Francis Beckwith Conversion Story

I grew up in a Catholic home I went to Catholic elementary and high school and during my early teenage years I kind of drifted away from the Catholic Church but I didn't drift away into unbelief I drifted into evangelicalism and it happened in a kind of peculiar way my father had a friend who had visited him one evening to talk to him about his own conversion the gentleman was Catholic and left on my parents kitchen table one of those good news for modern man New Testaments you know the stick figures are in it and and I didn't know it was a Bible I opened it up and began reading after my parents had gone to sleep and I was sort of moved by the stories about Christ and I wanted to hear more about what this guy was telling my parents I was only thirteen at the time and I called him up and asked him about what was going on and he invited me to go with him to this Jesus people Church in downtown Las Vegas I grew up in Las Vegas Nevada and it was a charismatic evangelical church or really wasn't so much a church as a ministry and it was ecumenical so you would have a kind of worship where people would sing praise songs then there'd be a twenty five to thirty minute sermon and it could be one night it could be a Methodist minister or an Episcopal priest or a Baptist and I remember going to that and it was a big old house in downtown Las Vegas and there was a section next to the kitchen it probably was a formerly a pantry but it was filled with books and tapes that you could take out and I began gravitating to that room after every every night I was there and I would take these tapes out about Christianity and belief in God and I became very much interested in theological questions I was a kind of weird little kid you know I wanted to find out how to argue for God's existence is the New Testament reliable these were the sorts of questions that really you know that animated me so I found myself drifting more and more away from the Catholic Church not so much because I'd become anti-catholic but because I found within this evangelical world really serious people that were interested in these deeper questions now as I've gotten older I see that within Catholicism there's this wonderful intellectual tradition but growing up in the early 1970s soon after vatican ii in the way that it had been interpreted among most american catholics the impression i got at the time was the catholic church in america wasn't a very serious place at least for somebody who was interested in following Jesus I remember listening to the hymns from Jesus Christ Superstar I remember one Mass that I went to I was horrified because the singer the woman that was leading in song saying I don't know how to love him from Jesus Christ Superstar which is of course if you know as a sort of romantic song that Mary Magdalene sings to Christ in in in the musical I remember the nuns giving up their habits that was really shocking to me because my first five years of elementary school we had these Filipino nuns that had you know these really you know elaborate habits with a big rosary beads hanging on there on the right side with a giant cross and crucifix and and this was impressive and and then we I remember there was a big controversy at the parish where the new pastor had brought in other nuns had sort of fired the the the the Filipino nuns and brought in these more secular nuns that dressed up in ways that didn't exactly lead one to believe that they were consecrated virgins let me just put it that way and this was I think as a young Catholic middle school kid this was sort of shocking and so I think those things really made an impact on me and not a good one kind of had a time in high school and I think it was you know looking back it was probably transitioned from you know 12 year old to 14 year old you know that sort of that that initial adolescent period was sort of confusing the place that I was attending the Maranatha house was Jesus people Church in downtown Vegas they had got laid everyone had moved and left to a place to like a commune on the coast of California and they become kind of cultic and I was sort of angry about that and I began then having doubts about my faith I became a kind of I think emotional agnostic so part of it was anger part of it was I just didn't want you know I whatever this part of my life how it influenced me I wanted to sort of move on but it was always there sort of percolating beneath the surface I never could really get rid of it I never was a party kid in college or excuse me in high school so it wasn't one of those things where oh this was an excuse for me to be immoral and to be self-indulgent it was just you know I was just really skeptical and again I think part of it had to do with a kind of mini rebellion against that and it wasn't until my senior year in high school that I really began rethinking what I had given up and I had one afternoon where I prayed I asked God to give me a sign and I had a radio in my room that was on a rock-and-roll station while I was praying this I I can't believe I guess we were maybe we're all like this we were young I could actually concentrate on one thing while music blaring in the background at age 53 I cannot do that anymore but I remember on my knees praying asking God to give me a sign I wanted to believe again and then the radio station changed to the Christian radio station from the rock-and-roll one now one of my friends said oh there's a there's actually a you know a natural explanation for this and I'm sure there there was a natural explanation for it but it's odd that the natural occurrence would occur roughly around the time in which I'm asking for a sign so even if you you could show that there was some kind of storm that helped my station or my radio to transition to this other station the fact that it would happen to transition to the Christian station only moments after my making the request shows that it may have not been a miracle that violated the laws of nature but at least it was a coincidence miracle so yeah that was really impactful for me after my teenage years I went to college and I won't spend a lot of time talking about this but I went to college became a philosophy major because I still interested in theological issues and at the University of Nevada Las Vegas where I did my undergraduate work there was obviously no theology department so I took philosophy at the recommendation of several friends because I was such a big fan of John Warwick Montgomery the Lutheran theologian I wanted to study under him and he had moved from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield Illinois to start his own school in Southern California called the Simon Greenleaf School of Law which oddly enough offered a Master of Arts degree in Christian apologetics now eventually Montgomery leaves there and it becomes Simon Greenleaf University with a law school and a school of apologetics but when I arrived there and it's only its second year they had an MA in apologetics and you know looking back I would never recommend a student of mine at Baylor to go to an unaccredited small graduate school but I was young and I really wanted the study under under John and also Harold Lynn Zell who was one of the founders of Christianity today and a historian who had done his doctoral work in it at NYU and Walter Martin who was the Bible answer man and so I went the Simon Greenleaf did my MA in apologetics and they went on for a PhD in philosophy at Fordham University in New York City which is a Catholic Jesuit institution and there I arrived a firmly committed Protestant and though when I arrived there I had been influenced a lot by an evangelical author named norm Geisler who is a toma stay follower of thomas aquinas and most omastar catholics Geisler wasn't but I arrived at at Fordham a kind of committed Thomas but when I when I took courses at at Fordham under several professors who were Thomas I became a convinced whole mist and one of those professors was the Catholic priest named Norris Clark who I took Thomas Aquinas from my first semester and he was a great example for me not really realize at the time but looking back and seeing that he was a a Catholic priest that was not only a fine intellect but was filled with joy he was somebody that not only knew a lot but he also loved a lot and that had a real impact on me during the 1990s began teaching more courses in these areas became conversant with some of the works especially encyclicals by john paul ii on these issues and I conveyed this story in my in my book return to Rome where I called up a friend of mine I just read fitty at rot Co the encyclical on faith and reason I called my friend JP Moreland who teaches at Biola University a very good and outstanding Christian philosopher and I read him a quote from fitrat Co and I said JP guess who this is and he reeled off the names of all these famous Protestant philosophers and theologians and I said JP it's it's the Pope and he pauses and he says I guess he's one of us and and what's you know that story though you know I I think back to that moment and and it and I you know at the time it didn't seem like very important to me but I look back and I think I was already thinking like a Catholic and this is why what the Pope was saying just made so much sense to me and but it never occurred to me at the time to even entertain returning to the Catholic Church so Trinity approached me with an offer an unsolicited one to be an associate professor in their master's program in faith and culture which I accepted and during that time we were looking for a home church and one of my colleagues I was a parishioner at st. James Episcopal Church in Newport Beach and so we began going there it was an evangelical Episcopal Church and we went to the service that was kind of between their high church and more evangelical service or more low church and it was a kind of like you know looking back it was like a Novus Ordo Catholic service although there are some obviously some differences but my wife was struck by it by the similarity and after going there for about a year she said you know this is so Catholic why are we Catholic and I said well honey here are the reasons why we were on Catholic and she said oh I guess you're the theologian in the family so you know so we you know we continued to go there and and then after my years at Trinity I had an opportunity to spend a short time at law school I earned a master's degree in Jared achill Studies from washing University in st. Louis and then two years after that spent a year at Princeton University as a visiting scholar in the politics department and during that time I was blessed to be a visiting scholar alongside some of my heroes including a gentleman named Hadley arcus who was at Amherst College as a professor but was visiting that year Princeton and one evening in February of 2003 during our year at Princeton he called me up and asked me why I wasn't Catholic and you know at the time Hadley was was a kind of secular Jew who was very sympathetic to the Catholic moral tradition and had defended the pro-- live view on abortion and had been in the forefront of defending traditional marriage and was very much the friend of so many devout Catholics and serious of Angelica 'ls but Hadley was not in the church at the time so I asked him I said Hadley why do you care you're Jewish and he said well you think like a Catholic you know your ideas and the way in which you take positions on certain questions or Catholic why aren't you Catholic and I you know gave him several reasons and he he said those are really lame reasons and so he he said well I'll tell you what why don't we sit down you and Robert Jule - is a very devout Catholic professor at Princeton and director of the James Madison program the program in which I had my appointment at Princeton and I said to Hadley you know it's probably not a good idea I don't think first off I'd be scared to death - to debate Robbie on on the on this issue he's a lot smarter than me and I don't think it would set a good example for you as a non-christian so I found out after my book came out my brother Patrick a very devout Catholic he was read return to Rome and called me up when he got to the section where I shared this story and he said he called me up he said you mean Hadley actually called you said what do you mean Hadley actually called me because I called up him and Robbie George and I told them to talk to you about why you aren't Catholic I said you're kidding I see you should have told me before I wrote the book it would have been better it would have made the story even cooler well when Hadley entered the church in 2010 I was at his confirmation and Robbie and I were outside the chapel that was held at the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC and I told Robbie the story he goes oh I remember when your brother called us and we decided that if he had Lee be to be the one that would talk to you so that's a whole nother dimension to the story that I didn't even know about and so we left Princeton in 2003 and I was hired at Baylor University when you're hired at Baylor they ask you questions about your faith and how your faith is integrated with what you teach now obviously different disciplines there's different degrees of integration philosophy is a sort of natural right so I was surrounded by people who were serious Christians but from different traditions so it was really the first time in my life where I wasn't among kind of evangelicals that were nondenominational who had no sort of connection to any tradition so if Baylor hired an Anglican it was a serious Anglican it was a if it was a Catholic the person would be a serious Catholic or Baptist or Presbyterian so for the first time in my life I began actually thinking where do I belong so it was kind of easy to be a kind of nondenominational ecclesiastically promiscuous evangelical but now I was among really smart people who had you know they connected themselves to something really important and so I was really challenged and now I didn't immediately return to the church a series of events made a difference to me and encounters I was asked by a friend of mine at Boston College Jorge Garcia who's a professor there and his wife Laura who is also a professor of philosophy there to participate in a conference on the work of John Paul the second and I decided to work on a paper that I eventually published in a journal called logos on how the Catholic Creed's are important in the development of Christian doctrine because it seems to me that just by picking up the Bible and trying to sort of come up with theology that you that most of us whether even if we regardless of whether we're Protestant or Catholic have to admit that we read scripture in light of what we've inherited that is those ways of reading the Bible that our predecessors have taught us how to read scripture so we think it's really obvious that the Divine Trinity is found in Scripture well we forget that the doctrine of the Trinity had to be kind of hashed out I mean people kind of knew in the first couple of centuries that there you know that God manifested himself in some way or another in three persons Jesus is divine in some way but it wasn't until centuries later the church worked this out and so we read the Bible today think'll John the obvious the Trinity's there it wasn't obvious to a lot of people and I give this talk and there's about four hundred five hundred people in the audience including jorge and laura garcia both philosophy professors at Boston College who invited me to speak and Laura who is a former evangelical who converted to Catholicism while she was in graduate school at Notre Dame in the 1980s raises her hand and she says look Frank I think you have a great paper I agree with you but you're really making a case for the importance and necessity of a Magisterium why aren't you Catholic this is in front of a couple hundred people and to tell you the truth I really didn't have a good answer I remember what I winged it and it probably came across I don't know if it came across as sort of ad hoc making up at as I go but it felt that way and it was I think an unsatisfying clearly was an unsatisfying answer to me because it really bothered me so I remember going back to Baylor really troubled by this question really what I was saying in my paper was that Sola scriptura is not enough and looking back I actually don't think as a Protestant I did think it was enough I do you know if I was really honest with myself but that question at that moment in my personal life for some reason it triggered it in a way that it had not been triggered before and then I was invited to speak at the University of Dallas which is a Catholic school in in Dallas and was invited to be a commentator on a paper by a political philosopher named Jay buddha chef ski who's a professor at the nursery of Texas who three years earlier had converted to Catholicism from F angelical ISM I commented on Jays paper it went well the next morning my wife and I were leaving the Marriott where we were staying and Jane his wife Sandra we're having breakfast they invited us to sit down with them and my wife asked Jay why did you become Catholic and we spent about three hours at breakfast and the issues that were really important to me included the question that obviously that Laura had asked that had really troubled me since February of 2006 but I had other questions several issues that really were important to me one was the issue of apostolic succession the the debate over justification the nature of the Eucharist and the sacrament of penance those were the four issues that for me were decisive the things that usually bother Protestants like indulgences purgatory doctrines concerning Mary never really never really bothered me I thought that if the Catholic Church was right about the Eucharist penance apostolic succession and the doctrine of justification then clearly those other issues sort of fall into place the analogy actively uses this if for example I believe the Bible is God's inspired Word which is something that all of Angelica's believe that doesn't mean I have to understand or answer every single problem of Scripture so the evangelical will say I believe Scripture in its entirety but supposing you bring up a verse that sort of seems odd or they can't explain they don't say well I'm going to give up believe in the authority of Scripture so for me that's the way I thought about the church I thought well if the Catholics really had you know the right answers to these other questions these four issues that animated me well then clearly they they have the authority to issue these judgments in these other areas and so that wasn't a really big deal to me you know Jay said to me read the Church Fathers and I said sure that's a so I spent some time reading the Church Fathers now I actually thought that I was going to read the fathers and not be persuaded and so part of my project was to read selections from the fathers that that were recommended to me by Jay but also to read books by non Catholics that were critical of this use of the father's and so I read several books one of which I had read years earlier and reread by Norm Geisler and Ralph McKenzie called Roman cow ethics and evangelicals and it's actually a book that's quite respectful of Catholics it's not an anti-catholic book in traditional sense so I thought it would be a good book to read because it would be critical but respectful and so there's a section in the book where they deal with some of the church fathers on on some of these issues and so this was actually a real turning point to me any in a total shock I remember reading Norman Ralph's section on justification and that doctrine and there was a selection of several quotes from or a section of several quotes from church fathers that Ralph and norm thought proved that the Reformers were more consistent with the church fathers than Catholic in the Catholic Church while I went back to those fathers and sure enough in those sections Ralph and norm were right I mean if you isolated those passages from the wider context sure enough they sound a lot like Luther and Calvin but then when you read the larger context they sounded really Catholic and this really disturbed me so one one quote that I have in in return to Rome is from John Chrysostom where it sounds like he could easily be mistaken for John Calvin but then you turn the page or in another section of the same set of sermons Chrysostom is talking about praying for the dead and whether you could pray for rich people who you know had not lived a Christian life and could their souls be saved well that's really Catholic to pray for the dead so that those are the things that surprised me and shocked me is that I would I would see these uses of the church fathers and then I would go back and it turned out that the fathers were largely Catholic and the other thing that stood out that I don't know if anyone had ever seen this before but it was something that kind of stood out for me it wasn't so much what the father said but what they didn't say so the issues that divide Protestants and Catholics today things like apostolic succession the nature of the Eucharist the Sacrament of Penance and justification or how we get saved or how we're transformed into the image of Christ as Catholics would look at justification we're kind of assumed to be true so there was there weren't a lot of arguments for like apostolic succession because nobody doubted it so when I Rheneas writes against heresies one of his arguments is well these heretics don't have apostolic succession but he just says it as if like everyone knows that's right so that was the kind of stuff that weirded me out was like whoa the reason why you don't find a lot of explicit detailed arguments about these issues is that everyone just assumed they were correct now where do you have the detailed sophisticated arguments Oh on issues the divided Christians in the day like was Christ truly God so the debate it Nicaea was over where the areas of Alexandria was right about Jesus not being fully divine or was a a nation and his crowd correct so so at the irony that was on that question today Protestants of catholics agree so for me it was the weird thing was that that on the things we agree on were the controversial things and the things we didn't agree or don't agree on were the uncontroversial things so to me that that was really a huge turning point and it happened so quickly because some of my critics online have said isn't this weird that Beckwith becomes president of the evangelio theological Society November 2006 and then returns to the Catholic Church in April of 2007 was it like but six months later well I think what had happened and this is why in the book return to Rome I try to tell the story this way and I and I hope that it gets communicated this way is that I had actually been changing for quite some time and didn't know it and so the ground was already prepared for the flower that arose from the soil and so these things happen quickly because I think I'd already been moving in that direction one of the one of the for issues that were that were important to me was the doctrine of justification the doctrine as Luther put it the from which the Reformation was launched for me I thought I had only been really taught it from a Protestant perspective I had even though I'd gone to Catholic schools I had never really been taught the Catholic doctrine as it's presented in the Catechism and then I went on for my first graduate degree where I studied under a great Lutheran theologian John work Montgomery who gave me Luther's account of the Reformation and then when I went to Fordham I was a philosophy PhD and I really wasn't a theologian that wasn't my my area focus so I you know accepted the Protestant story and the understanding among Protestants and there are divisions among Protestants so I don't want to give the impression that all Protestants have the same exact account of justification but there seems to be a core of the Protestant view and by the way I what I mean by the Protestant view is the Lutheran Calvinist part of the Reformation there's another poor or the Anglican quasi Anglican reformed you of the pro' there's also a third part of the Reformation the radical Reformation which doesn't embrace this and so they kind of get short shrift that's the the Anabaptist but having said that the dominant view is the one coming from Luther and Calvin and and and those churches that come out of that part of the Reformation and essentially is this that that justification is different than sanctification that is you are justified at a particular moment when one receives Christ and there's nothing you can do to earn that grace and everything you do after that point in terms of good works is part of your sanctification your changing over time and being conformed to the image of Christ justification is merely a legal declaration that is to say you are declared justified on the basis of Christ's death and resurrection now the Catholic view as I understood as a Protestant was okay the initial grace God gives you but you have to work your way to heaven you do good works and now looking back I see as a Protestant I thought that way because my understanding of justification was a litigious or legalistic view of justification that is it was a legal declaration but the Catholic view of justification is deeply informed by an understanding of a kind of rightly ordered life and so the Catholic holds that it is God's initial grace that in fact draws you to him and so there's nothing you do to earn your justification and ironically there's nothing that you do to earn your justification after you receive that grace there's a mystery there and that's the part that I think Protestants of a really difficult time grasping because in Protestantism everything's in either/or it must be either God or you but in the Catholic view the grace that you get at baptism is sanctified or sanctified grace and that sanctifying grace allows one to cooperate with God as you undergo change throughout one's life so the grace allows you to engage in works of charity so that not that one earns heaven it isn't like there's a balance sheet in fact the example I think I use in the in the book is that you have to think of of the conversion of a person you know organic way not in a mathematical or mechanical way that is we are organisms ordered towards a particular end as Thomas Aquinas would say the beatific vision and so God gives us grace appropriate to the sort of creatures we are what are we we are rational moral agents and so he gives us the grace so that our agency can cooperate with God's grace for our own transformation and so even though we merit it God gets all the credit that's the mystery as I say in the book return to Rome it's not so much about us getting into heaven it's about getting heaven into us and so for the Catholic it isn't about earning anything it isn't like you know you'll go to work and you clock in and you clock out it's not about that at all it's about transformation so once I understood that I began then reading the Bible differently I began reading certain passages of scripture that now made greater sense where Paul is talking about we are sanctified and we are justified wait a second I thought those were supposed to be separate or Paul talking about earning the crown or running the race thought wait a second if people are already saved what does that really mean or in the Last Judgement the difference between the sheep's and the goats was between what they did and didn't do now if I had as a Protestant I would try to sort of you know reinterpret those passages but then I began reading the early church fathers including the council of orange which dealt with what was called the Pelagian heresy and the council of orange had that kind of transformational language by the way that the Pelagian heresy was the heresy that said there was no original sin that you can sort of earn your own salvation you didn't need grace so that council was going against the view that you could earn your salvation yet there was a part of it that talks about Grace playing a role in our cooperation with God so there was no absence of good works but that good works were sort of transformed by that grace and so there was a mystery there that is we do work but God gets all the credit and then I would read then I read a Gustin he held that view then I read the Council of Trent which was supposedly according to some Protestants a document that affirmed that one was saved by works and I didn't find that there at all and then I read Thomas Aquinas the and then I read the Catechism that was published in the 1990s the same thing and so what I saw was a continuity of Catholic doctrine from the early church through agustin through the council of orange through the Middle Ages through Aquinas so the Council of Trent and then the contemporary church and I thought this has got to be the correct view of the nature of justification so in any event I you know that was that to me changed a lot by by finding that historical continuity because the Catholic account of the universe in human beings is the best and it's the best not just because in some theoretical sense it's the best it's produced real Saints and real beauty yeah it has have Catholics done bad things oh to be sure they have done bad things but I think with anything that is great at its core the corruption will be great too so the church that gave us the greatest writers the greatest thinkers the greatest historians the greatest scientists the greatest beauty the greatest cathedrals the greatest civilization that also gave us some bad things too this is why people don't get uptight about if they're teaching let's say in the public schools Transcendental Meditation right you know which of course is part of the Eastern religion people don't get uptight about that because they think it's just Eastern religion they get uptight when they're teaching the Bible or they're teaching something that seems to be aligned with Christianity or Catholicism why because they see the power in it right so I think the reason why you should become Catholic is because you're going to be joining a great tradition a tradition that has had the most wonderful saintly people the world's ever known and it's also something that has something for everyone this is something that I didn't realize until I was in the verge of returning to the church I mean one of the things about Protestantism and it's a in it's something that's a tragedy I think of just Christianity in generals the divisions among Protestants but you find among Protestants at least among my friends who are sort of theologians who belong different traditions is that the the different denominations attract kind of similar personality types right so you know your typical Pentecostal is not going to be like your typical Westminster Seminary graduate but in the Catholic Church you find these personality types reflected in the different let's say orders of religious right so the Franciscans are different than the Jesuits and the Jesuits are different the Dominican and I think you find that among lay Catholics too so you have among lay Catholics kind of mystical types artistic types sort of ordinary sort of business types you have philosophers and theologians you have you know all sorts of people all over the map in different careers at different specialties and different interests and different personality types so I think the church is this interesting place where you have you can have a Flannery O'Connor and you can have a Joseph Ratzinger and that's sort of an amazing place you know and so I think that you know if you're you should become Catholic for that reason but also you should care about your soul all right and the story that Jesus tells is the story in some ways of the Catholic Church you know pick up your cross and follow me I think this is something that you know that I think it's been lost in American Christianity what I grew up in you know Jesus loves you as a wonderful plan for your life well Jesus loves you but it may not all be that wonderful at times right there's the cross but that doesn't mean there isn't joy but it means that the church does have something to say about suffering which I don't think much of American Christianity both Catholic and Protestant really talks about a lot and so I do think that you know the church does give this wonderful account of beauty of intelligence and suffering that I don't think that any other account gives as quite a good story

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Length: 38min 45sec (2325 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019