Apocrypha Now

I had never been angry at a book before I read The Da Vinci Code. I am no biblical scholar, and it was clear to me that Dan Brown is not either. The book was overtly blasphemous, and, worse, it was popular. It really bothered me how many people liked it. (A thriller based on the Gnostic Gospels isn’t exactly my idea of entertainment anyway.) But my outrage soon gave way to reflection, and the novel prompted me to think for the first time about how the real Bible actually came to be. In its way, The Da Vinci Code is what led me to the Catholic Church.

I was raised in a Protestant family who moved freely among churches and denominations and non-denominations. We always believed in God, and we believed in the Bible and read it. We said some prayers now and then. We lived in a particularly religious area: western Michigan is the region’s Bible Belt. We were less religious than the region but at least as religious as the average American. We did not go to church every Sunday, but we went to church many Sundays, and there were certainly times where we did go to church every or almost every Sunday. When I became an adult, moved out, and went off to college, I was not going to church frequently. But I still had my own faith, praying most frequently when I found myself in some kind of trouble. I did go to church in college at least a few times. I tried various local Protestant churches in the East Lansing area but remained at none. I read some theology. I also continued to read the Bible, regularly and without commentary. But I didn’t know the history of the Bible. I had never heard of Saint Jerome, and I wouldn’t have recognized the word “Vulgate.” I just knew the Bible was the Word of God.

When I read The Da Vinci Code, which was inescapable for several years, I began to think about its treatment of texts outside the canon of Scripture and the possibility of other Bibles. I knew that Catholics had “added” some books to theirs—the mysterious Apocrypha, which I assumed was pretty much just Maccabees. I didn’t think any of it was theologically significant and assumed that Catholics’ divergent views came from things popes had declared rather than from their understanding of Scripture. Messing with the Bible was clearly a bad idea; the last page of it had a stern warning about adding to or subtracting from the book. I was ignorant without knowing it and had a quintessentially American view: the Bible is the Bible, and we all know that, and we all know what’s in the Bible. But Dan Brown of all people made me wonder: who gets to decide?

I had faith that the people who decided and compiled the Bible were right and guided by the Holy Spirit. The Gnostics were out, and for good reason. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were inspired by the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit had acted through some men to protect the canon of Scripture so that we could have it two millennia later. Once I started thinking about this, and read about the context, I started to see a problem. If the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit, then people who preserved it down through the ages were guided by the Holy Spirit too. This seemed a necessary precondition to biblical Christianity—that the Bible we hold is right and true. But for this to be the case, the Catholic Church must have been inspired and protected by the Holy Spirit to preserve the Bible inerrant and intact for more than a thousand years only to deliver it . . . to Martin Luther? I was simultaneously forced to believe that God had established the Catholic Church to pass on the Bible and that everything the Church had passed on was false. I did not yet know the phrase Sacred Tradition, but I somehow arrived independently at the conclusion that if the Holy Spirit had guided these men to preserve, translate, and transmit the Bible to me, maybe the things they said about it were worth paying attention to. If you don’t accept that someone—some institution—has been entrusted by God to tell us that the Gospels were true and the Gnostics were false, what makes The Da Vinci Code wrong? The only candidate for that someone to speak this truth was the Church.

I shouldn’t give Dan Brown too much credit. The Catholics I would get to know during that time in my life certainly had a role. In my childhood, I didn’t really know many Catholics or know much about them. My mom’s family had been Catholic, but they had abandoned the faith before I was born. My teenage years were spent in Hudsonville, Michigan, a town full of Dutch Reformed Calvinists. There is one Catholic parish, and there were a few Catholics in my high school, but they did not figure very much into my experience.

My first real exposure to the Church came when I interned at a think tank whose staff, a mix of Catholics and Protestants, often discussed theology. The think tank’s founder was a priest and my supervisor would later be ordained as well. The latter once told me that I would either become Catholic or nothing. I thought that was silly at the time. But somehow over the course of a few years, I started to think that maybe the Church was right. Not just right about one topic, but maybe just plain right—about everything.

Once I became open to the idea, it was hard to stop seeing things in this light. I started to find clues—like Dan Brown’s invincibly ignorant Robert Langdon—particularly when reading the Bible. The most arresting of these was not, as some readers might guess, Our Lord’s discourse on the Bread of Life or the giving of the keys to Peter, but the account in Acts of the Council of Jerusalem. The first Christians were divided about the question of the Mosaic law; Jewish Christians insisted that Gentile converts needed to become Jews, that males should undergo circumcision, and that dietary and other customs should be observed. Paul disagreed. But what do we see him do? Instead of founding his own church and attempting to win adherents to his position as the leader of a new breakaway sect, Paul sets off for Jerusalem, where the Church’s leaders debate these issues, and he finds himself confronting Peter. But even in the midst of their dispute, Paul does not break off from Peter or his fellows; he reasons with them in a loving and charitable manner. I found what follows even more moving. When the council adopts most of Paul’s positions—but not all of them—he accepts the decision and insists that Christians must avoid eating food sacrificed to idols. He accepts the teaching of the universal Church and Peter as the head of the Church. This was clearly what the Church was supposed to look like: united, under a tangible authority in which debate is possible without schism or recriminations. And this sure looked a lot more like the Catholic Church than the Protestants.

When I decided to become Catholic, mine was at first a purely intellectual decision. I just decided that the Catholic Church was right, but I didn’t know how one actually became Catholic. And I wasn’t necessarily on board with personally doing anything Catholic. I was going to be Catholic in the sense that I was going to cheer for the Catholics and at least give Church teaching the benefit of the doubt. My old coworkers, though, pointed out that I needed to start going to Mass, which seemed quite strange to me. Nor did I begin doing so until I had entered law school. There, my roommate (who was a practicing Catholic) went every Sunday. He reported to me that Mass at Christ the King, the regional charismatic parish where he had gone on his first Sunday, was horrible. He told me that the homily was extra long—like a Protestant service—and the music was upbeat, energetic, and had a guitar—also like a Protestant service. It sounded like a great option for me. I went the next weekend and found myself signed up for R.C.I.A.

Christ the King was the perfect parish for me to convert in. My R.C.I.A. group was large and full of people like myself—would-be converts wanting to learn about the faith rather than someone checking a box to get a sacrament. Our group leader had a Ph.D. in history and was in the process of being ordained to the diaconate. The pastor was himself a convert with an amazing story—the dark-and-stormy-night kind of conversion story—and was willing to tackle the big issues from the pulpit. The R.C.I.A. process got into real material and answered tough questions. Learning about the saints was a particular treat. For my confirmation I chose Saint Alban, the first recorded British martyr, who only took the place of a priest to save his life but also converted his own executioner by his example.

My roommate went to Mass every Sunday with me (the parish grew on him) and stood with me at the Easter Vigil as my sponsor. He was a great inspiration, though no one is perfect. At the Vigil, he forgot my confirmation name and whispered to me asking my saint at the last minute. Mishearing “Alban,” he answered the priest, “Almond.” I was confirmed in the name of Saint Almond, with the priest giving a skeptical look that matched my concern that this is not a real saint’s name. But it turns out Saint Almond is another British martyr, though not the one I had picked. I still don’t know who my patron saint is.

Alban or Almond, the conversion clearly took. My six children have been baptized into the Holy Catholic Church, and I now find myself thinking a great deal about how to raise them in the faith. I know that mine is not a particularly exciting conversion story. Sometimes I envy people who have a great road-to-Damascus moment that turns their lives around. For me, it was a gradual recognition of the truth and the understanding of authority to speak that truth, a truth that eventually pushed me to action. If there is any lesson from it, it is that quiet encouragement and engagement both matter. You never know whether the person you’re arguing with is slowly moving in the right direction and agreeing with you. It is also, I suppose, a testament to the mystery of providence and God’s ability to bring good forth out of evil. If He can redeem us with the horror of the Cross, a teenager can be led to Him by one of the worst novels ever written.