I am a thirty year old attorney. I am also what one might call, "A Prodigal Catholic." The reason for my journey back to the Roman Catholic Church can be summed-up in a phrase commonly used in the practice of law, "the evidence demands a verdict." A favorite Protestant apologist of mine by the name of Josh McDowell wrote a great book entitled, Evidence That Demands A Verdict. In his book, McDowell, with copious historical detail, lists the evidence that led him from atheism to Christianity. I submit to you, in a much less copious fashion, the story of how the evidence in favor of Catholicism led me back home.
The youngest of six children, I was raised by loving Catholic parents who throughout my childhood consciously endeavored to set a good Christian example for their children and others. They did, and to this day still do. In addition to being devout and active Catholics, my parents sacrificed many creature comforts to send us to Catholic schools. I was blessed with the benefit of both a Franciscan led grade school and a Jesuit led high school education. From my grade school days as an altar boy through my high school days at Tampa Jesuit, I always thought of myself as a good practicing Catholic. And I was. That was the problem. I, like many young Catholics, would fall away from the Catholic Church because somewhere along the line I failed to make the transition beyond the mere practice of my faith to understanding.
From as far back as I can recall, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Jesus; and as far back as I can recall, I have known of the soft spot in His heart for me. During the first years of college, my love for Jesus and my lack of understanding would lead me away from the Catholic Church. I found myself surrounded by many young evangelical Protestant friends. They seemed excited about their faith and often invited me to attend their Bible studies and church services. One day I accepted their invitation. I remember being amazed at the difference between the tambourine lead praise and worship songs of their service and the pious solemnity of the Catholic mass. They introduced me to a life in Christ that I had not discovered in the Catholic Church. Soon they began asking many honest questions about my Catholic faith, questions to which I had few answers. Their questions revealed my lack of understanding.
I thought, if anyone should have the answers it should be me, a person who had received a strong Catholic parochial education and came from a strong Catholic family. The answers did not come. I remember seeking help from a local Catholic priest. The answers he provided, while thoughtful, left me wanting. I figured, "Heck, if the Priest doesn't have the answers, neither must the Church." In the meantime, my Protestant friends were providing me with literature and alternative answers that would eventually undermine my Catholic faith.
I remained in the Church for a while out of a sense of obligation to the heritage of my family. Indeed, as far back as my genealogy went, my family had been Catholic: Irish Catholic, French Catholic, seriously Catholic. During my last years of college I became active in a college organization called the Fellowship of Christian Students (FCA). It was through this group and through the church affiliated with this group that I came to know and defend the born again salvation of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. With their help, I made the switch from Catholicism to a reformed theology. The people in this new church made it easy. Many of them, including the pastor and his assistant, were ex-Catholics. Months passed and I became very active in my new church. I even decided to be re-baptized by full immersion. I invited my parents to attend the baptism and judged them harshly when they refused. I thought their loyalty was misplaced. My loyalty was to Jesus Christ and my parents' loyalty, I concluded, was to an institution. While I am sure my father explained to me that my request for baptism was nothing short of a betrayal of the effect of my original baptism in Christ's Church, my ears were closed.
It was also during this time that I met many brothers in Christ that were not afraid to express their love for Jesus. I admired this. Through FCA I had become close friends with a student whose father was a Baptist minister. One New Years Eve, he suggested we bring in the new year, not in a bar, but on our knees in prayer. We did just that. It was right. I needed this fellowship. I had never done such a thing with a Catholic brother. I wanted the courage and zeal for Jesus that I saw in my friends and committed to studying my Bible with a passion.
A couple of years passed and I was confronted with college graduation and the big question, what to do with my life. One day I recall watching a television talk show. The show dealt with the topic of abortion. Two guests were advocating for their respective positions. I remember being saddened at the contrast between the well-spoken pro-abortion advocate and the poor-spoken, emotional pro-life advocate. When the show was over, I concluded I wanted to be a lawyer. My reasoning was that law school taught people how to think and articulate themselves persuasively. I wanted the tools to defend my Christian faith against people like the pro-abortion advocate that I had seen on television.
At that point in time, I was doing volunteer work for the Florida Family Council, a pro-life, pro-family organization affiliated with James Dobson's Ministries. Through this volunteer work I discovered the very real political forces in our society attempting to attack and erode the Judeo-Christian morals upon which our nation was founded. I was heartened to discover that other organizations, such as the Rutherford Institute, a Christian non-profit law firm, were successfully defending Judeo-Christian morals from these legal attacks. I decided religious liberty law was for me. I took the LSAT, applied to several law schools, and ended up attending Mercer Law School in Macon, Georgia.
After my first year of law school I was asked to be on the Mercer Law Review. In addition to serving on the law review, I served as the president of the Mercer's Christian Legal Society. Through the Christian Legal Society I learned of a law firm based out of Atlanta, Georgia, by the name of Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (C.A.S.E.). Its founder was a Mercer Law School graduate by the name of Jay Sekulow. Jay was an outspoken messianic-Jew that had taken a case of religious discrimination all the way to the United States Supreme Court and won. While I was in law school, Jay decided to join forces with Pat Robertson and became the Chief Counsel for The American Center for Law and Justice (A.C.L.J.), Pat Robertson's response to the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.). The A.C.L.J. was becoming famous for its successes before the Supreme Court and its many victories in the defense of religious liberties and free speech rights. The A.C.L.J. represented many high visibility pro-life and pro-family advocates including Randall Terry of Operation Rescue fame.
My position on the law review would afford me the opportunity to befriend Jay Sekulow. During the second year of law school I became an associate editor of the law review. This meant that I was in charge of picking a topic, soliciting writers, and editing and publishing a volume of the law review. Jay Sekulow came to mind. I would attempt to get Jay Sekulow to write an article for the law review on religious liberty. I was truly unaware of just how ambitious this was of me. Jay Sekulow had recently been named one of the top one hundred most influential attorneys in America.
I had planned on attending a Christian Legal Society Conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and learned that Jay Sekulow was to be the keynote speaker. This was my chance to introduce myself and make my proposal. I was running behind schedule when I pulled up to the conference center in Virginia Beach. The seminars had already begun and there were only a couple of men outside the hotel entrance when I arrived. I did a double take. The men were Jay Sekulow and Keith Fournier, the Executive Director of the A.C.L.J. This was my chance. I exited the vehicle, introduced myself, and made my proposal all before Pat Robertson pulled up beside us to give Jay and Keith a ride. It was as if I had been dreaming. I just stood there as the three of them drove off. I had Jay's telephone number in my hand.
One thing led to another and not only did Jay Sekulow end up being the key author of a Mercer Law Review Symposium on Religious Speech in Public Schools, but I was offered a summer clerkship with the A.C.L.J. in Washington, D.C. between my second and third years of law school. It was during this clerkship with the A.C.L.J. that I would begin my journey back to the Catholic Church.
My summer in Washington D.C. with the A.C.L.J. was an incredible experience. I found myself working with attorneys that had helped to define some of the most important religious liberty laws in the land; I was in the United States Supreme Court house on almost a weekly basis; I even flew on Jay's private jet as part of a legal SWAT team. The SWAT team flew to Albany, New York, to file a temporary restraining order against the city enabling Youth With A Mission (YWAM) to put on a gospel presentation in a public park. The city had initially denied YWAM the right to present their gospel play claiming it violated the "separation between church and state."
While working with the A.C.L.J., I was surprised to learn that its Executive Director, Keith Fournier, was an evangelical Catholic. Keith had served as General Counsel and Dean of Evangelism at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio. I had heard of the spiritual renewal taking place at Steubenville long before meeting Keith and asked him about it. Keith was receptive to my questioning and gave me a copy of his book, Evangelical Catholics: A Call for Christian Cooperation to Penetrate the Darkness with the Light of the Gospel. This meeting with Keith sparked a number of in-depth conversations regarding Catholicism between a fellow summer intern and me.
Our discussions revolved around the Catholic Church and the many prevailing Protestant misconceptions about its teachings. My fellow intern was Anglican and we shared many commonalities. On one occasion I recall joking that from my exposure to Protestant teaching, I had concluded that Christendom began around the 1500s with the reformation. Very rarely did my Protestant pastor or friends discuss the pre-reformation era. Indeed, it was as if the timeline went something like this: Christ lived; Christ died; the church was uncorrupted for a time, then the last apostle died; corruption spread throughout the church; then came the inquisition; the selling of indulgences; and finally Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door. I always thought this was a bit problematic. Indeed, it was problematic. I concluded the reason many Protestants feared to tread on pre-reformation turf was because to look at the pre-reformation era was to look at 1500 years of Catholicism. I was quite aware at the time, however, that there were an equal number of Catholics, like myself, that were sufficiently ignorant of the Church's pre-reformation past.
Our conversations eventually turned to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone). I found myself questioning my Anglican friend as to what came first, the church or the Bible. It seemed quite clear to me from Scripture that Christ first and foremost established a church. It therefore followed that the teaching authority of the church easily predated what we call the book of the New Testament. Was it not the authority of the Church then out of which the scripture was born? I had heard that St. Augustine had written that were it not for the authority of the Church, he would question the authority of the Bible. This was a profound admission to me. It was also troubling. The logic seemed too simple, too clean. If Christ established a church and gave it teaching authority and promised the gates of hell would not prevail against it despite its human frailties; and if this authority were handed down through apostolic succession by the laying on of hands, the only intellectually honest conclusion I could arrive at was that the Catholic Church was the church established by Christ for the preservation and explanation of the gospel. What was more troubling to me, was that I had chosen to serve Christ while rejecting the authority of His Church. This would continue to trouble me and ultimately spark an individual study into the history of the Church that would lead to my reversion.
After graduation from law school, I joined the United States Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, and became an Army attorney, a JAG. After earning my jump wings at Fort Benning, Georgia, I was assigned to the XVIII Airborne Corps & Fort Bragg, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was there that I met another JAG who was a devout Christian. He and I would hash over many of the old questions I had struggled with in earlier years regarding the Catholic Church. They were the standard questions, such as, "Is the Pope infallible?" or "Was the Virgin Mary forever virgin?" or "Was the Blessed Sacrament really the body and blood of our Lord and Savior?" Incredible questions perhaps by one raised with the benefits of a Catholic education, but honest questions nonetheless.
As an attorney, I was trained to go to the source documents for authority. And that is what I did. Starting with the Bible, then the ecumenical councils, then the writings of the Church Fathers, and finally to the catechism, I was amazed at the answers I found. History began disclosing hidden treasures. There it was in all its brilliance, the Catholic Church; the unbroken apostolic succession from the apostle Peter to Pope John Paul II. The clear line of ecumenical councils from the Council of Nicea to Vatican II. The evidence was overwhelming. It was as if I were discovering the Catholic Church for the first time; discovering the beauty and importance of the sacraments for the first time; discovering the treasure-filled heritage of the Church for the first time. I found myself almost at every turn arguing the Catholic position with my fellow JAG. I took the Catholic position so often that my friend nicknamed me "Pat Poff the Papist!" The truths and teachings of the Church had satisfied my thirst for explanation. The evidence was demanding a verdict. Still, I resisted. My pride was the last hurdle to overcome.
After having made the decision some years before to attend a nondenominational church; after having judged my parents wrongfully when they refused to attend my rebaptism in the Protestant Church; after attempting to lead other Catholics away from the Church in misdirected zeal, my ego and pride served as a stumbling block to accepting what my heart and mind were telling me, that I had been wrong. I had left the one true Church. After many hours of study and prayer, the evidence demanded a verdict in favor of the Catholic Church. My soul longed to be back in communion with the Church. It no longer was an intellectual decision, but a spiritual one. One day, while attending a course at the Judge Advocate General's School in Charlottesville, Virginia, I drove to St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church and asked the priest there to hear my confession. It had been years since I had been to confession. I was nervous. Where would I begin? What did I say? What would the priest think? What would he do when he heard how far I had fallen away from the Church? What do you think he did? He forgave me. He simply forgave me. He absolved me from my sins right then and there and blessed me. As I walked away from the confessional he added, "Welcome home."
It was perhaps one of the most freeing experiences I have ever felt. My sins were forgiven. Like the prodigal son, I was welcomed back into communion with the Church. At mass that evening, I stood before the Holy Eucharist and was humbled. I stood in awe and reverence of the miracle that had just taken place at the priest's hands. The tambourines of my old charismatic church were distant as I stood before Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. I am now free in my obedience to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I am in communion with the Blessed Mother, the apostles, and all the saints throughout the ages. Indeed, the word communion has profound import to me now. This prodigal Catholic returned home and was welcomed back with open arms.
If you are a prodigal Catholic or an inquiring non-Catholic, I challenge you to look at the evidence yourself with an open heart. It will demand a verdict. If you are a good practicing Catholic that has not fallen away from the Church, I invite you to join me and countless others who at this moment in history are either discovering for the first time or rediscovering the fruits of moving beyond mere practice to understanding.
God bless ~ Patrick J. Poff