith was driven by survival energy rather than secure love, I struggled when reality did not fit into my dualistic framework. I found it especially difficult to understand Christ's tender preference for the poorest, the marginalised, the sinner and the outsider.
The Catholic faith that gave me certainty was governed by clear rules about what kept you in God's good graces, what kept you out of it, and what you must do in order to get back into God's and the Church's good graces. But Jesus Christ in the gospels always seemed to transcend such rules, and it confused me.
The Catholic faith I knew and lived out for over thirty years valued righteousness over mercy, purity over compassion, and the respect for a person's dignity was in practice subject to their compliance with the rules that determined who was in and who was out. I state all this as a matter of fact and without bitter judgment because a trauma-informed perspective has helped me to understand why this form of faith was so appealing, even necessary, to someone like me with complex trauma.
(Read older post: "I discovered my faith was a trauma response. Now I'm seeking a faith that is a freely-willed response to Love.")
My journey would have been very different if I did not also simultaneously have a deepening interior life that continually brought me into direct and personal encounter with Christ. While I was seeking knowledge and certainty from my Catholic faith, these interior encounters with God always shook me from my certainty. The God of these encounters always confounded me and transcended any understanding. The mercy and love I experienced in my interior journey also continually defied the clear black and white clarity of the rules-based Catholicism I strove to live by.
And yet, even as I deepened my interior life with Christ, I had always assumed that deeper love for God would lead to deeper conviction and love for the Catholic Church. That assumption was also part of the paradigm I used to have - that Christ and the Church would surely always be aligned in everything, and that the institutional Church already had the right answers and the right practice to everything.
This experience of Catholicism formed the foundation of my identity for over three decades. I used to be absolutely certain that no matter what scandal may happen, that I would never doubt my Catholic faith or the Church. But God, as usual, had something better in mind for me than an unshaken, uninterrogated, and unintegrated faith.
(To be continued in Part 7 of Being Catholic After Deconstruction)
Journeying with you,
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