Richard Maffeo: from Jew to evangelical Christian, and thirty-two years later, Catholic.
It was the Bible that led him on his journey, and also the testimony of the teachings of the first Christians.
Richard Maffeo was born into a Jewish home in the United States. When he was 22 years old, on Christmas Eve of 1972, he prayed a brief prayer: “God, I believe that Jesus is the Messiah.” “I did not understand much of what it meant to commit myself to the Messiah, but I understood that I needed his forgiveness, his help to change my life.”
Maffeo accepted Jesus as the Messiah promised to Israel in the light of various Old Testament prophecies pointed out to him by some Protestant Christians who knew them well. “For example, they pointed me to Isaiah 7, which foretells the birth of the Messiah from a virgin. And Psalm 22, which described his crucifixion. Isaiah 9:6 speaks of a child who will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Daniel 7 prophesies about the Son of Man who will receive from the Ancient of Days an everlasting dominion,” he lists. And of course, the passage that opens Mel Gibson’s film on the Passion, in Isaiah 53, the “suffering servant”: “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; with his stripes we are healed.”
“After reading and rereading the Old Testament Scripture, I suddenly understood the truth. Not only did God love me, but he had planned from the beginning of Creation to send his Son to bear the punishment that my sins, that all our sins, deserve. By trusting in his sacrificial death, for me, I could be saved,” was young Maffeo’s conclusion.
He considered himself a Messianic Jew, or a Jewish Christian, and for more than thirty years he attended evangelical churches and studied the Scriptures with passion. It is a period he remembers with sincere gratitude.
“A longing to please God”
“It was in evangelical churches that I learned the need for daily repentance. I learned that personal holiness is not acquired by following a list of rules, but by developing a deep longing to please God. I experienced spiritual fullness in worship. I looked forward to Sunday so I could lose myself in worship of Christ. My teachers and pastors helped me acquire a spiritual hunger for prayer and the charisms of the Holy Spirit. Centered on Scripture, they taught me to love and memorize the Word of God,” he explains.
“I owe an enormous debt to evangelical Protestantism, but I did not understand the fuller depth and breadth of the living Presence of Christ on earth until I discovered it in the Catholic Church,” he adds.
The Eucharistic presence
As the years went by, he met Catholics who argued for Catholic teachings from the Bible. Richard already knew many verses by heart, but in isolation. When he thought about them together, it changed his way of seeing things.
“I realized, as the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church realized, that the Lord Jesus is with us also physically on the altar of the Eucharist, with Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.”
There were the strange words of Jesus Christ in chapter 6 of St. John: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” And there was what St. Paul taught the Corinthians: “Is not the cup of thanksgiving [eucharist] a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread which we break a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor 10:16).
How did the first Christians understand this? Certainly not as twentieth- or twenty-first-century evangelicals would, not as a symbolic memorial. St. Justin, a convert from a cultured pagan family, who was born in Palestine around the year 100 A.D., is very clear in his writings: “the bread we receive is not common bread. And the drink is not common drink. We have been taught that just as the Word of God became flesh for our salvation, this food, over which we proclaim the thanksgiving with the word of the Lord, has been transformed into the flesh and blood of that same Jesus, and this food, thus transformed, nourishes our body.”
Thus Catholics maintain that teaching: that the bread and wine really become that Flesh and that Blood of Jesus, which Jesus asked us to eat in order to have eternal life.
The saints who pray for us
“Protestants who recite the Nicene Creed will recognize the phrase: I believe in the Communion of Saints,” Maffeo goes on to explain. “God made me remember that scripture I had read many times while studying the Bible over the years, and he opened my eyes to the fuller meaning of the Nicene phrase: Christians have the privilege of asking for the intercession of the saints who are on the other side of the grave.”
It made Maffeo think that Moses, though he had died many centuries earlier, held a long conversation with Jesus and Elijah at the Transfiguration. And in the parable of the rich man Dives, he asked for the intercession of Abraham, who had died in the distant past, so that he would warn his brothers. “I thought that if the rich man asked for Abraham’s intercession, why should I doubt that the saints intercede for us? If I could ask my living friends and my family to pray to God for me, why not ask it also of our Christian family, who are far more alive in Heaven?” And it was in that sense that he understood Luke 20:38: “Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him.”
The role of Peter and his successors
“For 33 years I resisted the Catholic interpretation of Matthew 16:18 (‘you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven’), that the Lord should have chosen Peter and his successors to lead the Church. I did not know that almost all the ancient doctors of the Church—Irenaeus, 198 A.D.; Tertullian, 200 A.D.; Jerome, 383 A.D.; Augustine, 402 A.D.—recognized Peter’s authority, grounded in Jesus, on the basis of this passage.”
“But when I searched the Bible for the word ‘keys’, I discovered that when it is not used as a tool for opening something, the word represents authority over something, as in Isaiah 22:22; or in Revelation 1:18 and 3:7. At that point, my memory took me to John 21, and I understood why it was specifically Peter whom Jesus charged to feed his sheep.”
Mary: venerated, not adored
“As a Protestant, I recoiled from what seemed to me an idolatrous adoration of the mother of Christ,” Maffeo explains. He discovered in the Catechism (paragraph 971) that the veneration of the Virgin “differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit”. Thus he saw that Mary is venerated, not adored.
But before coming to the Catechism, Maffeo went, as always, through the Bible and the early Christians. Thus he discovered that for Justin (155 A.D.), Irenaeus (190 A.D.) and Tertullian (210 A.D.)Mary was a “second Eve,” “the one who corrected the error of our first Mother. They saw her as the new Ark of the Covenant, whose womb cradled the Bread of Life. They saw her as the queen of heaven, just as the kings of Judah honored their queen mothers (as in 1 Kings 2:19; Proverbs 31:1-9; Jeremiah 13:18). Even Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, held traditional Catholic positions on Mary, such as her perpetual virginity and her immaculate conception.”
The end of the journey
“At the Easter Vigil of 2005, I was received into the Catholic Church. That night God took my love for Scripture, prayer and worship and combined them with the Eucharist, the Communion of Saints, the Virgin Mary, papal authority and other doctrines and sacraments that God gave to the world through the Church.”
Today Maffeo and his wife Nancy attend St. Charles Borromeo parish in Tacoma, Washington. He writes on several blogs in English on spiritual and apologetics topics (such as www.equippingcatholics.blogspot.com) and has written two books with his testimony and what he has learned on his spiritual journey (www.richmaffeobooks.com).
Source: Religión en Libertad
