ANTHONY BARATTA: A LOT OF THOSE EARLY CHRISTIANS UP TO MARTIN LUTHER, THEY WERE CATHOLIC, AND THERE WAS A CONSISTENCY. “In the fall of 2011 I got a call from my dad saying that he was going to return to the Catholicism of his youth. Really that made me angry. I felt betrayed by him and I didn’t understand it at all. If you really like this liturgy stuff, you can just be Lutheran. Why do you have to betray our family and go to the Catholic Church? I was at the time working as a youth pastor, preparing to enter Southern Baptist Seminary. So I spent over 15 hours talking to a PHD in Church history who was a pastor too, asking questions, trying to prove my dad wrong. And in that process, I did have a few doubts along the way. At one time where I was watching the YouTube video of the Mass and it just seemed beautiful, wonderful…. Ultimately, it was the Bible and Church history. Hearing that my dad was becoming Catholic shook me up enough to reexamine these issues closely and spent a summer Evangelizing Catholics in Poland, John Paul II stomping ground… So I felt this yearning as I was studying Catholicism to be rooted in something greater than Evangelicalism. --- Ultimately, it was the Bible and Church history. I hadn’t really been shaken enough to take any of their claims seriously so that shook me up….. I had three books of the Bible memorized but I couldn’t really answer the questions enough. How do we know we have the right books in the Bible? How do we believe in the authority of the Bible without any outside authority? To the question of authority that related to early Church councils that really bothered me….. We didn’t even talk about Martin Luther or John Calvin, but if we did it wasn’t really people before them with an occasional quote from St Augustine. History just wasn’t anywhere to be found. And as I studied I found other Evangelicals who were looking for the history and rootedness…. And so I would read some of these stories, these Protestant saints from 17 hundred and 18 hundred. These guys really aren’t that old. I can really only go back so far. Five hundred years is really not that long. I yearned for something deeper, but if I tried to go back before that, it was certainly sounding really different…. So there was this natural pull to go back to go deeper, to stand for something to be rooted and I couldn’t find it in Protestantism…. And I picked Martin Luther because I wanted to read where my dad had gone wrong. And I thought I was going to love Martin Luther. I really was appalled by what I saw as being very nonchalant and casting aside a lot of Church history…. And I was like digging before the Reformation which I hadn’t done. A lot of these early Christians up to Luther, they were Catholic. And there was a consistency. There was a continuity that was lacking. chnetwork.org/2014/11/southern-baptist-seminarian-leaves-become-catholic-interview-anthony-baratta/
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 01:43:51 +0000
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