I was baptized Catholic, which had more to do with my mother and father being members of large Catholic families of Anglo-Irish and Polish descent than it did with conscientious obedience to Church teaching. Shortly after receiving my first Communion, I reprimanded my parents for missing Sunday Mass. “It’s a mortal sin and we’re going to hell,” I reportedly told my surprised mother, who wasn’t particularly inclined to being scolded by an eight-year-old boy. Thus ended my parents’ familial obligations to the Catholic Church.

We tried out various Protestant communities: the local United Methodist congregation (I enjoyed partaking of the grape juice substituted for wine) and then a charismatic Anglican church in which congregants would routinely lie on the floor, “slain in the Spirit.” Eventually we landed in a non-denominational evangelical megachurch in our native northern Virginia.

I very much enjoyed that evangelical church. The pastor, wearing a blazer sans tie, was compelling and charismatic. He projected Bible verses on massive screens behind him to support his sermons, which were preached in a Tidewater cadence that reminded me of my extended family. I read the Bible, prayed (some), and sought to persuade friends at school to become Christian.

My first year at the University of Virginia, I fell in with several evangelical groups on campus. Kindled by youthful enthusiasm, my faith became the central, all-encompassing feature of my life, and I sought to evangelize everyone I met. I was innocent and naïve, in some ways that at times I wish I could recover, and in others that today still induce an embarrassing chuckle. One manifestation of that naïveté was my eagerness in the spring semester to sign up for a course entitled “Introduction to the New Testament.” What could be better than learning more about the Bible? Within a few weeks, I regretted my decision as I discovered how contested were many of the beliefs I held most dear, such as the historicity of the biblical texts and the divinity of Christ. Many of my evangelical confreres in the class seemed comparatively indifferent to these direct attacks on our beliefs. “What do you expect from an unbelieving professor?” they asked. (Our instructor was in fact an Episcopalian.)

For me, that class and others I would later take as part of my religious studies minor were a provocation that demanded a response. I familiarized myself with the arguments of evangelical and conservative Protestant scholars regarding the chronological dating of the Old and New Testament books, the reconciliation of seeming historical incongruities between various biblical texts, and the scriptural basis for Reformation-era doctrines such as sola fide. In the process, I realized that I needed, indeed yearned for, a Protestantism that was more grounded in the history of the church, including not only the earliest generations of Reformers but pre-Reformation sources such as the early Church Fathers.

So I became a Presbyterian, and while still an undergraduate was accepted to a Reformed seminary near home. It was in seminary, I hoped, that I would find the logically coherent, historically faithful sort of Protestantism that would bind intellectual vigor to the emotive tendencies of my faith. In some ways that was true. I certainly read a lot of sources I had wanted to read, including Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

And yet there were still unresolved tensions. Some of it was personal: I began dating, and almost immediately fell in love with a Reformed Baptist girl (there’s the naïveté again). We agreed on almost everything when it came to theology, except something essential to contemplating a life together: whether to baptize children (paedobaptism) or wait until they are old enough to make their own profession of faith (credobaptism). For much of the year we dated, we read books together, sought counsel from our respective pastors and elders, and ultimately made no progress. She didn’t think baptizing babies was biblical; I did.

Meanwhile in seminary, I was trying to work through the complexities of a scholarly debate that had roiled the Protestant academy and various evangelical churches for a generation: the so-called New Perspective on Paul. To put it succinctly, scholars who subscribe to this theory argue that Martin Luther misinterpreted Paul’s meaning in Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians when he speaks of “works of the law” that are not salvific. Far from condemning the idea that both faith and works were required for salvation—an idea that Luther and his co-Reformers opposed—Paul was telling the early Church, which was composed of many Jewish believers, that various badges of Jewish identity such as circumcision, Sabbath observance, and the dietary laws were no longer required. Such markers were superseded by faith in Christ, and their full meaning was manifested in the sacraments; for example, baptism fulfilled the promise of circumcision.

If this theory was true—and even some prominent and respected Protestant scholars, including the Anglican bishop N. T. Wright, taught it—it seemed to threaten the very foundation of Protestantism. Sola fide, “once saved, always saved,” “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior”: all of these doctrines represent the various ways that many Protestants conceptualize what they view as a core marker of their religious identity, and what they define as setting them apart from Catholics, who believe that participation in the sacramental life is necessary for salvation.

The more I read about this debate, the more overwhelmed I became. Trying to accurately interpret Paul’s letters required competency in biblical languages, deep knowledge of ancient history, and familiarity with the complexities of scholarly debates over the Bible. (This is of course true for all of Scripture.) And even if over a lifetime of study I could acquire those skills and that knowledge, there was no guarantee I would identify the right answer. Indeed, many scholars far more intelligent than I had been studying and debating these very topics for decades, with no resolution in sight.

All of this seemed in tension with another core doctrine of Protestantism, though one less formally taught and discussed: the doctrine of perspicuity. In layman’s terms, the doctrine means that the Bible is clear enough that Christians can read it and either determine what is necessary for salvation or identify the essential doctrines of the faith. In my Presbyterian tradition, we relied on the definition articulated in the mid-seventeenth-century English Westminster Confession of Faith:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

How could I reconcile the idea that Scripture is clear, clear enough that the learned and unlearned should be able to read it and determine what is necessary for salvation, with Protestant debates over precisely that question?

The more I pondered this problem, the more perplexed I became. Protestantism, pace the Catholic Church, is supposed to be the everyman’s religion. “The plow-boy with scripture is mightier than the greatest Pope without it,” Tyndale declared. There is no need for an ecclesial hierarchy of priests, bishops, and the pope to tell you what the Bible means, on this view; its meaning is quite simple, accessible to everyone. And yet here we were, Protestants debating not only what one might call peripheral issues such as instrumental accompaniment in worship and female ordination but also the core doctrines of our five-centuries-old tradition.

As soon as I realized this, I could not banish the thought. In Protestantism, divisions were everywhere, causing ruptures in denominations and the formation of new entities. My Presbyterian denomination had been formed in 1973 because of a dispute within the Presbyterian mainline. Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans—all of them were periodically splintering over divergent interpretations of Scripture. Even the evangelical church of my youth had once been Southern Baptist, but had dropped the label to be more “seeker-friendly.”

Who was I to make sense of these seemingly intractable debates? I liked to think I was intelligent, even bookish. But was I capable enough to discern which church most rightly interprets Holy Scripture? The more I studied, the more inadequate I assessed myself to be to the task of adjudicating centuries of debates over the Bible, ecclesial history, and complex theological subjects. Far from being a faith for the simple, Protestantism was a dauntingly cerebral religious tradition.

While I was having this crisis of faith, one of my best friends from college was experiencing similar difficulties at a different Presbyterian seminary. Excited for Christian history courses that he presumed would prove that the Reformed tradition most faithfully embodied the teachings of the early Church, he instead discovered a dog’s breakfast of theological controversies that were consistently resolved by recourse to an institutional church. What is more, this institutional church, and the Church Fathers who informed its thinking, taught doctrines regarding the sacraments, salvation, and Mary that were consistently at odds with the Reformers. All this confusion was leading him to consider Catholicism because of its claim that the tradition of the Church helps to interpret Scripture.

My friend and I talked and emailed a fair bit over those months. Despite my own theological frustrations, I thought my friend crazy for contemplating the possibility that the Catholic Church was right. I had left that tradition, so of course that meant I knew enough about the Church to be an authority on the matter. Instead of listening to me, my friend entered the Church with his family shortly before he completed his seminary degree (much to the chagrin of his professors). They moved back to Virginia, and our debates, now in person, became more intense.

For every criticism I leveled at the Catholic Church, my friend had an answer, and his responses were sophisticated ones that reinforced my feelings of intellectual inferiority to the task at hand. I was losing—not only the debate with my friend but my confidence in any semblance of a coherent Protestant theology. I wondered, did Jesus intend for it to be so difficult to identify His Church that Christians would have to become scholars and theologians?

The Jesus of the Gospels never seems to portray the choice to follow Him as a sophisticated theological one requiring extensive study. Over and over again, He makes His authority evident by ways of miracles and otherworldly holiness—what the Church calls “motives of credibility.” John writes, “Many other signs also did Jesus in the sight of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God: and that believing, you may have life in his name.” In the apostolic preaching of the post-Resurrection Church and in the Church Fathers, we see that same paradigm of miracles and holiness acting as demonstrable proof for the Church’s identity.

The Catholic Church, I came to realize, was the church for everyone, because miracles and holiness are proofs we all can appreciate. Protestantism, in contrast, is often beguiled by its own default of placing interpretive authority of an ancient book written in a language no one today speaks in the conscience of the individual Christian. This makes unrealistic intellectual demands upon its adherents. That’s not to say Catholics are discouraged from deepening the intellectual dimensions of their faith, whether through reading Scripture or consulting its rich theological heritage. Yet alongside intellectual heavyweights such as Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman are the simple and holy saints, those who would likely struggle to articulate theological syllogisms or offer a philosophically coherent defense of the faith: Isidore the Farmer, Bernadette Soubirous, and Faustina Kowalska, to name a few. Even Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, decreed a doctor of the Church in 1997, was no theologian in the typical academic sense.

Once I recognized and submitted to the Catholic Church as the one Jesus founded—which, because of my earlier first Communion, I was able to achieve by simply confessing my sins to a Dominican priest who patiently suffered anxious theological questions that seem now to me bizarre—the study of Scripture and theology no longer induced frustration and anxiety. No longer was it expected of me that I personally discern the meaning of Scripture but that I learn its rich meaning from the Church and Her tradition. I could have confidence that the Church was who She claimed to be, and that She demanded of me not intellectual brilliance or scholarly competence, but faith and holiness.