By Gideon Lazar, The Catholic University of America (
Above: Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine of the Holy Family, the church where Gideon was received)
The day this was posted, I was received into the Catholic
Church. Many of my Orthodox friends are likely shocked at my decision,
so I wrote this article to explain my reasoning.
First some background on myself. I was raised in a
non-religious Jewish family. I considered myself an atheist for as long
as I can remember. In my Junior year of high school, I looked into the
evidence for Christianity, looking to refute it. I walked away from that
endeavor becoming a believer in Jesus and firmly convinced by the
evidence. I began to read about the early Christians, and then look at
modern denominations. I was convinced that the Orthodox Church was the
true Church, and so I became a catechumen. After two years as a
catechumen I was baptized into the Orthodox Church. Many of my friends
are Catholic, so I went to go research Orthodox apologetics against
Catholicism in an effort to prove that the Orthodox Church is the true
Church.
While at first it seemed obvious that the Orthodox Church was
right, the more I studied, the more I realized I was missing a lot of
nuance. I ultimately ended up being convinced by the evidence for the
Catholic Church, and so I had no choice but to convert. So now, a little
over a year after my baptism, I am being received into the Catholic
Church. I ask readers to please read the entire article (I know it’s
long) before rushing to judgement as I may respond to your points later
in the article. If you feel as though I did not address something
important, please comment below about it. Because of the length of the
article, I could not put as much detail to every section as I would have
liked and so I may write more on these topics in the future.
The thing that initially triggered my move towards Catholicism
is Our Lady of Fatima. One of my friends was telling me about the fruits
Fatima had on her own life. She read what the Theotokos had said to the
children about modesty, and it caused her to become more modest in her
dress. She also told me about how her priest had visited Fatima and when
he came back, he preached a fiery sermon about the reality of hell. I
had been told by my fellow Orthodox Christians that Fatima was at best a
hoax and at worst demonic, so I decided to investigate Fatima for
myself.
The view that Fatima is simply a hoax cannot be the case. It
has a miracle connected with it that was witnessed by thousands of
people, many of whom were atheists who came to the event specifically to
refute what the children were saying. Skeptics have argued that it was
simply a mass hallucination, but Christians should be skeptical of this
argument. Skeptics of the resurrection of Jesus often respond to the
fact that there were 500 witnesses by pointing to Fatima. If Fatima was a
mass hallucination, so could the resurrection of Jesus have been. No
other mass hallucination has ever been recorded though. In reality,
Fatima was actually the most seen public miracle since the time of the
exodus about 3500 years ago.
The other objection to Fatima is that it is demonic. However,
the vision doesn’t sound like Satan at all. Would Satan command people
to pray 53 Hail Marys and 6 Our Fathers, both fully Orthodox prayers,
every single day? Would Satan command people to pray that Jesus “lead
all souls to heaven” 5 times every day? Would Satan remind people about
the reality of hell in a time when even the Church is forgetting about
it? Would Satan seal all of this through a public miracle witnessed by
thousands of atheists, causing many to convert and dedicate their lives
to Christ? If this is Satan’s plan, it isn’t a very good one.
I did find one way to stay Orthodox after discovering this.
Fatima was true and Orthodoxy is true. After all, the message of Fatima
seems entirely Orthodox. There are some major problems with this though.
First, Our Lady said that “in Portugal the dogma of the faith will
always be preserved.” Portugal has remained Catholic, with only a tiny
Orthodox minority. If Orthodoxy is true, the dogma of the faith has not
been preserved in Portugal. In addition, Our Lady requested that Russia,
the largest Orthodox country, be consecrated by the Pope, the head of
the Catholic Church, to the immaculate heart (a Catholic devotion
rejected by many Orthodox as heretical) so that it will be converted.
I
reconciled this by saying that it needed to be converted from communism
back to Orthodoxy. However, why would God request Catholics to do this
in a very Catholic way?
One Orthodox priest I read
tried to fix this by saying that the “Holy Father” was actually the
Patriarch of Moscow. This is already a stretch because the Patriarch is
not called by this title while the Pope is. He goes even further by
claiming that “the immaculate heart of Mary” is actually the true
teachings of the Orthodox Church but the Theotokos needed a way to
communicate this to peasant children. At this point this is such a
stretch that it’s just easier to draw the obvious conclusion, if Fatima
is true then Catholicism is true.
The other major event that triggered my shift towards
Catholicism was reading about the history of Catholic missionary work.
In Orthodoxy, there are a few saints that are famous for missions: Sts.
Cyril and Methodius (who were before the schism), St. Nicholas of Japan,
and St. Herman of Alaska. In fact, if you discuss missionary work with
anyone who is Orthodox, they will probably bring up St. Herman of
Alaska. There is a reason he is brought up again, and again, and again.
He is essentially the only successful Orthodox missionary since the
schism. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s mostly true. He
converted a few hundred natives in Alaska, and that’s basically it. St.
Nicholas’ mission in Japan now numbers less than 10,000 people, less
than 0.01% of the population of Japan. Orthodox report large missions
currently in Africa and Latin America, but the numbers are highly
exaggerated and are often self-reported to be 10 or 100 times larger
than what is recorded on official censuses by the government or third
parties.
On the other hand, Catholics have a long and glorious history
of missionary work. I used to assume this was simply because of colonial
empires, but this is false. Catholic missionary work continued after
the schism. Missionaries went as far as China and India before the age
of sail, despite the fact that the Orthodox were closer to these lands
and didn’t go. During the crusades, St. Francis of Assisi went to the
Sultan himself and tried to convert him.
Then, during the age of sail Catholic missionaries went to
places where there weren’t colonial interests. Catholics went to places
in India where there were no Portuguese settlements. They went to Japan
and continued to sneak in even after they were expelled. They went deep
into forests and mountains in Latin America beyond Spanish and
Portuguese settlements. Priests often stood up the colonial authorities
to defend the natives, one of the main factors that eventually lead to
the suppression of the Jesuits by the Pope under pressure from colonial
empires. On the other hand, Orthodox missionary work before the 20th
century was pretty much exclusively limited to the land of the Russian
empire.
Catholics also did missionary work for the Eastern Christians.
This created the Eastern Catholics, known also as the Uniates. The first
major group of these is the Maronites. Since the Maronites were under
Muslim rule, they had no contact with Rome for hundreds of years. When
they finally got contact during the crusades and learned of the schism,
they quickly sided with Rome. The other Eastern Catholics came later.
There is a myth in Orthodoxy that people only became Eastern Catholics
under force by Catholic kings. This has some truth to it, but is mostly
false. These groups mostly came over willingly. While some did come over
by force, the Orthodox also forcibly converted large numbers of Eastern
Catholics Orthodoxy. This objection by Orthodox is really just an
appeal to enlightenment ideas of freedom of religion that have not been
historically held by Orthodoxy or Catholicism.
It’s also notable that there are large numbers of Eastern
Catholics, but very few Western Rite Orthodox. Since the schism, the
West has sought unity such as at 2 Lyons and Florence. While these were
mostly failures, they were rooted in a desire for unity. After the
schism, there were large amounts of Jesuit missions to Eastern Europe
and the Middle East. Rome also sought union with all the East. The
Catholic Church has within it all 6 rites of the Church: Latin,
Byzantine, East Syriac, West Syriac, Alexandrian, and Armenian.
While
it is an established point of our faith that the Church cannot change
teachings that have been definitively proposed to the faithful for
belief, the about-face the Catholic Church has done on the question of
evolution since the mid-19th century is nothing short of revolutionary -
revolutionary in the most literal sense of the word, "to turn around",
for the Church has done just that, turned around on its approach to
evolution and questions surrounding the origin of human life. In this
article, we will trace the origins of the Church's interaction with
evolutionary theology and witness how, while the papacy of the 19th
century condemned evolution as incompatible with Christian theology, the
late 20th century Magisterium has essentially enthroned the theory as a
permanent fixture of Catholic thought. 
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