Yes… this almost happened to me:

(I recommend taking the time to watch the video before reading what follows)

 

It was around the year 2000 when, after having spent some time away from God, I experienced a reconversion. At that time my Catholic formation was not poor, since I had been educated at a Catholic school where we read the Bible daily, I had been very involved in the Charismatic Renewal, and later I had even belonged to a group of university students being prepared in one of our seminaries to be committed Catholics.

The Internet was becoming increasingly popular, and I wanted to use that medium to share my faith with other brothers and sisters. I founded a small community in the MSN groups called Ecumenical Catholics at the Service of Christ (which later became the website CatolicosEcumenicos.com) and began to participate actively in other groups where there were not only Catholics but also Protestants.

When, as was natural, a debate began between Catholics and Protestants, I would rather naively step in to calm the waters and ask that we go deeper into what united us and not into what divided us. But there came a moment when, faced with such insistence on the part of the Protestants, the debate had to be addressed, and the subject to be discussed was Mary’s virginity.

Until then I knew the basics of the issue: Protestants believe that Mary had more children because they interpret literally the expression “brothers of Jesus”, which at that time also referred to close relatives. Case closed. However, one of the Protestants pointed out a supposed error in that reasoning: first, that this could happen in the Old Testament because in Hebrew the word aja (brother) was used that way. The New Testament, however, is written in Greek, and in that language the word for “cousin” is anepsios; therefore, if the writers of the Gospels had wanted to say that Jesus’ brothers were not sons of the same mother, they would have used that word instead of adelphos, which is the one they use. To this they added another argument that seemed more convincing to me: in Matthew 1:25 it was said that Saint Joseph (the adoptive father) “knew” (in the sexual sense) the Virgin Mary after the birth of Jesus.

Faced with these objections, I did not know what to say. I went to consult my mother, a woman of deep faith and prayer, but she answered in a way similar to Mrs. Amalia. In fact, she became as uneasy as I did when reading Matthew 1:25.

I remember that at that moment I felt the earth move, because I knew that the perpetual virginity of Mary was a dogma of faith. If the Bible truly formally contradicted a dogma, whichever one it might be, then there would be no guarantee that any other dogma was true.

Even then I knew that I could not go around as Hans Küng, Teresa de Forcades or Andrés Torres Queiruga now do, not believing in the dogmas and remaining perfectly comfortable while thinking that I could still consider myself Catholic. Either the Catholic Church taught the complete truth regarding dogmas and doctrine, or it would have no substantial difference from the rest of the Protestant ecclesial communities, with their various doctrines molded to the taste of whichever founder came along. I would have to leave the Church and begin a search for the truth on my own, making a faith to my own “measure.”

Fortunately, my resources were not limited to my kind mother, and I began to investigate. It was then that I found an article in which Father Daniel Gagnon analyzed in detail the objections that had been put to me, and refuted them in a convincing and masterful way (see Did Jesus Have Brothers?). I remember returning with those arguments, and after the debate dragged on for some time, the Protestants ended up alleging that, after all, they did not care whether Mary had had more children or not, since it was neither their problem nor did their salvation depend on it.

Paradoxical and revealing: the issue did not matter to them; the only thing they wanted was to show that the Catholic Church was wrong about something, whatever it might be, so as to open a breach in our Catholic faith. Of course, their intention was not bad: they believed they were in the truth and were helping me to come out of Babylon, which they considered “the great Harlot”, when they were the ones who were mistaken.

If it were not for apologetics, today I would be Protestant, and I would be helping them draw Catholics out of the Church. When I realized how greatly we Catholics need to be formed in this area, I began adding more apologetic material to CatolicosEcumenicos.com, to the point that it no longer made sense to keep it under that name. I closed it and began again in 2006 under another name: ApologeticaCatolica.org.

It seems to me that many bishops have not quite awakened and realized the danger that Protestantism represents for the Catholic faith; and as Father Amatulli lucidly points out: they live as if we were in Wonderland. Let us finally wake up, because the faith and salvation of many of our brothers and sisters are at stake.

Author: José Miguel Arráiz