The Heart Has Its Reasons
In summer 2021, when I realized that on April 28, 2022 it would be exactly fifteen years since I had returned to the Catholic Church, I began ruminating about the Evangelical world from which I had departed and what it was that ultimately carried me back across the Tiber. Because I am a philosophy professor—someone who traffics in concepts, ideas, and arguments, and gets paid to do it—you would think my reversion was purely a matter of the intellect, that my choosing to return to full communion with the Church was the result of a detached rational consideration of the contending arguments offered by competing Christian groups. Although a decade ago I would have agreed with that account, or at least been highly sympathetic to it, I am not too sure about it anymore.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in November 1960, I was raised Catholic, attended Catholic schools from the first through twelfth grades, and received the sacraments of Baptism, Confession, First Holy Communion, and Confirmation all before the age of thirteen. And yet, soon after my Confirmation, I found myself drawn to what seemed like the greener pastures of Evangelical Christianity. It was by way of a place called Maranatha House, a small Jesus People church in downtown Las Vegas, the city in which I was raised. (My family had moved to Vegas in January 1967 when my father took a job as an accountant to work for his brother-in-law, the renowned poker player and sports book-maker, Fiore “Jimmy” Casella).
I had, unbeknownst to my thirteen-year-old mind, very quickly imbibed the assumptions of my newfound Evangelical friends. These assumptions included the principle of sola scriptura (that the Bible alone is theologically authoritative), the necessity of having a born-again experience, the importance of sharing one’s faith with unbelievers (sometimes called “witnessing”), and the insignificance of the sacraments, a living Magisterium, and apostolic succession. My parents, both observant Catholics, permitted me to continue attending Maranatha House as well as several other Evangelical groups. After a brief excursion into unbelief during my high school years, I returned to Christianity but not to the Catholic Church.
Although it all seems so very strange to me now, to my teenage self—a young man who just wanted to follow Jesus—the love, fellowship, and Christian commitment of my Evangelical friends was attractive and overpowering. I felt like I was part of something new and special that was advancing the cause of Christ, but without the historical baggage of the Catholic Church in which I had been born.
My commitment was so deep that I could not imagine my life’s work being centered around anything else. For this reason, in college, I switched my major to philosophy and read just about every book I could find on theology and the Bible authored by an Evangelical scholar. I was particularly smitten by works that had an apologetic flavor, that offered arguments and proofs for why it was rational to believe in God, the inerrancy and historicity of the Bible, and the truth of Christ’s Resurrection.
I went on to do graduate work at an Evangelical school where I studied under the Lutheran scholars John Warwick Montgomery and Charles Manske. From there, I matriculated at Fordham University, where I earned my PhD in philosophy. It was at Fordham, a Jesuit institution, that I first came in contact with serious Catholic scholars—in particular, Fr. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Fr. Gerald McCool, S.J., Fr. Robert Roth, S.J., and Dominic Balestra—who would introduce me to the richness of Catholic philosophical thought. Why, you may ask, would an Evangelical ex-Catholic want to do advanced philosophical work at Fordham, of all places? The answer: my Italian mother, who was probably prompted by the Holy Spirit, suggested I apply there. It was as simple as that.
