9 Books I Read While Discerning Catholicism: #1 Rome Sweet Home by Scott Hahn
9 Books I Read While Discerning Catholicism: #1 Rome Sweet Home by Scott Hahn
As with all conversion stories, they are better to tell in person. I’m not sure which form it will take, but at some point I’ll share my Catholic testimony in full. In the meantime, a protestant should not convert willy-nilly to the Catholic church. If they are serious, they are reading a lot of books. So, in order to give some context prior to sharing the full story, I have compiled a list of those books. The plan is to drop one each day leading up to December 31st.
#1 Rome Sweet Home
The first half of this book is easy for any any Christian, Protestant or Catholic, to read. However, about halfway through, protestants may feel like Dr. Hahn is drowning you in the Tiber and his wife Kimberly is trying to throw you a life vest. Catholics, may say “Really? How come?” but Protestants, if you pick it up, you will know what I’m talking about.
The second half is very, very Catholic, not in the apologetics way, but in the phenomenal way. How did all these events happen to Dr. Hahn and his wife? There were so many opportunities for his marriage to fail, for his life to be ruined, and yet God still remained faithful. Faithful in the sense that all the doctrines he was struggling with were affirmed by what I call “loud whispers”. This should not be confused for a “secret knowledge”, it’s precisely the opposite. Anyone who reads it will be struck by the conclusion that if Catholicism is true, then we should expect God to move in this way in the life of a Protestant. But if its not true, then something evil happened in Scott’s life.
According to Amazon, I ordered it December 14, 2022. What started as a polemical study of just another denomination, which just so happened to be the largest denomination in the world, turned quickly into me trying to escape the conclusions that it was the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. A few weeks later, I would announce on Solomon’s Corner that Lindsey and I were investigating the Catholic Faith, but that I wasn’t sure where that investigation would lead.
Dr. Hahn’s testimony shifted my perspective in many ways, but there were really two big ways. The first was related to my assumptions with my friends who converted. As is the tendency when someone converts to a different religion, I attempted to psychologize my friends’ conversions.
One of my assumptions about Catholic converts from Protestantism, to my shame, was that they were converting because they would have access to more educational and scholarly opportunities. After all, Catholics themselves will say “We love converts”, but then again so do Protestants. Whether you’re Protestant or Catholic, converts are propped up as an existential argument for the truth claims of their respective institution’s doctrines.
But is this a surprise? How many times have those of us growing up in the church seen “converts” get book deals because they were a drug addicts, nihilistic atheists, or occult leaders? Shortly after they convert, or so it seems, they are getting interviews, media appearances, and establishing or working for ministries to help others like them convert. So while I am embarrassed to have assumed such things, I also know that the digital landscape has made it easy to convert, benefit, and then jump on some other new trend.
But Dr. Hahn didn’t have that experience. While he did get a book deal, obviously, this was 30 years ago. And the way it came about was not through him posting for 6 months on X (formerly known as Twitter) or doing an interview with Matt Fradd or Michael Knowles. Furthermore, Dr. Hahn experienced a complete career collapse. Back then it was rare to meet a Protestant, especially within Dr. Hahn’s circles, that would even grant that Catholics were Christians. So his conversion came at great cost. It was a decision that was either incredibly foolish or incredibly faithful.
He lost his academic career, his pastorship, and many of his friends. To add to the mix, his wife didn’t convert with him initially. He and his wife, Kimberly, were divided for 5 years as Scott converted and Kimberly remained resistant. He attended Saturday mass, and attended Protestant Sunday Services faithfully until God worked in Kimberly’s life. He was the epitome of a Biblical husband, which Kimberly affirms in the book. The story is just an incredible story, especially considering their marriage came out stronger rather than weaker, despite many within the protestant community advising Kimberly to divorce Scott because, on the protestant view, he had committed heresy.
In my perspective, his story is extraordinary. It certainly seems miraculous, not in the capital “M” sense like a Eucharistic miracle or seeing an angel, but many of of his experiences were what we would call the “hand of God” in his life.
This was the same hand I had seen in my Protestant Christian life. For example, when I met my wife, I knew on the first date she could be my wife. Why? Because when her phone rang, she began digging through her purse and took out a huge, worn, student-study Bible. This event was not identical in form, but it was in substance, to my own parents’ story.
My mom bumped into my dad and she knocked a large Bible out of his hand. This became the impetus for my mom believing there was something different about my dad. This event was something us teenage boys joked about a lot with Mom and Dad. I could have never imagined that God would use my immature teenage humor to signal to me that he had brought me a godly wife.
Similarly, Scott Hahn’s story demonstrated that God was leading him to a different relationship, in the same way that God had led me to Lindsey. The same kind of whispers from God, the same kind of leading, the same lowercase “m” miracles that God used to get me on one knee and offer my life to Lindsey, were the same kinds of things that God had used to get Scott Hahn kneeling before the Eucharist.
While I knew that God could work this way with Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and even an Elevator (IYKYK), for some reason it never occurred to me that God could do the same thing for a Catholic convert: mainly because I presumed that the Church was essentially wrong in its doctrine, while the other denominations agreed on what was essential and disagreed on what was non-essential. What I discovered, and intend to write on further, is that Catholics, as an institution, had a category for God leading non-believers to Christianity within Protestantism, but Protestantism did not have a category within their doctrines for Catholics.
So I was forced to conclude that Scott and Kimberly were either demonically influenced or God really did move in their lives and lead them to the Church. I knew the former was false because of how the book ended, but I wasn’t ready to say Catholicism was viable.
God or The Devil?
Scott’s story has reverted many lapsed Catholics and converted many Protestants. For me, I had to recognize that Protestantism cannot, institutionally, account for a conversion story like Scott’s. There are many Protestant individuals that will account for it subjectively, but they do so at the expense of their fidelity to their denomination. This will only lead them to a relativism they deny with their tongues, but affirm in their hearts.
Some may want to say, “well, this is why doctrine is really a mystery”. True, but it’s not incapable of apprehension. We may not comprehend a doctrine, but we can apprehend a doctrine such that we can know when doctrines contradict (i.e. one or both are false, but they can’t both be true). In the same way, we will never discover something about the nature of circles that would suddenly cause us to call them a square. Likewise, we will never find something in God’s revelation that both affirms the Catholic doctrines and the Protestant doctrines. These doctrines are not mysterious. We can know what they mean, even if we don’t know the fullness of their application.
Protestantism and Catholicism are not merely different expressions of the same religion. Their claims do contradict. One cannot say it is a sin to pray a Rosary, while another other claims they were healed by it. A man cannot say that Mary told him to build a monastery, while another claims that he heard a demon. One cannot cast out demons by the power of God, while others say He does this by the power of the devil. Only one of these statements can be true.
Coming up next…
For those that just want the list, here it is. I attempted to put them in the order I purchased and read them, not necessarily by order of significance. If you decide to purchase them, please use my affiliate links here below 👇 . That way I get a kick back 😇.
Rome Sweet Home by Scott Hahn
40 Reasons Why I’m Catholic by Peter Kreeft
The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity by Casey Chalk
Faith and Reason: Philosophers Explain Their Turn to Catholicism by Brian Besong and Jonathan Fiqua
The Lamb’s Supper by Scott Hahn
This is My Body by Bishop Barron
Persecuted from Within by Joshua Charles and Alec Torres
Saint Maximilian Kolbe: A Hero of The Holocaust by Fiorella De Maria
Honorable Mention: The Case for Catholicism by Trent Horn