What you are about to read here is a testimony divided into two parts. The first is the story of my conversion to Orthodoxy. The second, the testimony of my return to the Catholic Church.

Orthodox by the Grace of God (5-21-99)

…that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. (1 Tim 3:15)

and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, WHICH is his body, THE FULNESS of him who fills all in all. (Eph 1:22-23)

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since, ten years ago, the Lord saw fit to rescue me from the shipwreck my life had become. After a childhood in which I had precious experiences with Him, I had become fodder for the predators of the New Age and occultism. The devil was indeed the roaring lion that had found prey to devour (1 Pet 5:8). But Christ came to my rescue and freed me from the jaws of the enemy. I soon found an Evangelical church in which to congregate. Shortly after my reencounter with God, my wife also accepted the Lord, and together we set out on the path of being Evangelical Christians at Amistad Cristiana in Madrid. Over the following six years we had the blessing of growing in that congregation. Amistad Cristiana was like a small family where we found true brotherhood. The man who was our pastor, Gregorio Jacob, had to put up with a great deal on account of how pig-headed I was and my difficulties in maturing as a Christian. Only God knows how grateful I am to Greg for all the things he did for me and for my family. But not only him: brothers and sisters like Flores, Lupita Campos, and many others were true blessings from the Father for my life. God allowed us to see His power in the life of a very special brother, Miguel, who was an active homosexual for many years of his life but who, thanks to the redemption of Christ and the sanctification of the Holy Spirit, was able to leave that world of misery and corruption behind. There was a time in those years when our home served as an inn for several brothers and sisters who were passing through Madrid or serving in the Church. We still remember a very special woman, Elizabeth, who, in only a three-day stay at our house, left us a fragrance of God that we will hardly forget for the rest of our lives.

Things began to change when I found a job in the courier section of a very important security company in Spain. The work was on a night schedule, six days a week, except for four months in the summer when I worked only five days each week. The fact is that it became very hard for me to sleep well during the week, and on Sundays it was not easy to attend the worship service with my family. We gradually drifted away from the church.

When we decided to move to a town near Madrid (Getafe), the distancing from Amistad Cristiana became irreversible. When I left the job and, living in Madrid once again, we went back to visit Amistad Cristiana, it was no longer the same. Many people had left and new ones were coming in. That is the way of life in a congregation, but the fact is that I never again felt that Amistad was my church in the Lord.

On the other hand, I had already begun to study the history of the Church as well as books on theology, especially by Anabaptists. We tried to find a Mennonite church and we found one, but it was in Torrejón, several kilometers from Madrid, and besides, we realized it would be almost impossible for us to fit into a group that had already been running for many years. The truth is that we were becoming Christians without a church in which to congregate. My “church” was starting to be my books and my conversations with other brothers from different congregations.

On more than a few occasions I attended the worship service of the Reformed church located in Vallecas, a neighborhood of Madrid. I had a good friendship with the pastor, but theologically I was very far from Calvinism. It was around then, more than three years ago now, that I began my odyssey on the Internet. At first I devoted myself to taking part in the chats of GCN, one of the most famous Christian chat websites on the whole Internet. Since my English is fairly decent, I managed to make good friends through that medium. It was a few months later that I discovered the Christian forums on the net, also in English. That was very different from the chats, because people had time to prepare their answers in the debates. After an experience on the Internet that I cannot recount because it involves other people, I drifted away from the Lord. Once again, He gave me another chance. Perhaps it was then that I saw most closely the reality that salvation is something one can scorn and throw out the window.

I know there are brothers who do not believe such a thing can happen, but I am telling what I have lived. After experiencing the forgiveness and the might of God’s grace in my life, I resumed my cyber-wanderings on Christian websites. I found the Atrevete website (www.atrevete.com), which had a forum and a chat. But Atrevete was oriented more toward Christian youth and adolescents than toward serious conversations and debates. A few months later I found a forum that was to be very important in my life: the Kingdom of God Forum (http://forums.delphi.com/elreino/), directed at the time by brother Carlos Devetac. I have devoted many hours of my life to the Kingdom of God Forum over the last two and a half years. In a first phase I found myself caught up in a very bitter dispute with a pastor from Elim. That debate was not edifying at all.

Then began one of the most fruitful debates of my life, under the heading “Catholic Church.” A few days after the dialogue started, Friar Nelson Medina, O.P., showed up at the Kingdom Forum, and with him I kept up an exchange of messages — or, as he says, of epistles — that exceeded three hundred. Of course, other brothers also took part in the same debate, and among us all we managed, not without difficulties, to argue without fighting or throwing things at each other’s heads, although every now and then someone would slip in — whether Catholic or Evangelical — who managed to sour the atmosphere. At first, the debate with Nelson revolved around the importance of the Word and its relationship with the Community that lives that Word. I meditated a great deal on that first part of our debate. I believe a good part of the “blame” for the decision I made afterwards has its roots in the analysis I did of that all-important matter of the Word of God and the Church. Christ is the Logos of God, the Word. The Church is the Body of Christ. The Church cannot live without the Word, nor does the Word find its true meaning outside the Church. That is my current position. But let us not get ahead of events. After we had squeezed the Word-and-Church debate dry, there was a pause of a couple of months in which it seemed that everything we had to say had already been said.

I seem to recall it was at that moment that I discovered the Web cristiana (www.iglesia.net). If the Kingdom of God Forum had been a blessing, the Web cristiana was no less of one. It seems hard to believe, but I have the impression that the era when the Web cristiana’s forum had its old format is a very distant one, yet little more than a year and a half has gone by. For some reason that escapes me, the debates on the Iglesia.net forum were “different” from the ones I had in the Kingdom of God forum. To put it one way, I was considerably more belligerent dialectically at Iglesia.net than at the Kingdom. I put it down to the fact that the topics I ended up debating on the Web cristiana were more “serious.” For example, one can disagree about the details of the Second Coming of Christ without the foundations of the Christian faith being greatly affected. However, if one argues about the Trinity, one does enter key territory. Moreover, people of somewhat more varied backgrounds took part in the Iglesia.net forum, as is the case of some atheists such as Stauros (Hernán Toro), with whom I had several truly interesting debates in which I defended the inerrancy of the Bible.

The fact is that, between one debate and the next, and largely because of them, I studied theology and the history of Christianity as never before. But apart from the theological and historical study, something began to weigh on my soul like a hundredweight of iron. The fact that so many people held such different opinions on so many doctrines was leading me to consider that something could not be right in all of this. The Sola Scriptura of the Reformers is a very pretty motto, but it begins to crack when those very Reformers were incapable of agreeing on the interpretation of the Scriptura. On another level, the forums were reproducing the same problem. I began to see that the Christian faith, the creed, depended too much on what this or that fellow might think the truth was. Let me give an example. We know there are Protestants who believe the doctrine of “once saved, always saved,” while others consider that doctrine something dangerous. Both sides pride themselves on proclaiming that they use Sola Scriptura, but they cannot come to an agreement. We know that God is not a God of confusion but of order. Now then, one of the two camps is teaching something that is not true. Who decides who is right?…

I began to meditate on how we can come to know where the correct interpretation of the Word of God resides. Where to look first? In the Word itself. Thus I realized that in Acts 15 the Church held its first great meeting to deal with a doctrinal problem that threatened to destroy the very foundations of Christ’s work. That is, how did the Church solve a serious doctrinal problem? By gathering in a council in which THE WHOLE Church, represented by the apostles, took part. Once I saw this, it was easy for me to connect Acts 15 with the ecumenical councils that the Church of Christ celebrated over the following eight centuries to resolve other serious doctrinal errors that threatened Christendom. When Arianism began to deny the divinity of Christ, Nicaea proclaimed the truth about the triune nature of God. When, after Nicaea, misinterpretations of the Nicene symbol of faith began to arise, and there appeared those who in some way denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Church gathered at Constantinople to fix the universal creed more clearly. The Church was, and is, the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim 3:15).

When someone, using his own personal criterion for interpreting the Scriptures, attacked that truth, the Church would gather and set the boundaries of that truth. There were two options: either the great majority of Christian bishops were wrong, or the ones who were wrong were those accused of heresy. Now then, does it occur to anyone to think that in Acts 15 the ones who were wrong were the apostles and the Holy Spirit, and the ones who were right were the Judaizers? NO, such a thing occurs to no one. Well then, I say and affirm that the Church of Acts 15 was the same one that gathered at Nicaea, at Constantinople, at Ephesus, Chalcedon… and the Holy Spirit was also the same. That Church is the one that knew how to discern which were the canonical books. That Church was the one that knew how to create a Creed that serves to define who is doctrinally a Christian and who is a heretic disguised as a Christian. That Church was and is the Church of Christ.

Obviously I am trying to summarize what for me was a gradual, progressive discovery. The key day, when everything turned upside down for me, was when I realized that my faith was built far more on my own perception of biblical truth than on what the Church of Christ has declared about the Bible itself. I was headed straight down the path of founding my own church, based on the faith of Luis Fernando. That this faith coincided to a great extent with the faith declared by the Church in her ecumenical councils did nothing to diminish the reality that I was the one judging what was good in those councils, instead of that conciliar Church being the one to judge what was good in my belief as a Christian. The moment of the great question had arrived: where is that Church of the first eight centuries?

When I realized that the Sola Scriptura theory cannot be valid, it is to some extent logical that I would set my eyes on the Church in which I had been raised. Rome, the everlasting Rome. Could Rome be the solution? I need hardly say that after eight years as a Protestant, in which Rome had always been the great enemy to be beaten, the mere idea of returning to that Church was little short of ironic. I, who had been accused of being a Romanist by certain brothers who did not understand why in recent months I had not wanted to continue down the path of armed confrontation — in a dialectical sense — with Rome, began to think that I might well be becoming Catholic again.

Reading J. H. Newman’s “Apologia pro Vita Sua” was an extremely important key in this period of my life. Newman was an Anglican priest who ended up going over to Catholicism, in which he became a cardinal. The curious thing about Newman is that he knew how to understand the errors of the Anglican system in which he happened to live, but at the same time his anti-Catholicism, typical of Anglicans, kept him from taking the step he finally ended up taking. But while I was reading Newman’s work, I noticed something. I wondered why that man was almost totally ignorant of the existence of the Orthodox churches. I found no logical answer to that question. Moreover, the Catholic Church that Newman joined, I believed, was not the Catholic Church of the late twentieth century. That Church did not have the dogma of papal infallibility. Nor that of the Immaculate Conception, nor that of the Assumption. Since in my conversation with Father Nelson Medina I had had to analyze the basis in Tradition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, I knew that this dogma had scarcely been discussed by the Church during the first fifteen centuries. And when it was debated whether Mary had been conceived immaculately, more than a few theologians opposed that doctrine. Not to mention the dogma of papal infallibility. For me, who had discovered the Church of the great councils, it was very important that any new dogma be approved by another Ecumenical Council and not by only one part of the Church. At that point I had no choice but to look East. What did I discover? Churches that over the last millennium had not moved to the right or to the left in relation to the Christian Creed declared by the ecumenical councils. The Orthodox Church was, and is, the great unknown in the West. Even though many patriarchates had to live alongside a large Muslim majority that was not exactly friendly to Christianity, one can see that those Christians did not rush into the madness of changing their beliefs to accommodate the society in which they had to live. But apart from the historical considerations about the survival of some Orthodox Churches, what I believed I understood with crystal clarity was that it was that Church which remained faithful when the West sought to impose a change in the Nicene Creed. When Charlemagne came to power, a theological battle began in the Latin church over the inclusion of the term “filioque” (and from the Son) in the Nicene Creed to indicate the double procession of the Holy Spirit. It might seem an unimportant matter, but to me it seemed unacceptable that the Latin church, headed by the bishop of Rome, should decide it could change the Nicene Creed without submitting the matter for discussion in another ecumenical council. And that despite the fact that there were Roman popes (e.g., Pope Leo III) who firmly opposed that inclusion of the filioque. I reached the conclusion that the first church that decided it could change the Christian creed all by itself was the Church of Rome. It may sound funny now, but I believed then that Rome was the first Protestant church and that it was therefore logical that five centuries later that church would suffer the split of the Protestant churches. My concept of the Petrine primacy was not very developed, and I had not taken note of the fact that it was Rome, precisely Rome, that had saved the whole East from succumbing to the Christological heresies on more than one occasion.

Once blessed with the conviction that the Orthodox Church was the one that had not budged over the last millennium, the time came to face the things I did not understand about that Church. Obviously I am talking about icons and the role of the saints and Mary. On the one hand, I knew that my belonging to Orthodoxy could not depend on my personal judgment about those aspects of Orthodox religiosity. If I had accepted the fact that it is the Church that judges my beliefs and not the other way around, I could not now set myself up to judge, just like that, the doctrines of that Church I did not accept. But God knew it would be very hard for me to take the step of joining a Church where I might have the impression that image-idolatry was being practiced. So I attended a service of the Greek Orthodox Church in Madrid for the first time. For those of you who have never attended an Orthodox service, I assure you it is another world. The Orthodox liturgy can hardly be compared with a half-hour Catholic Mass. For a start, the service according to the Greek rite lasts an hour and a quarter. But that first hour and a quarter flew by for me. I could not explain it in words, but from that first service on, I spent the whole week waiting for the next Sunday to come so I could attend another. Why? I do not know. Only God knows. Since it proved impossible for me to arrange a meeting with the Greek Orthodox priest, a friend told me about another Orthodox priest, Teófilo Moldován, who is in charge of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Spain. Before going on, I would like to clarify something. I was most pleasantly surprised by the attitude of the Orthodox faithful toward the icons. I saw nothing that could resemble idolatry. I assumed that, as everywhere, there would be Orthodox who had an idolatrous relationship with icons, but I realized that an Orthodox believer who felt and lived the divine liturgy as his own — a liturgy in which pneumatology is given a very prominent role — could hardly fall into iconolatry. And, in case I had any remaining doubt on the matter, everything became even clearer to me the Sunday I attended the Orthodox service celebrated by Father Teófilo Moldován, presbyter of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Spain. If the Greek service lasted an hour and a quarter, the liturgy Father Teófilo celebrated stretched over two long hours. That was an unforgettable experience for me. The participation of the people in the Romanian Orthodox service was more active. The hymns, though I barely understood the words, seemed beautiful to me. Never before had I felt the sensation that heaven was moving down to earth so that we could catch a glimpse of what that great eternal liturgy in the world to come will be.

After the service, I spoke with Teófilo’s wife, and she told me he would not be able to attend to me properly at that moment, since several people wanted to speak with him for pastoral counsel. Teófilo came up to me and told me that in the morning we could talk more calmly. And so it was. I found a man who knew how to listen to me and quickly understand my situation. His advice was a great help to me, and I will never be able to thank the Lord enough for having placed Father Teófilo in my life at that moment.

I remember that on one of the occasions when I spoke with Father Teófilo, I told him something I felt to be very true, which I now summarize: “When God saved me from the shipwreck, I clung with all my strength to a wooden raft so as not to drown. On that raft God has sustained me for more than eight years, not allowing me to sink again. But a wooden raft goes wherever the current takes it. It can stay in the ocean for years and years without arriving anywhere. God did not want me to remain on that raft, and He made a great ship pass near me. I raised my arms and asked for help. Now I am climbing up the ladder of that ship. I know the ship’s destination is dry land. That land is none other than the new heavens and the new earth that God has promised us. I give thanks to God for granting me the privilege of being a member of the Church He founded 2000 years ago. That Church is now the foundation and pillar of the truth and of my life. Christ is the rock and the cornerstone. In Him I trust.”

Then came the month of October of the year 1999. Here is the text in which I tried to describe what happened then.

And the Ship Docked in a Safe Harbor (10-22-99)

Brothers, today I can tell you with joy that the ship reached dry land. The crossing was much shorter than I thought it would be. I arrived at a safe harbor. And imagine my surprise when, as we were coming into port, I began to recognize the streets of the city we were approaching. I knew at once that I had come back home. That blessed ship, which will always be my ship, which will always be among God’s greatest blessings for my life, had brought me back to the place where I found my Christ when I was a child. It had brought me back to our beloved Catholic and Roman Church. Catholic because she is universal, and citizens of every country form part of her. Roman because it was in Rome that the two great apostles, Peter and Paul, gave their lives in martyrdom, as a sign and example of the path to be followed by those of us who love the Lord.

Oh, brothers, how beautiful it is to walk the streets where one grew up! How beautiful to remember the moments when one was taking one’s first steps on the path of Christ! To remember that First Communion as I once again receive the precious body of our Savior upon my lips! To remember the teachings of that mother who brought me into the world, while other brothers and sisters bear witness to how much she has helped them understand how to face suffering and illness! To remember those seminarians who had the fire of God in their hearts, as I watch that fire still present in a man of God, a priest, who at 60 years of age keeps spreading the love of God to those around him! To remember that moment when my father shut himself in my room to pray with me for John Paul II, who had just suffered an assassination attempt, while now I can go on contemplating the result of those prayers in the person of our Peter at the close of the century, in our apostle who tirelessly continues his ministry of shepherding Christ’s flock! To remember the sweetness of our blessed Mother, Holy Mary, as I now once again contemplate her example and her love for her Son in the Scriptures!

Praised be God the Father, who has allowed me to return to His house! Praised be Jesus Christ, who forgives me for all those times I was deeply unjust in condemning His Church for things of the past!

Praised be the Holy Spirit, who has transformed my being, cleansing it of pride and human wisdom to return me to the state of spiritual childhood, in which I have so much left to learn and so many of His mysteries to enjoy in the light of the Magisterium of His Beloved Church!

I want to publicly thank a man of God, a spiritual father who has known how to be patient with me, and who I know has shed more than one tear and offered many prayers before being able to behold what your eyes are now seeing. I want to thank you, brother Nelson, beloved son of God, for having been a servant faithful to God, who has used you to help me on the voyage back home. When I was on the raft, you told me to look for the ship. When you saw me on the ship, you prayed to God to bring me home soon. And when the ship docked, you were at the foot of the gangway down to dry land to welcome me and show me once again the beautiful streets of our Jerusalem, of our Church. And as the Scripture says, “Let him who is taught the word share all good things with him who teaches” (Gal 6:6), so I have made you a sharer in this great blessing God has given me in returning to our beloved Church. God bless you for all you have done for me and for my family.

In the love of God the Father, in the blessing of Jesus Christ, and in the presence of the beloved Holy Spirit, I leave you.

In Christ and in His blessed Church, which is the Church of you all,

Luis Fernando.

* * *

A few weeks later, it fell to me to share the good news on the Kingdom of God Forum, the one where I had debated so much with Father Nelson.

These were the reasons I laid out on that forum:

Testimony on the Kingdom of God Forum (11-13-99)

Well, before announcing the decision my wife and I have made, I want to clarify something. It is not the fruit of any crisis. Quite the contrary.

The fact is that a little over a month ago Lidia and I, together, decided to return to the Catholic Church. I could set out many reasons of a theological, personal, and even pragmatic kind, but I prefer to be brief in this message, so I will try to summarize everything in a few points:

1- I am not “abandoning” the Orthodox Church. I still feel her to be MY Church, and I intend to keep advancing in the knowledge of the immense treasures stored within her. From time to time I will attend the liturgies in Romanian as well as in Greek and Slavonic because, beyond the problem of language, one can appreciate and enjoy the presence of God in the midst of those liturgical celebrations. I doubt that for a long time I will be able to find an attitude as reverent toward the sacred and the divine as the one I found among my Orthodox brothers in Spain. That personal experience will always be with me, and God knows how much it has helped me in these last months. That said, it was quite evident that my family could not follow me on the path I had taken. At first it seemed to me that such a thing would be possible if the liturgy could soon be adapted into Spanish, but I have seen that this is impossible in the coming years. Obviously I could not and would not push my children and my wife into such a situation.

2- Even before my entry into the Orthodox Church, I had the feeling that Lidia, my wife, not only would raise no objection to a possible return of ours to the Catholic Church, but would be determined to do such a thing with the greatest of joys. She, who is not a person interested in doctrinal disputes but in living Christianity in the simplest (and at the same time committed) way possible, always told me that what matters is not which church one belongs to but which God we serve. In that sense, my wife has been the perfect complement for me, who am too much of a “theologian” and need someone to bring me down from the clouds to the practical reality of daily life in Christ. That is why, when I asked her whether she would accompany me in a hypothetical return to the Catholic Church, she gave me an immediate and resounding yes.

3- As you all know, I have been, on this forum (and on others), one of the people who has done the most anti-Catholic apologetics work. From the sacramental system and the hierarchical one, to dogmas such as the perpetual virginity of Mary, her Immaculate Conception, papal infallibility, etc.; all those topics were argued by me from a radical-Evangelical perspective (half Quaker, half Mennonite). When I came to understand the fundamental role of the Church as the pillar and bulwark of the truth, many of my objections to a large part of those dogmas collapsed. I had already realized earlier that the motto “Sola Scriptura” was something not only unbiblical but plainly and simply false, since interpretative traditions came to occupy in the Protestant churches a role as fundamental as, or more so than, the role of many popular traditions in the traditional churches. The evidence that the Church Christ wanted was a Church united, not divided into thousands of different denominations, was also a key for me to understand that Evangelical Christianity, with all its good things, with all its love for the Word and its missionary fervor, was not ENOUGH. I am not saying it is not enough for the salvation of its members, because that is assured by faith in Christ Jesus and not by belonging to this or that Church; but the Protestant ecclesial system is certainly the very opposite of what Christ expressed in the Gospel of John and of the instructions of the apostles. If to that we add the nonexistent apostolic authority in the immense majority of Protestant denominations, which prevents an effective, real battle against the new heresies arising in our days, the matter becomes, at least for me, quite clear: the solution for the unbelieving world cannot be the one offered by churches that do not hold one single faith, do not have one single baptism, and do not possess an apostolic succession in accordance with the one instituted by Christ and His apostles and maintained by the Church down the centuries. I know many of you will not agree with any of this, and I know your reasons, because I myself have held them. If I have any advantage (?) today over many brothers, it is that I know how a Protestant thinks and I know how a Christian thinks who belongs to the Church that is heir to that of the first millennium. And I understand that the solution for the Christianity of the third millennium is not the example of the church of this millennium now ending, but that of the first millennium of our era.

4- One detail I consider very important, and which cleared my way back home (my first home was the Catholic Church) in a very decisive way, is the evidence that Christian dogma is in constant development from the first century until Christ returns. It is not that God’s revelation needs totally new things; rather, it is a development in the knowledge of truths that God has deposited in His Church, which is the one that proclaims the MANIFOLD wisdom of God in the heavenly places. In that sense, what for me was an essential element in my approach to the Orthodox Church has been, in exactly the opposite direction, the element that helped lead me back to the Catholic Church. The Orthodox Church is the clearest exponent of the preservation of a tradition received and brought to fruit in the first millennium of Christianity. But in these last years she has limited herself, with some rare exception, to preserving what she has received. Given that there was obviously an ENORMOUS dogmatic development in the Christian faith of the first millennium (e.g., the Trinitarian and Christological dogmatic development), there is no weighty reason to suppose that such development halted its course after the Schism. And Western Christianity took over the leadership in continuing to seek new formulas for rethinking the Christian creed. This is a very complex and delicate subject, so I only want to sketch out the essentials of my argument, but I am sure many of you will know how to understand what I am saying.

God bless you

* * *

A year has now passed since our return to the Catholic Church. A year of much interior struggle, much controversy with Evangelical Protestants, many changes at the family level. Lidia and I were married in the Church on December 11, 1999, the same day we baptized our son Juan, who had just turned five. Although we had been civilly married since 1988, we had not considered it essential to be “re-married” during our time at Amistad Cristiana, though that possibility was seriously considered on some occasion. However, upon returning to the Catholic Church, it seemed essential to us to consecrate our union through the sacrament of matrimony. The Lord chose to bless us immediately with the gift of another child. And, to our even greater joy, the baby turned out to be a girl, which fulfilled our desires. Lidia’s pregnancy was not easy, as she suffered threats of miscarriage, and in the end the girl was born premature, though healthy. Her name is Rut, and she is at present the happiness of our home. Besides the new daughter, this year we made a very important decision. We decided to leave Madrid and come to live in the province of Huesca, in Aragon. Here we hope to serve the Lord and His Church for the rest of our days, though always remaining aware that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable and one never knows where His will may lead us.

If there is one more thing I have to thank the Lord for this year, it is the love He has placed in my heart for the Church. The sacraments, especially the Eucharist, have become the fountain of grace to which I gladly turn whenever I can. I remember my days of ignorance regarding the sacramental life when I was an Evangelical, and I thank the Lord for having delivered me from that foolishness, by which I considered the sacrament something pseudo-Gnostic and pagan. How much nonsense I managed to say about the Christian “mysterion” while I was a Protestant! How much blessing I find in them now!

I cannot fail to make special mention of the sacrament of the Eucharist. I have had the privilege of receiving communion under both species on at least a couple of occasions, but above all I have felt on many occasions the need to receive communion not only on Sundays and holy days of obligation but daily as well. I believe that however much one tries to explain theologically the essence of the Catholic Eucharist, nothing and no one can describe to perfection what that communion of the believer with the body and blood of Christ consists of. A communion that enlightens us and opens our eyes like those two men on the road to Emmaus, who could not recognize Christ until He broke the bread, in clear reference to the Eucharistic mystery. I know of no great saint of our Church who has not had a profound love for the Christ present in the Eucharist. It is through this sacrament that Christ is truly Emmanuel, God with us and in us. It is through this sacrament that Christ fulfills His promise to be with us until the end of the world. Eucharist, divine food that renews us for eternal life.

To begin wrapping up, I could include in this testimony all the unpleasant circumstances Lidia and I have had to face since our return to Rome. But what for? What sense would there be in speaking at length about the pressures, threats, blackmail, mockery, contempt, slanders, and calumnies we have had to endure from some who call themselves Evangelical Christians? No, I do not think it is necessary to go into details or give names. I would only like to clarify a couple of things. First, that despite those people, more than a few Evangelicals have respected our decision and have even defended us from the attacks of their “brothers in the faith.” To these true brothers in Christ I give thanks for their honesty and their friendship. Second, I want to say that each and every one of those attacks, blackmail attempts, pressures, etc., that we have received has served to reaffirm us ever more in the faith of my Church. I am fully convinced that the attitude of those Evangelical fundamentalists will bear as its fruit that many impartial people who had no sympathy for the Catholic Church will begin to see things differently, since it is impossible to remain unmoved when one sees the visceral hatred those “Christians” show toward everything that smells of Catholicism. It is one thing not to agree with many Catholic doctrines, and quite another the hatred that takes those doctrinal differences as its excuse. The Lord, who knows and discerns the intentions of the heart, will know how to judge all those attitudes justly.

There is little more left to say. Only to announce my intention to write a book that may be useful to my Catholic brothers in the defense of the faith of our Church. I hope the Lord gives me wisdom to do a good job with that book. I also desire that He help me to be a good catechist in the parish to which we are attached. Much work remains to be done in the Church of Christ in Spain. We need laborers and lives given over to the religious vocation of service to God in His Church. I only ask God for health and energy enough to serve Him for the rest of my days.

I bless you all in the name of Christ, of whose beloved Church I form part.

10.16.2000

Author: Luis Fernando Pérez