My Catholic Conversion Story (how was I convinced to make the switch from Anglican to Catholic?)

what if the eucharist isn't actually the true presence of christ you know in the anglican church what if the pope really is the vicar of christ and i should be you know obedient to him and his [Music] bishops hey i'm grace elaine brown and today i'm just going to talk about my conversion to catholicism and why i decided to convert i grew up presbyterian i went to a presbyterian church in my hometown my parents grew up protestant my mom was presbyterian growing up and my dad grew up catholic and then also protestant so we decided to go to a presbyterian church and i was baptized in the presbyterian church and i actually recently was conditionally re-baptized catholic but i can talk about that in another video and we went to the presbyterian church until i was an about i think a freshman in high school and the presbyterian church we went to was a really nice community i really enjoyed my friends that i made there as well as uh some of the aspects of the worship services you know we had a tenebre service where we lit the candles and said the you know read the scripture as well as um you know a nice easter one of my favorite things that we did when we were presbyterian that i've never seen anybody else do is a beautiful we had this wrought iron across it was like eight foot tall and it had kind of lattice on it and every family would bring a bouquet of flowers to put into this lattice cross and then on easter sunday we would all there was just this beautiful cross in the sanctuary of our you know presbyterian church and it was just smelled delicious and it was beautiful another thing i really liked about being presbyterian was the community in our church we had a wednesday night church kind of potluck and we do kind of like a youth group sunday school kind of thing on wednesday nights so my parents had a lot of friends getting together and then i grew up with a lot of friends going to church as well and i think that that's something that protestants do very well that i haven't the catholic churches i've been a part of haven't done as well is have that kind of community aspect obviously i believe that the catholic church is the full truth so i wouldn't say you know you should abandon the catholic church just because protestants do community better but i definitely think that that's something that catholic churches should work on one thing that's been consistent through each of the denominations i've been a part of which is presbyterian high church kind of anglican and then finally catholicism is communion as a presbyterian our communion was just a loaf of bread and grape juice and we didn't believe in transubstantiation or that you know jesus was actually present body blood soul and divinity in the communion it was just um really just a remembrance of jesus and the last supper both anglicans and presbyterians have uh liturgy i would say anglicans more so than presbyterians um but the liturgy for presbyterians was very kind of basic and you know it varies church by church for protestants especially um so it was kind of just a bit of scripture and then i think every second and fourth sunday we would go up and have you know we would get the bread and do intention which is you know dipping the bread in the grape juice and taking it um as purely a symbol of christ and in high school i met a guy who eventually became my boyfriend and his father was an anglican clergyman and so i decided after he kind of talked to me about going to their church i decided to start going to their church as my family had kind of stopped going to our presbyterian church there had been a lot of drama and like kind of like power struggles and it was um there were a lot of really kind people there but we just didn't i just didn't feel comfortable there anymore and then my parents didn't either so we stopped going to that church so i was kind of in between churches for a while i wasn't going to church on sundays um and then i was invited to go to this anglican church with my boyfriend and i really enjoyed it it was actually the first anglican service i ever went to was um this my boyfriend's sister's wedding and it was it was so such a different you know experience than my my presbyterian services had been there was incense and there was chant and hymns and it was you know the altar servers were wearing you know catholics and alves and obviously the priest had vestments um it was just you know completely complete 180 from the presbyterian church i've been going to and i thought it was truly beautiful i love incense i know not everyone loves incense but i love incense and i love you know tradition and the bells and whistles that come with you know a liturgy so becoming anglican was pretty easy for me actually um i it took me a little bit to learn more about uh kind of the sacraments so the kind of flavor of anglicanism i was was a very high church anglican the angle can clergy men and bishops that were in the diocese i was a part of when i was anglican were very rooted in tradition and so their you know their services were very beautiful and traditional which i i loved and going along with that the high church anglicans believed in a lot of things that i didn't as a presbyterian they believed in the transubstantiation of the eucharist you know in communion they believed in the blessed virgin mary as the mother of god and in the assumption of mary um so they believed a lot of the catholic dogma that i would later learn about in rcia which is you know the way you transition into becoming catholic if you didn't already know that it's a rite of catholic initiation for adults i think um and so i didn't know pretty much most things about you know catholic dogma i didn't know until i became anglican and i went to this church camp the patron of which was st michael which i have this little this little picture of him from and i keep it on my desk because uh st michael the archangel's prayer was one of the first kind of like catholic prayers that i memorized and he's very special to me especially since caleb is in the military and so at this church camp i learned like i said about you know catholic dogmas as well as a lot of just church history and theology and it was actually at this church camp after i'd been going for a couple years that i realized i wasn't really sure if being anglican was truly like the fullness of the christian faith i was taking a church history class at this anglican church camp and we started talking about king henry viii and all the you know the drama that was going on and why he you know the schism even happened how was he he was heretic and i began to think you know how how come i am an anglican whenever you know the church of england is the church that he established you know breaking away from the catholic church like how is that how is that the church that christ established if we are coming from this sin and this you know this schism so really made me start to think you know what if the eucharist isn't actually the true presence of christ you know in the anglican church what if the pope really is the vicar of christ and i should be you know obedient to him and his bishops eventually i went to college and in college there weren't any really traditional anglican churches around because in north america and in england too the the church of england has kind of splintered into like more traditional versus non-traditional sex and the non-traditional usually call themselves episcopalians and then anglicans are usually a little bit more traditional um but like like all protestant denominations it's it's all localized like there's not you know there's not the pope to kind of keep everything specific i know in catholicism there are like more like eastern traditions and western traditions um but they're all under the same dogmas whereas in protestant denominations a lot of times it's very much like you are not a baptist if you don't do blank there's a lot of uh confusion being an anglican was just kind of weird i constantly found myself having to explain what i believe to people because i didn't want people to think that i believed in all of the fruity things that episcopalians believed in um but i also didn't want to be associated with catholicism because i didn't understand what papal supremacy and the infallibility of the pope was all about i thought it meant that the pope could just say whatever he wants and it was the truth and dogma but that's not true so once i finally learned about that that's kind of when i started to consider becoming catholic you know i was kind of worried that it wasn't the true presence as well as the fact that i i didn't have a good i didn't see a good reason for why the pope wasn't instituted by christ so in college i didn't have a church that was as traditional as the one i had been going to as an anglican so i was really i was really pretty bummed about that because i do enjoy a beautiful liturgy and reverence and i just wasn't really finding that in college station and then i kind of broke up with my boyfriend whose father was an anglican encouragement and i started dating caleb who's my husband now who uh he's a cradle catholic and he about invited me actually one of our first dates was he invited me to go to mass on easter with him and it was really sweet and so we went to mass on easter and i was really uh unpleasantly surprised at the mass there's two parts of it because i was really happy because for some reason even though i was anglican i i really did believe that the true presence was for sure in catholic churches i felt surety in the fact that catholic priests were consecrating you know the bread and the wine it was becoming the body and blood of jesus christ but on the flip side the liturgy was very low church which i wasn't used to and you know there was like a folk band an electronic drum kit and i'm pretty sure there was some bongos involved and i was just pretty uncomfortable at the mass actually because i was i was shocked i was thinking you know i'm a i'm a protestant and our service is more traditional than this catholic mass like i was very confused but i kept going to catholic mass with caleb because i didn't have another church to go to so we just attended that mass and i asked caleb a lot of questions you know i asked him about the dogmas that i had learned as an anglican and how they kind of translated through to the catholicism and i had so many questions and finally caleb just suggested i consider doing the right of catholic initiation for adults rcia which is basically just kind of like theology 101 plus like what catholics believe and toward the end of rcia you can decide whether you want to convert to catholicism or not and be confirmed so there was no pressure for me to actually you know convert to catholicism and i didn't want to convert because of caleb i knew that i needed to make that decision myself because ultimately you know at the end of the days regardless of whether or not i married caleb which i did end up marrying caleb i would be you know face to face with god and being judged alone on that so i decided to join rcia and in the initial kind of onboarding meeting with the priest i asked him my kind of big two questions about why is anglicanism not a legitimate um you know form of catholicism like why are we not in communion with the anglicans and i don't really have time to go into all the details but he explained to me why catholic orders are valid and anglican orders are invalid and he also explained to me papal infallibility and what all of that meant and i was pretty much convinced at that point i found that since i had been anglican for a couple of years if i had been presbyterian and gone through rcaa i think i would have had a lot more questions i continue going to the college rcia in the fall and then in the springtime i decided i wanted to be confirmed in the catholic church and part of that process of becoming a confirmed catholic was them going back to my presbyterian records and making sure i had been validly baptized and it was only recently that i began to be concerned about whether or not i had been baptized validly you know with um in the name of the father and the son the holy spirit my parents didn't remember and there was no video evidence so i can talk about that in another video but i went through all of rcia and learned a lot of stuff and asked a lot of questions about catholic social teaching and about you know different moral issues and i learned a lot i highly recommend doing it at a really good parish if you haven't done it already even if you are catholic i think there's a lot that catholics need to learn still and we can always be learning about our faith because it is the most important thing in our lives so finally in easter of 2019 i was confirmed in the catholic church and it was quite the journey getting there you know i grew up presbyterian and then i was anglican for a little while and i learned a lot of catholic dogma in our that anglican church we kind of called ourselves like catholic the light edition or you know a lot of catholic stuff but just maybe not quite everything and then i became catholic and i've been catholic ever since so i hope you enjoyed hearing about my conversions to catholicism and if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments below or dm me on instagram i'm at gracefulcatholicblog or you can comment on gracefulcatholic.com i want a blog post i'm happy to talk to you about my conversion or about catholicism or motherhood or anything so judith so thank you so much for watching and if you'd like to stick around feel free to subscribe and i hope you have a blessed day bye you

Channel: Grace Elaine Brown

Views: 28,459

Keywords: catholic convert, protestant convert to catholicism, catholicism

Id: whKiv-gdPDU

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021