My church loyalties: Why I am not yet a Catholic
Vatican City as seen from across the Tiber. Photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont.
In 2005, after Benedict XVI was elected pope, I wrote an essay for the Century titled “In need of a pope?” That essay cost me a job at a Protestant evangelical institution. A Catholic friend told me at the time that I should think of that result as a gracious preemptive strike.
Since then I have repeatedly been asked, “Why are you not Catholic?”
The main reason I am not (yet) Catholic and remain a Methodist and an ordained Methodist elder is that I do not know how to become Catholic without betraying the people who taught me to love God, pray, worship, desire the Eucharist, take delight in scripture, and so on. How can I leave the people I love?
