Dr. Joseph D. White

After being shocked by how deeply and ubiquitously Catholic the ancient Christians were in 2017, I finally became willing to hear out the Catholic Church I had despised my entire life, and take the deep dive. What I found is that the Church had consistently read the Bible more deeply, more comprehensively, and more consistently than anything I had ever encountered in Protestantism. I also saw that Her teachings had been consistently misrepresented and slandered by most Protestants I had ever known, heard of, or read my entire life. When I finally began to be willing to SIMPLY LISTEN to the Catholic Church, and give it the benefit of the doubt, questions I had my whole life were finally answered. Inconsistencies in Scripture I could never explain—no matter how much Luther, Calvin, or other Protestant theologians I read—suddenly made glorious sense. I began to experience this profound biblical wisdom as a merely curious Protestant, not a convictional Catholic. But it was overwhelming. This was hard. It was extremely time-consuming. It cost me literally tens of thousands of dollars in books—many of which I’ve read, and some of which I continue to work on. It’s really quite true to compare Catholic and Protestant theology with two incompatible sets of software. I simply never realized how much my Protestant software had blinded me to seeing so many things. That software had to be unwound, and rewired in many ways. I had to be willing to have a lifetime of assumptions and opinions blown to smithereens. But once I was, it was beautifully reconstructed by the teaching of the Church and Her saints. What the Church taught not only made far more sense, but it was far more beautiful than anything I’d ever encountered in Protestantism. The Gospel was so much richer. It made so much more theological, moral, and historical sense. And in many ways, it was actually far simpler, and less convoluted. On top of that, it was incredibly consistent in its essence from century to century. In 2017, when I began reading the Fathers, I was SHOCKED at how different their faith was from mine, beginning with the disciples of the Apostles themselves. Now in 2023, with years of reading their writings under my belt, I’m shocked—and even more, profoundly GRATEFUL—that their faith is now my own. I can read virtually everything they wrote with little or no qualification. It is the same faith—the Catholic Faith. It was an incredible relief to find this safe and pleasant harbor after so many years in Protestantism, where debates about the meaning of Scripture could be resolved by no one, and we only had two options: water down the faith to accommodate the conflicting opinions; or form yet another schism. The Catholic Church presented me a radical solution: Herself. As some utopia? No, far from it. I’ve often heard Protestants act as if the Catholic claim is that everyone is always nice, obedient, and orderly in the Church. That’s absurd, and that is never what I thought. There have been many chaotic periods in Church history. We’re in one. There have been very wicked bishops, and even Popes. But when the dust settled, in every century, the promises of Christ to remain with, protect, and guide His Church into all truth—IN SPITE of human sin—were consistently vindicated. There’s nothing like it in history. The Catholic Church remained fundamentally the same: the flock under the successors of the Apostles in communion with the successor of Peter. Simple, public, and known to the whole world, both friend and foe, century after century, and now millennia after millennia. I’ve loved the Bible since I was a little boy. But since becoming Catholic, I have never loved it more. Its riches are never-ending. The Bible has never come alive, nor been so thrilling to study, as since I humbled myself before the apostolic authority of Christ’s Catholic Church. I’m so excited to share this story, and the wonders I found, in the ensuing months and years. I’m so grateful.