Blessed as a Catholic!

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Blessed as a Catholic!
A Full Transcription of Steve Ray's talk to Couples for Christ

(Steve K. Ray is a convert to Catholicism from the Baptist Church. His story of conversion is chronicled in his book “Crossing the Tiber.” He and his wife go around the world
telling the story of his conversion and of their belief that the Roman Catholic Church is the one true Church. This is the full transcription of the talk he delivered during the
Mission Core Teaching Night, July 13, 2010, Xavier School Gym.)

Good evening. It’s wonderful to be here. I’m a charismatic, too. I’m also a Couples for Christ and there’s my couple right there. Stand up, Janet. I’ve been married to that girl for
33 years – that’s the best thing I ever did. The second best thing I ever did was to become a Catholic. We have four children and eight grand children and they have names like
Maria Faustina and Damian Augustine and so on – very Catholic names.

But we weren’t always Catholic. And I’ll tell you the story of how we got here tonight. But first I wanted to say that it’s wonderful to be here. I love being with the Filipino people.
I think that the Filipino people are the best in the world. And I hope you don’t mind if I keep my hat on. I don’t know how you Filipino men do it. But you keep your hair even
when you grow older and I do not have that gift. In America, we lose our hair when we’re 25 or 30. You keep your hair. I want to know your secret. One day I walked out of my
house and a seagull flew over. And it went, “Poop!” … dropped on my head. From that day on, I’ve worn a hat.

I took a class not too long ago, a couple of years ago. It was a new computer software program that came out about studying the Bible on the computer. And I went to a class
of about 200 men and I was the only Catholic in the whole group. The rest were Baptists. About halfway through the class, we stopped for lunch and I said to the man sitting
next to me, “What are you?” He says. “I’m a Baptist.” I said, “What do you do?” He said, “I’m a missionary to the Philippines.” I said, “Really? What do you do there?” He says,
“They are all Catholics. They don’t know Jesus so I go to get them born again.”

And then he said, “What do you do?” I said, “I am also a missionary to the Philippines.” He said, “What do you do there?” I said, “I teach them to defend themselves against
guys like you!”

And that’s why I’m here. My wife and I, once we became Catholics, we fell in love with the Catholic Church. I always loved Jesus. I always loved the Bible. But when I fell in
love with the Catholic Church, I had a great love affair. When I was 17 years old, it was when I looked up to heaven, and as a Baptist boy raised to love the Bible and the
Baptist church, I looked up to heaven and I said, “Jesus, I’m going to give my life to you. I’m going to serve you everyday of my life.” And Jesus accepted me. And when I
turned 39 years old, He introduced me to His family, the Catholic Church.

And so now, what my wife and I do, is spend our lives going around the world, telling people about the Catholic Church. Three different groups of people: For those who don’t
know Jesus, I tell them they need a Savior, that the religion they are part of, whether it’s Islam, or Buddhism or Hinduism, or atheism or whatever it is, is not sufficient. They
need to be Christian because Jesus is the one who died on the cross for their sins. For those who are not Catholic but are Christians, like my former life as a Protestant, I go
to them and tell them, “I love you as brothers and sisters in Christ but I want to invite you back to the fullness of the faith in the Catholic Church.” And my third group of people
that I go to talk to are the Catholics, many of them born and raised Catholics but have no clue how lucky they are and how much they need to wake up and enjoy the Church
and begin to be excited about being Catholic and tell everybody else.

So those are the three groups.

And I’m going to tell you the long journey that I got, that I took all the way from the United States to come here – five times -- but the real journey that I took was even longer
and that was the journey from the Baptist tradition all the way to the Catholic Church.

The journey begins with my Mom and Dad. They were born in Chicago and they were pagans. They had no religious upbringing. They didn’t go to any church. And my mother
had 12 years of miscarriages. Every time she tried to have a baby, she would lose the baby. And she was very sad. And one day, she was going shopping in Detroit, Michigan,
and she got the keys and her purse and she was ready to leave when she turned on the radio and she heard Billy Graham. I know you’ve heard of Billy Graham, the great
Baptist evangelist. And my mother heard for the first time that she was a sinner. That God was going to… He loved her but because of her sins she was going to go to hell. But
then God loved her so much, He sent His only begotten Son to die for her sins, and shed His blood on the cross and if she would accept His salvation, she would not go to hell

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but she would go to heaven. My mother had never heard this before. No one had ever told my mother this. And my mother started to cry and she fell to her knees on the floor
and she asked Jesus to save her from her sins. And she never went shopping that day.

My father was having a nervous breakdown. He thought he was dying. He wasn’t but he thought he was. And he went out on the porch of our house in Detroit and he looked
up to the stars and said, “If – IF - there is a God, reveal yourself to me because I need you.” But he didn’t even know if there was a God who could hear his prayer.

The very next day, my father went to work at Ford Motor Company in Detroit and a man walked up to my father and said, “Charlie Ray, you need Jesus Christ in your life.” My
dad had prayed only the night before and the very next morning, a man comes and says, “You need Jesus Christ in your life.” It was an answer to his prayer. And because that
man came to talk to my father and had the boldness and the courage to tell him about Jesus, I’m here today. What would have happened if that man had said to himself, “Oh, I
am not going to talk to Charlie about Jesus Christ because religion is a personal thing. It’s private. It’s not something you talk about.” How many people in the world today who
are Catholics are afraid to tell other people about Jesus, are afraid to go up to someone and say, “You need Jesus Christ in your life?”

But imagine for a moment, when I stand before God on Judgment Day and I’m there before God and He is judging me and in the end He says to me, “Welcome to heaven.”
And I walk over this way and the door opens and a beautiful angel comes out, and there’s the smell of flowers and the sound of harps (rather the sound of music you were
singing tonight which is beautiful music and I wish all Catholics could sing like you. Thank you for the good music.) And this door opens and the angel starts to escort me into
heaven.

And then my neighbor, or the man or woman whom I work with everyday at work, they come up to be judged by God. And when the judgment is over, a door opens on the
other side and over there the smell of sickening smoke comes out of the door and hideous screams and these ugly angels with hooks on their wings come out and they grab
my neighbor, and they drag him to the other door, to hell. And as my neighbor is going to that door, he looks back at me and he sees me going in the door to heaven and he
says, “Why are going in that door?” And I say, “Because I was a Christian and I was baptized and a member of the Catholic Church and I obey Jesus Christ.” And my neighbor
will say, “You knew about this? You knew about heaven and hell? You knew about salvation and you never told me? Damn you, Steve Ray! Why did you work with me every
day and you talked about sports and the World Cup? You talked about the weather but you never told me about Jesus Christ and heaven and hell and now I’m being dragged
by these hideous creatures into hell and you’re going into heaven?”

And you know that’s going to happen to people someday on the Judgment (Day). And they’re going to say, “Steve Ray, why didn’t you tell me?” And what am I going to say? “I
wanted to be ecumenically sensitive? I didn’t want to hurt your feelings? I did not want to act like I know everything and so I didn’t say anything?”

My wife and I have pledged that we will never have anybody stand before God and point a finger at us and say, “You didn’t tell us,” because I am going to tell the world about
Jesus Christ and His Church.

Now my father and my mother both became Baptists because the two people who came to them were not Catholics. If they were Catholics, then maybe I would have been
born and raised a Catholic. But because they were Baptists who were the ones out evangelizing, my mom and dad both became Baptists.

And then they prayed for more kids. They prayed that they would have children. And my very special possession that I love and I own it and it sits on my desk is an old black
leather Scofield Reference Bible, King James Version, with gold-covered edges and every page is underlined and marked and it is all tattered and torn because this was my
father’s first Bible. And he loved the Bible. He studied it everyday of his life. And it sits on my desk and the reason I love that Bible so much is that, when they became
Christians, Baptist Christians, they prayed that God would give them children. At the same time, he bought the Bible, and he wrote in the Bible the date, April 1954, and I was
born in December 1954, nine months later, after 12 years of miscarriages.

My mother said I was an answer to her prayer. But when I became a Catholic, she said God misunderstood her prayers. But they’re very happy, my mom and dad, that I’m
Catholic today. My mom and dad are very happy I’m Catholic today and I’ll tell you why. Because they are celebrating 71 years of marriage, 71 years of marriage, and they
can no longer take care of themselves. Four weeks ago before I came here, I sold their house and I moved my mom and dad into my house to live with me. And I told them,
“You are lucky I am a Catholic, because this is what Catholics do, not Baptists. And now, they sit on my couch, still with their arms around each other and they say, “Thank
you, Steve, for taking care of us.” And I say, “Do not thank me. You took good care of me when I was a boy, I will now take good care of you until you die. You will stay in my
house. This is what Catholics do.”

Now my mom and dad … I was born and they took me in front of the Baptist church, and they held me up and said, “Jesus, we give this boy to you to serve you all the days of
his life.” They could not take me to a Catholic Church and have me baptized because already they knew that to baptize a baby was a wicked, Catholic, man-made tradition.

Two things my mom and dad learned from the very beginning. Two things they taught me from the very beginning. That Jesus died to forgive my sins and the other is that
Catholics are going to hell because they have the wrong gospel and it was our job to help Catholics get saved so they could go to heaven, too. That’s why America sends so
many missionaries to the Philippines. They think you’re not saved. I think it is arrogant of Americans to come here to try to tell YOU about Jesus. You have been Christians and
Catholics for over 400 years; you were Christians on this island before the United States ever got started. Who are we to come here and tell you about Jesus? You should
come to America and tell us about the Catholic Church and you should teach the Catholics how to sing like I just heard you sing. We need you to come to America.

Now my mom and dad loved the Bible so they taught us to love the Bible. This is why I am not angry at my mom and dad for not raising me a Catholic. This is why I am not
angry at the Protestants because I love the way I was raised even though I know it was not fullness of the faith. They taught me to love Jesus. They taught me to love the
Bible. They taught me to be afraid of hell and to go to heaven but they never told me anything about Mary. They never told me anything about the Eucharist. They told me that
the Pope was a bad man.

But the things they taught me about the Bible and about Jesus I am very grateful for and everyday I thank my mom and dad for raising me to be a Christian. My mom and dad
paid me 50 cents for every Bible verse I would memorize so I was a rich little kid ‘cause I could memorize Bible verses quick. The first verse a Baptist boy learns is John 3:16.
How many of you know it by heart? Say it along with me: John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish
but have everlasting life.”

Give yourselves a hand.

Most people think that Catholics don’t know their Bible and yet you just quoted one of the most important verses by memory. But the problem is most Catholics don’t know
where to find it in the Bible. That’s why we always said not just “For God so loved the world…” but, “John 3:16, For God so loved the world…”. And then they taught us to
memorize other things. Let me tell you what I memorized when I was 8 years old.

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It may take you a minute to know what I’m saying but the time I’m done I think you will know. I have to take a deep breath.

GenesisExodusLeviticusNumbersDeuteronomyJoshuaJudgesRuth1Samuel2Samuel1Kings2KingsIChroniclesIIChroniclesEzraNehemiahEstherJobPsalmsProverbsEcclesiastesSongfSol

I did it in one breath! Those are the books in the Old Testament. Even if I made a mistake, you wouldn’t have known it. But I did make a mistake because I lacked 7 books in
that list because as a Protestant, my Bible had seven books less than yours does. In the 1800’s, the British Bible Society ripped out seven different books and threw them
away. From that point on, Protestants have been deprived of seven books of the Bible. I didn’t know that until I became a Catholic.

My mom and dad took us to the Baptist church every Sunday, every Wednesday night for prayer meeting, vacation Bible school, everything we did. And then, at 15 years old, I
decided I didn’t want to be a Christian anymore. It was too… it cramped my style. The kids in our church were not cool. I didn’t want to be a Christian. It was for old people and
sissies. So I decided to live a little wilder life and for two years I rejected Christianity but, my mother was very smart. She made sure that whenever Billy Graham was on the
radio, she would have it playing in our house. And one night, I heard Billy Graham on the radio, and I always had a soft spot in my heart for God even though I didn’t want my
mom and dad to know. And I heard Billy Graham say, “For God so loved the world… (but you can put your own name in there). You can say that ‘For God so loved (Steve
Ray) that he gave his only begotten son that (Steve Ray) will believe in him and he will have everlasting life.’”

And I started to cry. I was 17 years old. I walked out on the countryside by my house and I looked up to the stars and I said, “Jesus, I’m only seventeen years old but I’m going
to give my life to you. I’m going to live for you everyday of my life from this point on.” Tears were running down my eyes and I went and got my Bible out, and I began to read
and study. At night, I would hide it between my mattresses because I did not want my mom and dad to know I was reading the Bible.

While all my friends are putting Playboy magazines under their mattresses, I was putting a Bible there. And then I went to school. My last year of high school or what you call
college here, there was a young girl with long blonde hair who had just come from California. And she had moved to Michigan. And this was her first day in school and
someone brought her to me and said, “Steve, we just met another Christian. She just moved here from California, she is 15 years old. I want to introduce her to you.”

Her name was Janet and you just saw her a moment ago because she stood up and waved to you. And that was the pretty little blonde-haired 15-year-old girl that I met in high
school. But I was too busy for girls. I had a Bible and Bible study books under my arm and I was going to evangelize the world and study the Bible. I was skipping all of my
classes because I thought it was more important to study the Bible and get everybody else saved in school. But Janet, when she met me the first time, she said God spoke to
her and said, clear as a bell, “That is the man you’re going to marry.” And she said it took God four years to get it through my thick skull, but finally I did.

Now a little bit about Janet. She comes from a Presbyterian background. Her mother and father were Presbyterians and she is the first Catholic in her family in over 400 years.
We did a family history. There are no Catholics in her family. She is the first in 400 years. We knew that when we became Catholics she would lose her family. I knew I would
lose my family, and I knew that we would lose all of our friends. And we did. Within one week of becoming Catholic, we lost all our families. They would no longer talk to us and
we lost all our friends.

Janet and I got married. We had four children. She taught our children at home. They never went to a school. In the United States, one out of four children graduate from
school and cannot read a book. Can you believe this? In America where we’re supposed to be so intelligent and so smart, we’re not. One out of four graduates from school and
they cannot read a book. In Detroit, 50% of the people who live in Detroit cannot read right now.

Janet said, “If I teach them at home, I guarantee they will all read when they graduate.” Plus, in the United States, it’s against the law to say in a public school that God created
the heavens and the earth. There is more freedom in Russia to say that than in the United States. Do not look up to the United States about everything, Filipinos. Sometimes
other countries have a tendency to look up to America. Do not do that because America is not the country it used to be. We have a president now, instead of celebrating Family
Week, he said we are going to celebrate the diversity of homosexuals and lesbians and transgender and bisexual and we will celebrate this great diversity of sexuality. Do not
follow America. We have legalized abortion. We have contraception available everywhere. We think divorce and remarriage is a sport like football. Do not always look up to
America and want to be like them because in many ways, America is no longer a country to look up to. In some ways we are, but in many ways, no longer.

Janet and I got married, taught our kids at home, I built a business. And everything was going well. I was teaching the Bible. I was studying and teaching and I was doing
evangelism. I was getting Catholics saved. I was very good at pulling Catholics out of the Catholic Church.

I often say I could open the Bible to a Catholic and I would say, “Are you going to heaven when you die?” And the Catholic would say, “I’m a Catholic.” “I didn’t ask you if you
were a Catholic. I asked you if you were born again. I asked you if you know you’re going to heaven when you die.” And the Catholic would say, “I haven’t killed anyone. I’m
trying to be good. I hope God will let me in.” And I would say, “You don’t even have a clue what it means to be saved.” And if a Catholic answered me that way today I would
still say, “You don’t have a clue.”

The only way we get to heaven is by the free gift of Jesus Christ that He gives us freely by His grace. And once He gives that grace, we believe in Him and we’re baptized and
we obey him and we become children of God.

But I used to get Catholics to leave the Catholic Church. And I was teaching the Bible, and we had a happy life. I had my own business. I built up a business to twelve million
dollars a year that we ran, just my wife and I. And then I became a Catholic and we lost everything. And you may say, “Steve, you had everything going for your business, Bible
studies you were teaching, you had everything going for you. Why would you leave family and friends to become a Catholic if you thought it was so wrong? What was it you
saw about the Catholic Church that made you want to be Catholic?” And I say, “Absolutely nothing!”

There was nothing I saw about the Catholic Church that made me want to be Catholic. And the Catholics that I knew were the biggest argument against the Catholic Church.
That’s changing in America by the way. The Catholic Church is waking up and Catholics are studying the Bible and learning to defend the faith but back in those days, when I
looked at the Catholics, they were an argument against the Catholic Church.

So what made me and my wife want to become Catholic? It began when we saw the problems in Protestantism. And, by the way, we pronounce that word wrong. We
shouldn’t really call it “Protestant.” It should really be called “Protestant” because they started out of protest against the Catholic Church. And, by the way, you call some of
those groups out there the “born-agains,” don’t you? You call them the born-agains. You should never call them the born-agains. They are not the born-agains. Who are the
true born-agains? You are. You are the one that defines “born again” the same way Jesus does. If you ask a Baptist, “How do you get born again?” they say, “If you asked
Jesus into your heart. You accept Him as your personal Lord and Savior.” And I ask them, “Where do you find that in the Bible?”

If someone says you’re born again by accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior and asking Him into your heart, they are telling you a man-made tradition, not the
Bible. How does Jesus say we get born again? Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and said, “Teacher, you understand the kingdom of God.” And Jesus said to Nicodemus,

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“You must be born again or you will never see the kingdom of God.” And Nicodemus said, “How am I born again? Do I have to go back in my mother’s stomach and come out
again? I am too big, I’m too old.” And Jesus said, “Unless you are born of water and the Spirit, you will never see the kingdom of God.”

How does one become born again by Jesus’ definition? By water and Spirit! By water baptism. Who are the real born-agains? You are because the Catholic Church teaches
“born again” the way the Bible teaches it. You should not call them the born-agains. If you do, you should say it this way: “born-again … NOT.” When I’m here, I refer to them
as the born-agains but I say they are – “born-agains… not” because you are the true born-agains.

Now what would make us want to be Catholic? We saw the problems within Protestantism. We saw the problems there and sometimes you have to know you’re sick before
you go see a doctor. And I found out that where I was, I was sick and I needed to find a doctor and the doctor was the Catholic Church.

Now there were three things that really we saw the big problems of: Number one, (and I’ll go through this very quickly because my time is running out already and I only have
two hours left to go. But the good thing is when we’re done, the traffic will all be gone. I’m only kidding. I won’t do that to you.) Number one, my wife Janet came home one
Sunday after we were at the Church listening to the preacher preach. He was up there with his Bible, thumping on the table and preaching away. And my wife said, maybe that
was good preaching but it wasn’t worship. We’re supposed to go to Church on Sunday to worship but every time we go, all we do is listen to preaching.

Now some of the churches in the United States, they get bigger music, they get bigger bands and they try to call this worship -- if you sing really loud, this is real worship.
Singing is part of worship but the real essence of worship is not preaching; the real essence of worship is SACRIFICE. And where do you have a sacrifice on Sunday morning?
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass! The other churches do not have it. I have been to the very oldest, most ancient churches in the world. I have been to Greece and Turkey and to
Italy, to Israel, to Egypt, to Syria and Antioch even. I have been to the oldest churches in the world and there is one thing that every one of those churches has in common. In
the center of the church is an altar. And the altar was a place where the priest would come and offer the sacrifice of the Eucharist. But when the Protestants came along, they
took the altar and they threw it away and they put this (the podium) in its place in the center of the church. No longer was there an altar and a sacrifice and a priest. Now there
was a podium with preaching and a preacher.

And Janet knew that something was wrong with that but we didn’t know what it was. All of you knew and the Catholics who lived near us knew but nobody had the guts to tell
us. So worship was a big problem.

Number two, who speaks for God today? I said it was the Bible. I had a very clever formula which is partially true -- Who wrote the Bible? The Holy Spirit wrote the Bible. And
where does the Holy Spirit live? In my heart. When I read the Bible, the author of the book lives right inside of me and so as I read, He can interpret it for me. Pretty clever ‘eh?

But what happens when you get a Bible and you get a Bible and you, and you, and you, and all of you get Bibles and you all go sit in your living room and you began to read
your Bibles. When we get back together a year later, do you think we are going to agree on what the Bible says? What there will be are 1000 different denominations when we
come back here a year from now. Every one of you will have started your own church. Everyone will have their own interpretation of the Bible. I know this because even among
my best friends in Evangelical Protestants, we could not agree on what the Bible taught. And that’s why there are now 35,000 different denominations around the world, all
reading the same Bible, thinking they have the same Holy Spirit and coming out with every different idea you can imagine.

Here in this island, you have the Iglesia ni Kristo, you have, down in Mindanao, where I’m going to go, Quiboloy? You have the Mormons here; you have Jehovah’s Witnesses,
Dating Daan. All of these say they are the ones that have the right interpretation of the Bible. How long have they been here? How long has Dating Daan been here?
Jehovah’s Witnesses? They are still wearing diapers; they’re still in their nappies! They are new religions. They have just gotten started; they read the Bible and came up with
their own interpretation.

And so my problem was, as a Protestant, is what do I do now? I have the Bible, I love the Bible but who knows what it really means? Is it all up to me to decide? Can Billy
Graham tell me what it means? Billy Graham doesn’t even think he is in a position to tell me what it means. There is no Pope in Protestantism to give a definition of what the
Bible means. Everybody does it on their own and there was spiritual anarchy, spiritual chaos. I knew something was wrong with Protestantism.

And the third one was the issue of morals. What does God expect of me? Can I contracept? Does God say it’s okay or is it wrong? Can I abort a baby? Is that okay or is it
wrong? Can I divorce and remarry? Or what about in the United States when our President now is pushing for one man to marry another man and be able to adopt children?
When will the day come when a man will marry his dog? Once you lose the definition of marriage, everything becomes okay, everything will be called marriage. Who speaks
for God and says what is moral and what is immoral?

In the United States, you drive down Main Street and on one side of the street you have McDonalds, Burger King, Jollibee. (I like that one, Jollibee) and KFC. And on the other
side of the street, you have the Baptists, Iglesia ni Kristo, the Mormons and the Pentecostals. Now it’s lunch time and I am driving down the road and I see these restaurants.
How do I choose which restaurant I will go to eat at today? I’ll decide the restaurant I’ll eat at by what I feel like. I feel like Jollibees today. Next week I may feel like McDonalds,
and I choose what I feel like.

And then Sunday morning comes and I drive down the same street and how do I decide what church to go to? The same way I decided the restaurant. I decide to go to the
church that I feel like going to, the one that has the best view of things according to me. If I think I should be able to contracept, and the Catholic Church says, “No,” then you
can leave the Catholic Church and go to the Methodist Church or the Pentecostal church and they’ll say, “Its okay.” The church that I went to when Janet and I got married, the
first thing the pastor said to us was, “what kind of birth control are you going to use?” The first question!

I chose the church that I wanted to go to. But is this the church that Jesus started? Does Jesus not have an opinion on these things? Does Jesus say, “It doesn’t matter. Do
whatever you want, just don’t kill anyone. Kill babies, that’s okay, but once they are born, don’t kill them, okay? As long as you do that you’re okay.”

This is not the God that created the heavens and the earth. The God that created the heavens and the earth has a “Ten Commandments” and He has laws and He expects His
creatures to obey them. And what’s the one church in the whole world that stands up and never compromises the truth about morals? It is the Catholic Church. All the other
ones fall, Boom! Boom! Boom! through history. It’s the Catholic Church that stands tall and says, “This is what God wants and the Catholic Church will continue to teach that
even if the world hates the Catholic Church, even if the media hates the Catholic Church, and even if government officials hate the Catholic Church.”

And you Filipinos have a government and people now who are trying to push these things on you. Just like America, they’re trying to make you a secular nation with
contraception and abortion and divorce and remarriage and homosexuality and everything else and you have to stand up and say, “No, we’re Catholics first and Filipinos
second.” I am a Catholic first and an American second.

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And so these are the three problems: What is worship, who interprets the Bible and what about morals. These were the three big problems Janet and I had and I almost
became an agnostic. I almost came to the point where I said, “Nobody can really know for sure.”

And then, right when we’re having our crisis, a friend of mine named Al Cresta came to me. He was my best friend, a preacher in a charismatic church, a talk show host for
Protestant radio, and he came to me and said, “Steve, guess what? I’m gonna join the Catholic Church!”

“What? The Catholic Church? Anything but the Catholic Church! Why would you join the Catholic Church? You’re too smart to be a Catholic.”

And so we said, “Let him go. Let him sit every Sunday morning with those Catholics. They don’t read the Bible; they don’t even know how to sing. Let him go.”

And in the mean time, for one year, my wife and I decided we were going to study and we were going to prove him wrong and we were going to get him to come back out of
the Catholic Church. And the more we studied, the more we realized that he was right.

I went to the very first Christians. I was convinced that the very early church was Protestant and I figured that if I could prove to him that it was Protestant, he would know that
he made a mistake, that the early church was Protestant and it only became Catholic later on in the centuries. So I went back and I started to read the very first Christians. And
guess what I found? The very first Christians who never had a New Testament, those who never had the Bible like we do, they were the ones who were taught directly by the
Apostles -- Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, Clement of Rome, Barnabas, the Didache, Shepherd of Hermes. These are writings you can read today. You can find
them easily on the internet. And if you have not read the letters of Ignatius of Antioch from 107 AD, you should read them. They will make you proud to be Catholic. He was
one of the first Christians. He was ordained by Peter; Peter himself placed his hands on Ignatius and ordained him.

And when I read Ignatius, I realized the early church was Catholic. See in my Baptist church, three times of four times a year, we had communion. And there we had crackers
and grape juice. We didn’t have wine because the devil was in that bottle. We only had crackers and grape juice and we said here in the crackers and grape juice, nothing
happens. It is not a sacrament, nothing is changed. It is only to remind us of the death of Jesus. But when I read the letter of Ignatius, Ignatius said, “Beware of the heretics
because they refuse to partake of the Eucharist because they deny that it is the very flesh of Jesus who died on the cross.” They refused to partake or to eat the Eucharist
because they said, “It is not the flesh of Jesus. It is only bread and wine.” Ignatius of Antioch was eaten by lions in Rome and he died believing the things that the Catholic
Church teaches.

When Janet and I started to study purgatory, we found out that the Catholic Church was right and I was wrong. When I began to study Mary, I found out that the Catholic
Church was right and I was wrong. And I would debate tonight any Baptist or born-again-not who says that you are wrong to love and venerate Mary, that you are wrong to
believe in purgatory because they are wrong. And their arguments are silly and they can be debated easily and they have been for 2000 years. That’s why I’m proud to be a
Catholic and why you should be proud to be Catholics as well.

The more we studied, the more we realized the Catholic Church was right. And if you want to know more, I wrote it all in my book “Crossing the Tiber” because this book is a
story of how we came into the Catholic Church and the arguments and the problems that we had.

We were, on New Year’s Eve, in my friend’s house (and I only have a few minutes left.) And we were eating dinner with our friends who were Baptists. And he was trying to
“save” us from our “lunacy.” He saw the direction we were going -- towards the Catholic Church -- and he invited us over. He was going to argue with us and tell us that we
should not and keep us from becoming Catholics and in the middle of the discussion, I said, “Jim, you and I believe in the Bible alone. We reject the Catholic Church and the
Pope and the tradition. We have the Bible alone but, Jim, do you realize that if you and I had seen Jesus crucified on the cross and risen from the dead in 30 A.D. in Jerusalem
that you and I would have never read the Gospel of John or the rest of the New Testament?” And he said, “Why not?!” And I said, “Because it would not be written in our
lifetime. If we were forty years old when Jesus rose from the dead, we would have been dead before the books of the New Testament were written. Jim, how would we know
how to be Christians, how would we know how to get saved, how would we know what to do in church on Sunday morning if we didn’t have the Bible?”

And on the way home, I said to my wife, “This is getting very scary! Scary!”

And she says, “What?”

I said, “The more we argue against the Catholic Church, the more I find out I’m backing myself right in the front door.”

All of you came into the Catholic Church forward. I came into the Catholic Church backwards by trying to prove it wrong. The next day was New Year’s Day. We had all our
books open. Not all of them, because in our house, we have 20000 books. We didn’t have all of them open but we had a lot of them open and we were studying about Mary
and all of these issues and at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, I closed my books and I started to cry. And I sat down on the living room floor with tears running down my eyes and I
was sobbing. And Janet said, “Steve, what’s wrong?” And I said, “Nothing is wrong. I am a Catholic. I read my way into the Catholic Church.”

That day, Janet and I, before that day, neither one of us had ever been inside of a Catholic Church. We had never met one time a Catholic Priest. We had never once met a
Catholic who could explain or defend the Catholic faith. And here I am, sitting on the living room floor crying like a baby and saying I am a Catholic because I read my way into
the Catholic Church. And Janet said, “Good grief!”

I called my friend, Al Cresta, who I called stupid a year ago when he converted and I said, “Al Cresta, Happy New Year! Guess what! I’m a Catholic! Hello, Al, are you there?”
He said, “I’m here. But I can’t believe what I just heard you say. Did you say you were a Catholic?” I said, “Yes”.

“How did you become a Catholic? You’re the last person in the world I thought would be a Catholic!” And I told him. And this was on a Saturday. And the next day was Sunday.
So Al said to me, “Steve, how would you like to go to Mass with us tomorrow?”

It had never dawned on me for two seconds that if I was going to become a Catholic, I would have to go to a Catholic Mass. I had never been in a Catholic Church before. I
heard that they worship statues, oooh! worship statues! I heard that you worship a piece of bread. And he wants me to go to a Catholic Church? And so I covered the phone
and I said, “Just a moment.”

And I said to my wife, “Janet, what should I say? He’s inviting us to go to a Catholic Mass!” And she said just as fast, “Tell him we’ll go. But we’re going to leave the children at
home. We want to get there late, we are going to sit in the back and we’re going to leave early before it’s over.”

Now you don’t do that here in the Philippines – leave early – you get there late sometimes but you don’t leave early. In the United States, after the Mass, about a third of the
people come up from the Eucharist and then they go right out the back door and they think the Mass is over. And so I say, when I said we’re going to get there late and sit in

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the back and leave early, people said, we’re real American Catholics right from the first day. But nobody else in the world understands that joke because Americans are the
only ones to get up and walk out early but I’m trying to change that. You know who’s the first man to get up from the Lord’s Supper and leave early? It was Judas. That’s why
all of you stay because you know that. And I will not get up and leave early because I respect the priest and the Sacrifice of the Mass which is not over until the final blessing.

We went to church that day and I remember standing up. They put me in the second aisle right where you are. Instead of in the back, I got there early and they sat me on the
front, on the aisle. And our eyes were big. We didn’t know what to expect. And then everybody stood up and looked around behind them and I thought, they never did this in
our previous churches, there must have been a problem. Everybody turned to see what was the problem. I thought, maybe somebody died and fell into the aisle so I turned to
look. But it wasn’t a problem. You know what it was. It was the procession coming up the aisle.

And when I saw the procession, for the first time in my life, I saw a Catholic priest. And when he came up the aisle, I started to cry for the second time in two days, tears were
gushing out of my eyes. I was sobbing, because for the first time in my life, I saw an apostolic man. I had known good Bible teachers and preachers and evangelists, I had
known radio guys and ones on television, preaching but I had never seen a real apostolic man who was ordained all the way back to the Apostles. And when I saw that man, I
knew exactly who he was and I knew what he was and I didn’t know his name but I knew who and what he was and I burst into tears and I cried and as he came past me in the
aisle and I watched him go by, I would have followed him to the lions to be eaten that day without even thinking about it.

I looked at my wife and she was in tears, too, crying. And she said to me, “Steve, I’m a Catholic, too.” And after the Mass, if you want to know what happened to us during that
Mass, you can read it in this book because I tell the whole thing that happened the first day at Mass.

I went out of there and I said to the priest, “Father Ed, we want to join this Church. I became a Catholic yesterday and we want to join so we could take the Eucharist next
Sunday.” And you know what he said, “We don’t do it like that around here.”

Now when Janet and I decided to convert to the Catholic Church, I asked my children if they would convert with us and my daughter who is very smart, a PhD now with her
Doctorate in Philosophy, married to a PhD, Doctorate in Theology, and when the two of them talk, I don’t even understand them anymore. But when I asked her, when she was
16 years old, when she was still a very smart girl, and my son, who was 13, “Will you join the Catholic Church with us?” they both said no. And I said, “Why not?”

And they said, “Because you taught us too good before. How could we ever join that church that you told us about -- the Catholic Church?”

My father was so angry at me becoming a Catholic that he clenched his fists, his face turned red, the veins popped out on his neck and he yelled at me, “How could you ever
become a Catholic?” And so I sat down to write my father a letter.

The letter started out: “Dear dad, you are the best father in the whole world. And I owe you from my heart an explanation.” And I started to type the letter and it got longer and
longer and that love letter that I wrote to my father became this book. I never sat down to write a book. I sat down to write a letter to my father and this is the letter I wrote my
dad. And the reason I bring this up is because when I asked my daughter and son if they would join with us and they said no, I had a good idea. I had just written the letter to
my dad. It was on typing paper. And I said to my daughter, “I just wrote this letter to Grandpa. Would you proofread it for me? Would you read and make sure there’s no
mistake before I send it to Grandpa?”

And she went up to her room and she was there all day and she didn’t even come down for dinner and at 10 o’clock at night (about what’s its going to be in two minutes), at 10
o’clock that night, she came down the stairs with tears running down her eyes. (Our family’s a bunch of crybabies, by the way. Ever since we became Catholics, we became
crybabies and we can cry about the Lord at the drop of a hat. By the way, I cried through that whole first Mass we went to and Janet and I cried at every single Mass for the
next 6 years. And I still cry at Mass most of the time. I always say I don’t like it and somebody said it’s a gift of the Holy Spirit. I said, I don’t like this gift so He should give me
another one! But I cried.)

But Cindy came down, my daughter, with tears in her eyes, crying, and she said, “Dad, I’ve decided to join the Catholic Church with you and Jess, he said, he will, too.”

And so I have to quit now but on May 22nd, 1994, on Pentecost Sunday, our whole family came up to the front of the Catholic Church. None of our friends would be there, only
my father came. And he sat at the back. Only one husband and wife of all our friends came to see us join the Church and guess what, they joined the Church too, a year later.

And our whole family came forward and we were baptized and we were confirmed with the oil of the Holy Spirit and we all received communion. And it never stopped because
from that point on, my wife and I said we are not going to stop loving the Catholic Church, telling other people about the Catholic Church. For those who left the Catholic
Church, I’m gonna do everything within my power to bring them back but I can’t do this by myself. I need your help. I need your help to go out and get the people who have left
the Catholic Church and bring them back into the fullness of the faith because we can’t do it alone but if all of us work together, we can turn the whole world upside-down for
Christ. Couples for Christ can turn families upside-down for Jesus. You can do a lot in the world -- with a thousand people in this room right now, the power and the ability is
unlimited. What we can do if we dedicate ourself to Jesus Christ and His Church and we go out saying, “I’m going to do something about his today. I’m not going to sit around
and let somebody else do it.”

And God bless you and thank you for being Catholic and thank you for having us here.

Jul 29, 2010 Last U pdated: Jul 29, 2010 5 Comments

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