Another Roman Road

How an Evangelical Becomes Catholic

Welcome to Reformation Catholicism’s first guest post! Madison Morrison is a junior at Samford University, where she’s been studying English and Christian Ministry. She reached out to me a few months ago after reading my Main Essay to ask about other work seeking to preserve the gifts of Protestantism within the Catholic Church. Around the same time, I read her essay about discovering Catholicism and was impressed by it. Now, having recently been Confirmed into the Church, I thought it would be cool for my readers to hear from her, another young Evangelical-turned-Catholic, about how it happened and what it was like. With that, I turn it over to Madison.

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A large sign in front of me read, “St. Perpetua Catholic School.” Dressed in a plaid skirt and navy sweatshirt, I held my mother’s hand and looked up at her.

“But Mommy,” I asked, “why can’t I have communion? I am baptized.”

It was my first day at a private Catholic school, where I would remain for less than a year. My mother had just informed me that when the school had Mass, I could not receive communion– something I found very upsetting.

“You have to be Catholic to take communion here, honey,” my mother said gently.

She did not explain the theology of the Eucharist or mention the deep river that ran between our land of “Protestant” and this strange land of “Catholic.” Yet, to my young mind, it seemed there couldn’t be that great a difference between the two.

I knew that my distant cousin would send my mom prayer cards with saints on them, which were promptly discarded into our kitchen trash can. I also knew my mom opposed sending me to this school. It was Catholic, after all! But my parents were desperate to get me out of California public schools, and St. Perpetua sat within walking distance of our home.

Nevertheless, I was unaware of what made Catholics and Protestants so different.

“Well,” ten-year-old me said thoughtfully, “I will just become Catholic then.”

My mom gazed ahead, her green eyes inscrutable. “If that is a decision you want to make when you grow up,” she said with a shrug, “you can.”

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I see now that the Lord was always calling me home to the Catholic Church. From my earliest years, I felt an innate pull to the big families with statues in their gardens and homes. The same ones that had strange dangling beads jostling in the car. But it wasn’t until this past summer that I allowed that yearning to come to fruition.

The home I grew up in spanned the breadth of the Protestant spectrum. My father was raised Episcopalian by an agnostic and a Buddhist, and my mother was raised Southern Baptist with roots in Seventh-Day Adventism. This allowed us to wholeheartedly accept the title of “non-denominational.” (I would later come to realize that my flavor of Protestantism was really sugar-coated Baptist theology vaguely grounded in Calvinism.)

My home was a “Church every Sunday” home. My mom made sure I never said “OMG” or used the Lord’s name in vain. We prayed before meals and before going to bed.

By all standards, I was raised in a good Evangelical home. Yet when the time came, as it always does in adolescence, for faith to transfer from one generation to another, it didn’t.

As a child, I saw Jesus as the genie in a lamp. I would say a prayer at the same time I wished on a star. I talked to God more as a magical master than as the Creator of all.

When middle school hit, a new awareness of the world made it impossible to simply surf the wave of my parents’ faith. I had to find my own. But when the time came, I struggled to catch my wave. Instead, I sank under the currents.

Middle school was a hard time for me. It encompassed a move from California, mental health issues, and strains of Instagram-infographic-style progressivism. I regressed, became a shell, and vented my hatred towards God in word and deed.

High school was different. I paused my anger at God and wondered if He was real and, if He was… who He was. After a long search for truth, I found Him as He had always been–the same God my parents had read me stories about. Only things were different now. Now, I knew Him as an intimate God, a loving Father, and my Creator.

As I came to a place of reconciliation with the Lord, and in true undeniable faith in Him, the strangest thing happened… I had this niggling feeling about Catholicism. Catholicism was something entirely different than the way I had been raised, and I viewed it with unease.

I don’t really know when I started to think about the Church or if perhaps the thought had lingered there all along. What I do know is that Catholicism began to quietly enter my life and my mind, patiently planting seeds.

After my initial conversion to Christianity—marked by a prayer of repentance and faith in my bedroom—I began to look for Christian content online. Some Catholics drifted onto my feed in small waves, while others were more prominent, such as Father Mike Schmitz. Each time, however, I quickly brushed away the ideas they espoused.

Questioning the Protestantism I had been raised with and only recently accepted seemed like far-fetched ideation. It was easy to ignore. Yet, at the same time, I had this weird sense (that I now laugh at) that I would one day marry a Catholic. My father seemed to intuit this somehow, and joked in high school that I would one day marry into a Catholic family.

All the while, I continued to develop in my faith, going through the early steps of sanctification. The Lord weeded out the faults and sins of my life prior to Him, patiently working in my heart. In knowing Him more, I desired to know more about Him, and I began to develop a vigorous appetite for theology

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At some point in my junior year of high school, having been a committed believer for a year and a half, I increasingly found myself in Catholic online spaces. I’m not sure if it was the combination of the Catholic political commentators I had come to enjoy or if it was the apologetic debates I consumed, but somehow I had landed in this foreign land—and I was fascinated.

I began watching videos of people describing their conversions, their reasons for their faith, and core Catholic principles. Yet my mother’s disapproval of the Church lingered in my mind, as well as my fears about this unknown territory. With the knowledge that physically going to a Catholic church to ask questions was impossible, the online world became my classroom.

In fact, I created a Reddit account for the sole purpose of learning more about Catholicism.

“Protestant teen looking to learn more about Catholicism,” the header of my post read. I had hopped onto two Catholic forums to ask questions.

In droves, the wonderful Catholics of the internet recommended books, speakers, and websites (which I would not look at until four years later when I remembered them). I looked at bits and pieces of their suggestions, watched some videos, asked some more questions, and then forgot about it.

Most of it, that is.

At some point during this time, I also stumbled upon the concept of “transubstantiation” and I had questions.¹

One night at church, my youth pastor sat, reading from Matthew 26, the Last Supper.

It seemed like the perfect opportunity.

My youth pastor had just given us a spiel on not overanalyzing theology and worrying about so-called “tertiary issues.” Yet, as I stared down at the verse in my Bible, I couldn’t help the squirming in my chest and the desperation for answers.

The word “transubstantiation” rang in my ears, begging me to ask. I raised my hand.

“Yeah, Madison?” my youth pastor called on me.

I breathed in sharply. “Isn’t this the verse that Catholics use to justify transubstantiation?”

His brows raised, and he nodded his head slowly. Everyone looked at me with confused expressions. They turned to each other and whispered with scrunched brows. Clearly, none of them had ever heard of this.

“Yes,” he nodded, “they do.”

I waited for the clarification to come. The reason this was wrong. I mean, this wasn’t what we believed.

Instead, another student shot up a hand and blurted out, “What is tran-sub-stant-ee-ate-um or whatever it is called?”

My youth pastor sighed deeply. “Transubstantiation is the Catholic belief that Jesus’ body and blood is physically present in communion,” he began. “Which is not what we believe. We just believe it is symbolic. But, this is one of those less important issues. It doesn’t matter what you believe about it. Let’s focus again on the universal takeaways about Jesus’ character.”

I remember the pointed look he shot me, like a reprimand. While that stung, what was worse was the disappointment I felt at his lack of response. I wanted more. However, being young and trusting of authority, it was easy for me to push this aside and simply listen to him.

It was also easy to find rebuttals of Catholic beliefs online (rebuttals I would later recognize as ill-informed and poorly motivated) that dismissed and temporarily sated my curiosity. Pushed aside and buried deep, I tried to get rid of my thoughts on the topic; yet, despite my best efforts, I was never very successful.

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A year and a half later, as I prepared for an Evangelical mission trip in Zambia, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Catholic Church. I spent hours watching videos about Catholic theology and found myself entirely lost and questioning everything.

Having been prepped by my mission organization for “spiritual warfare” prior to the trip, it was easy for me to dismiss my theological confusion as nothing more than an “attack of the enemy.” Even still, there were nights I wrestled with God, losing sleep as I asked Him what was going on.

When I loaded onto the plane to fly across the Atlantic, the girl I sat beside told me her story of leaving the “demonic” Catholic Church and all the “spiritual bondage” that came with it.²

“It is full of so much darkness,” she said sadly, shaking her head.

This was my confirmation. Leave behind all thought of the Catholic Church! It’s as bad as they say!

When we landed on Zambian soil, I would discover that one of the groups that this organization evangelized to was Catholics.

“They often have a work-based mindset,” one leader told me.

“They live in bondage,” another said.

I nodded along, shoving down the part of me that had just been consuming hours of Catholic content. I forced my thoughts into a chest, locked it, and threw away the key.

Now, I was ready to happily share the good news with the Catholics we encountered.

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Two weeks after returning to the States, I was off to college as a Christian Ministry major.

The fires of ministry still freshly burning within, I was ready to share my faith with anyone and everyone who would hear it. I yearned to serve the Lord and make Him known to the world.

Within the first two weeks of school, I had shared the gospel with Jehovah’s Witnesses on a street corner, and in the following weeks I prayed over and ministered to anyone I could.

My desires were good… but I quickly realized in conversations with other students in my major (who were more developed in their theological beliefs) that I was theologically confused and without a church home.

My mission trip had taught me many Charismatic—and frankly off-base—theological beliefs that I was freshly unpacking. Paired with the church home hunting that is all too characteristic of freshman year at a private Christian college, it seemed like I couldn’t find my place in the Christian landscape as I knew it.

This coincided with questions that were raised in my classes. Debates and conversations about Calvinism, salvation, “once saved always saved,” and more took place and left me with insufficient answers.

I wandered through my school year, hopping from church to church and asking a million questions.

At some point during this time, in similar fashion to the other times I had “done research,” Catholicism snuck into my social media feed. Only this time, it was not obscure anecdotes; it was full-force facts and shocking claims.

The Eucharist. Contraception. Salvation.

They smacked me in the face.

And for the first time, I began to allow myself to wonder about them. My previous explorations had been like a child digging with a shovel in a sandbox. At first, this time was no different. I did my surface-level dig, finding only rocks instead of treasure. I pushed it off, set it aside, and was going to forget…

And then summer hit.

One day, as I was training for a new job with a long-time friend, I made the mistake of mentioning my “rocks”—my curiosities and questions about the Catholic faith.

My friend was shocked. “Madison,” she said, “You are so deep in your faith… I wouldn’t have expected this from you.”

My stomach sank. Within minutes, she was quizzing me on the Catholic Church’s beliefs on salvation, prayer, contraception, priests, and every other entity foreign to our land of “Protestantism.” It struck me the more she asked that I had never really dug at all. That I knew nothing about these little rocks, and I had set aside my shovel before truly digging.

Suddenly, I was faced with the fact that I needed to do something about my rocks. I couldn’t shove them away anymore. The key I thought I had thrown away earlier had resurfaced, and I hesitantly unlocked the chest.

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In the following months, I traded my shovel for an excavator, my few inches of depth for hundreds of feet.

Books, Reformation documents, ecumenical documents, and hours of the wisdom of YouTube left me with no place to run or hide. When I faced Catholicism as it truly was for the first time, I was nothing other than entirely convinced.

A wise saint once said, “To be deep in Church history is to cease to be Protestant.”³ When you face the claims of the Church in their truth and entirety… you are backed into a corner.

The claims of the Church can be nothing more than either complete truth or absolute heresy, and if you understand that, you are forced to choose.

As of March 2nd, 2025, nearly a year after my excavator first broke ground, I made my choice.

I joined the Church.

There are a multitude of reasons for this, from Church history, answered prayers, Biblical evidence, and a call that extended throughout my life, but the short summation of them would be this:

1. The Eucharist.

   As a believer of the Christian faith, if someone claims to have your Lord and Savior—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, well… they might be crazy. But if one billion someones make that same claim… Well, that calls for investigation.
   In fact, it absolutely cannot be ignored.

   More so, if every Church Father unequivocally defended that truth, then you face a problem as a Protestant. Either the entire Church was wrong about this for 1500 years, or you are. If Catholics are right, then the greatest conceivable blessing stands to be gained; if we are wrong, then Catholics are perpetuating the largest blasphemy in history.

   You must choose.

2. Fruit.

   “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

   -Matthew 7:15-20, emphasis added.

   Fruit may be the last thing someone thinks to associate with the Catholic Church. In fact, many Evangelicals will point to past historical atrocities the Church committed in order to prove the Church’s fruit is bad.⁴ However, when looking at the preservation of the Church’s beliefs, especially the preservation of societal standards, the Church’s fruit is very good.
   While by the 1950s every major Christian denomination had allowed for contraception, the Catholic Church denounced this, sticking with historic Christian teaching. As other denominations go so far as to support LGBTQ+ in leadership, advocate for abortion, allow for IVF, and other substantial changes to Christian belief and structure, the Catholic Church has remained steady and unyielding to the shifts of cultural norms. People always fail. There is no doubt that there are historical atrocities people in the Church have committed. But the preservation of faith and the moral standards of the Church has stood the test of time. If that is not good fruit, I don’t know what is.

3. The Focus.
   Tying into one and two, the center of the Mass is the Eucharist. The center of worship… is the Lord.
   I do not say this to assert that Protestant churches do not focus on the Lord or worship Him… but I do say this to make you think:
   What is the center of a Protestant Church service? Is it the breaking of bread? The Lord Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity? Or is it a sermon? Or rather the person giving the sermon?
   Sermons, while good, ultimately depend on the rhetorical skill of a fallible being.
   In a culture that too often points back to us, there is something poignant about a service that points us back to Him. If the focus of Sunday morning is the gospel readings and the Eucharist, then there is little room for man to be the center of attention. It is not the pastor’s voice filling up space but rather the Lord Himself.

Some of these questions are hard. Some may stir your ire as much as your curiosity. Some are as deeply challenging as convicting. But it is neither our comfort that designates truth, nor the limits of our understanding.

When I realized this, I simply couldn’t turn away anymore. I had tried to lock down, push away, and ignore for years. Yet, the questions never went away and continued to whisper to my soul until I was forced to answer.

You too face this dilemma. You face a choice. And in some way, you must answer. On this side of heaven or the next.

I can’t begin to express the deep wrestling that comes with conversion, the valley of trial and error. But I can express the deep joy that comes in answering the Lord’s call and seeking the truth above all.

I don’t know if the little girl who asked her mother if she could join the Church knew she would one day. She certainly did not understand the gravity of such a decision. But my, I would like to think she would be deeply pleased knowing I sought Jesus and found Him in His Church.

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You can find more of Madison’s work here, and more of my work here.

1. Transubstantiation is the belief of the Catholic Church that Christ is physically present in the Sacrament of Communion: Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. This dates back to the early Church with accounts defending this as early as the first century, especially citing John 6.

2. For those unfamiliar with this rhetoric, this language is a normal part of more Charismatic Christianity.

3. Eric here to add that this is none other than St. John Henry Newman, a 19th century Oxford don and Anglican priest who studied his way into Catholicism. He is also the source of the “via media,” a position that imagines Anglicanism as being halfway between Catholicism and Protestantism. Ironically, Anglicans today still cite this as their unique heritage, despite the fact that the man who coined the term admitted it was ultimately an attempt to evade the fullness of the Catholic Faith.

4. Madison: This position often leverages bad popes and the Crusades to prove that the Church and Papacy were not established by God. This ignores the 33 evil kings and 5 good kings of the Old Testament that were equally appointed by God despite their human faults.

Eric: And even if it were a kind of “good works competition,” (and my Protestant interlocutors take great pains in other arenas to insist that it’s not), the Catholic Church would still win. She provides a full quarter of the world’s healthcare, and operates a staggering “5,000 hospitals, 10,000 orphanages, 95,000 elementary schools and 47,000 secondary schools,” according to Wikipedia. She funded most of the great art of Europe, and a fair chunk of the science, too. But Madison is right. Readers of the Bible will know that the important party in covenants with God is not man, but God. Catholics may have serious moral failings, but it is God who preserves the Church’s integrity, because her body is His own.