Dear brothers:

From Spain I wish to testify to you here that, after remaining for nine years in various evangelical churches, some of them truly sectarian, and after trying to get my closest relatives to abandon the Holy Catholic Church, including my wife—formerly agnostic and now happily back in the faith of Jesus Christ and once again a practicing Catholic after being 25 years away from the Church.

 

 

I prayed, and God answered me

It all began with the prayer I addressed to God on the 16th of December of last year, which I transcribe below:

“Holy Father who art in heaven hallowed and glorified be thy name

for all eternity I praise and bless thee, good Triune God and I give thee thanks

for thy love and mercy toward me knowing that thou givest me at every moment what I need.

I ask thy forgiveness for my failings for all the times I have sinned

through lack of love toward my family and others in these last 9 years

of my walking in the Protestant churches thank thee for all those who truly have been genuine brothers

and whom Thou gavest me, and for the love I have received from them, forgive and grant repentance and conversion to all those

who are not, and who only devote themselves to manipulating consciences in a sectarian way

and whom Thou knowest. And now, Father, I want thee to give me the strength to face the problems or the rejection

when I must stand firm before others on account of the step

that I have decided to take, among other reasons to increase and strengthen my communion with thee

and to seek that my works in this life may be pleasing to thee in keeping with thy commandments, as the principal reason

without forgetting the other great one, important to Thee: the increasing of unity and love in my family and therefore,

I consider, and desire that it be thy will also, besides being necessary, this abandonment of my affiliation

with the evangelical or Protestant churches. Guide me anew in my return to the Holy Catholic Church, to a good parish community

where it may be lived out as authentically as possible, within our imperfections and failings,

thy Holy Gospel, and where I may find good fellowship Christian and Catholic, so that they may become a reality:

the principal purposes I referred to thee before. This I ask of thee in the name of Jesus trusting that thou wilt guide me.

Amen.”

 

 

The following day, the 17th of December of 2003, God answered my prayer, giving me sufficient conviction and peace in my heart to take the step of requesting my admission to the parish of my neighborhood, where once again, through the Eucharist and many other activities, my family and I serve the Lord to the best of our ability. There too I have received from Jesus the intercession and favor of Our Blessed Mother Mary(Jn 19,26) who watches day and night over all of us, her adopted children, and the communion with all the Saints who have gone before us in the history by which, in this world, the true church of Jesus Christ is being built, founded by his apostles and whose head is Peter (Jn 1,42; Jn 21,15; Lc 22,31; Mt 16,18…)

I made the mistake of believing that religions are bad and sects are good.

As for myself, I only wish to relate that in my childhood I was Catholic like most Spaniards, but in my youth I gradually drifted away from it and my life took paths foreign to the faith. At the age of 35, faced with various problems in my life, I asked myself a series of questions about the existence of God, and upon reading the Holy Gospel of John I received once again THE LIGHT OF JESUS CHRIST, on whom I had turned my back in adolescence. But I made the mistake of not returning to the church of my baptism, communion and confirmation, and I also fell into the error of believing, through some independent Baptist sectarians, that religions were bad and that only those who hold the Bible as their sole authority were true Christians.

In time, as I came to see that they, the evangelicals and Protestants, had also built a religion, but one in many cases far removed from the true interpretation of the Holy Word of God, I had to ask God’s forgiveness for my sectarian proselytism toward my family and others, with the harm that it causes, while at the same time thanking him for showing me the way to the place where every Christian ought to be: his Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, to which I have returned, together with my wife and two children, with 44 years of life given to me by our Lord and Savior.

What impacted me most is the testimony of love of my wife.

There are many reasons of various kinds that have moved me to make the decision to return to the Catholic Church; the most important has been the testimony of love that my wife has given me (and that of other Catholic relatives as well), who, having long desired to return to it, at no moment pressured me to convert to Catholicism, nor did she do so in order to divide the family; on the contrary, she kept accompanying me to the evangelical services—after having endured my pressures for her to convert to the Protestant faith, it would have been logical for her to do the same.

She showed her Catholic faith by her works and her conduct toward me, which made me wonder in my conscience whether it was not I who was mistaken. In view of this, I went on investigating on my own Catholic apologetics websites ( www.defiendetufe.org www.apologetica.org ), where their doctrines and their tradition were reasoned out biblically, which is why I realized that the Protestant biblical interpretation was biased and adapted to the convenience of whatever group interpreted it, giving rise to the numerous sects we can find in this field and to the arrogant attitude of many of them in believing themselves the only chosen and truly saved ones (there was an American missionary who once told me that if in the Catholic Church people saved their souls, it would make no sense for him to be in a country like Spain).

I began to understand the value of obedience(works) in my salvation.

As a result of this I began to think that salvation by faith alone is not possible unless it is accompanied by works that show it to be alive (Stgo 2,14), that it is those works that the Lord is going to judge (Mt 25,41) to verify whether our faith in Him is genuine or not, and that we must show greater humility and be confessed and repentant of our sins when the hour comes for us to be in his presence (Mt 7,21).

I came to understand that the church which truly preaches the Bible in full and gives good works their rightful place as necessary for salvation was none other than the Catholic Church, the church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ (Mt 16,18). And I also came to understand the insistence of many evangelical sects in minimizing and scarcely preaching about good works, for “that business of good works is a matter for Catholics, who think they are going to be saved by them, without the faith that truly saves”.

For most evangelicals, though not all, in their view very few Catholics are truly Christian and saved; this is why they feel compelled to “preach the gospel to them” and draw them to their churches. There are many more reasons, biblical, logical and from my personal history, that have led me to return to the Catholic Church, but I consider that they cannot fit in a testimony that must be condensed enough to be able to reach many people. Nevertheless, if the Lord permits, and once I put in order many aspects of my life, among them achieving a genuine deprogramming from my experience of these last nine years, perhaps I will be encouraged to write a document, perhaps even in the form of a book, that gathers in more detailed particulars everything recounted in the present testimony.

I hope that this humble testimony may serve for the Glory of our Lord, and that every evangelical of good will who may read it may ask himself why his churches try to evangelize Catholic countries evangelized for centuries, trying to create problems of conscience for their Catholic relatives in order to draw them to their church, and that they may also reflect on which is the church that for 2004 years, with its lights and its shadows, but in an uninterrupted manner, has been faithful to the teachings of the Holy Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

For the Glory of our Lord Jesus Christ! Amen

Author: Jesús R. Góngora Luque.

Source: Defiendetufe.org

San Sebastián (Guipúzcoa) – Spain February 2004