Rome Sweet Home

by Kimberly Hahn

  Right before our daughter was born, I had an important conversation with my father. My father is one of the godliest men I know. He has truly been the father I have needed to lead me to my heavenly Father. My dad could sense sadness in my voice.

  He asked, “Kimberly, do you pray the prayer I pray every day? Do you say, ‘Lord, I’ll go wherever you want me to go, do whatever you want me to do, say whatever you want me to say and give away whatever you want me to give away’?”

  “No, Dad, I don’t pray that prayer these days.” He had no idea of the agony I was enduring over Scott’s being Catholic.

  He said, genuinely shocked, “You don’t!”

  “Dad, I’m afraid to. I’m afraid if I prayed that prayer, that could mean joining the Roman Catholic Church. And I will never become a Roman Catholic!”

  “Kimberly, I don’t believe it will mean you will become a Roman Catholic. What it means is that Jesus Christ is either Lord of your entire life, or he isn’t Lord at all. You don’t tell God where you will and won’t go. What you tell him is, you’re yielded to him. That’s what matters most to me, far more than whether or not you become a Roman Catholic. Otherwise you are in the process of hardening your heart toward the Lord. If you can’t pray that prayer, pray for the grace to pray that prayer until you can. Yield your heart to him—you can trust him.”

  He risked a lot saying that.

  For thirty days I prayed every day, “God, give me the grace to pray that prayer.” I was so afraid that by praying that prayer, it would seal my fate—I would have to throw away my brain, forget my heart and follow Scott like a moron into the Catholic Church.

  Finally, I was ready to pray that prayer, trusting God with the consequences. What I found out was, I was the one who had made the cage, and, instead of locking it, the Lord opened the door to set me free. My heart leapt. Now I was free to begin to want to study and to probe, to begin to explore things with a measure of joy once again. Now I could say, Okay, God, it isn’t the way I planned my life, but your dreams are good enough for me. What do you want to do in my heart? in my marriage? in our family? I wanted to know.

  On August 7, 1987, Hannah Lorraine was born. It was with great joy we welcomed our first daughter into the world, and with great relief that the placenta previa condition and intermittent bleeding trauma were over. This baby was another living symbol of the power of prayer and a witness to our abiding love even in the midst of great pain and struggle.

  I went to Hannah’s baptism not even knowing if the priest were going to say, “Mrs. Hahn, would you please sit over there while I baptize your child over here.” All I knew was that, in obedience to God, she needed to be baptized Catholic.

  From the moment we walked in, Monsignor Bruskewitz welcomed me and cordially invited me to do and say all that in good conscience I could do and say. Though I kept silent during the invocation of saints and disagreed in my heart with his explanation of baptism, I was astounded at the beauty of the liturgy. I participated as wholeheartedly as I could.

  I was not prepared for the beauty of the baptismal liturgy. It was everything I would have prayed for for my daughter! At one point, right after the priest had finished praying an incredible prayer for our child to hear and respond to the Gospel, I was squeezing Scott’s hand from the sheer joy of the moment. (He feared I was clutching him so I would not run out.)

  Then Monsignor concluded that prayer, “Amen and Amen.”

  I blurted out, “Amen!” I could not hold it in. (That may be typical for a Baptist, but I was raised Presbyterian!) We all laughed together. And Monsignor assured me the sentiments were shared by all.

  I did not feel as though Hannah had been bound and chained by the burden of being a Roman Catholic (as at one time I had feared), but rather, she was being freed to be the child of God she was created to be. As I left Saint Bernard’s church that day, God was doing an important work inside of me. I said to Scott, “I know today is a turning point for me.” It wasn’t the only one, but it was an important one.

  8

  A Rome-antic Reunion

  Scott:

  Shortly before moving to Joliet, Kimberly and I bought our first house just three blocks away from the College of Saint Francis. We moved there less than a month after Kimberly had given birth to Hannah in Milwaukee, She was still recovering from her third Caesarian section, while I had just finished up my language requirements by passing the French and German exams. In the midst of it all, I had to prepare the four courses that I would be teaching in less than two weeks.

  Working with college students proved to be exciting and rewarding. I quickly learned that very few, if any, of my Catholic students really understood their Faith, even the basics. I got a special kick out of helping “cradle Catholics” discover the riches of their own heritage, especially from Scripture. I started a weekly Bible study with a dozen members of the football team and spent a lot of time with students outside of class. Living three blocks from the college proved to be a real boon for building relationships.

  In three years, I also discovered that it takes more than the sincere desire of a few members of the administration and faculty to restore the Catholic identity of a college that has traveled a long way down the road of secularization. It was a real struggle at times. It was my first direct exposure to Catholics who had abandoned their Faith but who would not relinquish their positions of power. Fortunately, I was privileged to work in a department with four great colleagues: John Hittinger, Greg Sobolewski, Sister Rose Marie Surwillo and Dan Hauser.

  One day at work I got a phone call from Bill Bales, one of my ex-friends from seminary, who had become a: Presbyterian pastor in Virginia. He was calling to apologize for something he’d done when Kimberly and the kids spent a week visiting with them, apart from me, almost a year before.

  Bill spoke in a quiet and contrite tone. “Scott, I need to ask your forgiveness.”

  “What for, Bill? I’m just glad you’re still willing to talk with me!”

  “Scott, I’m afraid that you might not be willing to talk with me after I tell you what I did.”

  He could not have done more to pique my curiosity and suspicion. “Okay, Bill, what did you do?”

  “A few months ago your wife went through your Catholic arguments with me; I think she was hoping that I would give her lots of ammunition to shoot them down. I really wasn’t ready with answers. Instead, I counseled her to consider whether or not she had biblical grounds to divorce you.”

  His words hit me hard; but I was so glad to be back on speaking terms that I quickly recovered. “That’s all right, Bill. As you know, if it’d been me five years ago, I would have urged divorce in the same situation.”

  Then Bill paused and drew his breath. “There’s something else, Scott.”

  I wasn’t sure I was ready for a second salvo so soon. “Uh, what is it, Bill?”

  “Well, I told Kimberly that I’d get back to her with solid arguments to refute your Catholic ideas.”

  “Yeah, go on.”

  “Well, it has been quite a while, and I haven’t come up with a single one.”

  I was barely able to suppress my triumphant tone. “Bill, that’s a forgivable offense if ever there was one.”

  “Thanks, Scott, but I’m not apologizing for that. I’m calling to ask you for help. During the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about the Catholic Faith, and I have several issues and questions that I’d like to talk over with you.”

  Immediately I realized what he was saying. “Bill, just tell me this, are you feeling the force of the biblical arguments for the Catholic Faith?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Are you also feeling a certain amount of terror as you ponder the long-term implications for you as a Presbyterian pastor?”

  “You better believe it.”

  By then I had figured out the real reason for his call. It became the first of many. Over the next year, Bill would call with questions based on h
is own intensive reading of Catholic theology. In my mind, Bill was a special case. At seminary he went beyond all of us in his understanding and love of Hebrew. He taped photocopied pages of the Hebrew Bible to the walls in his study just to help with studying and memorizing it.

  After graduation Bill went into the Presbyterian ministry, serving as an associate pastor under Jack Lash, my closest ex-friend from seminary. Bill was still a minister there when he called me. Back in the good old days, when I was still a Calvinist, Jack had me preach at his ordination and installation service. Since I had become a Catholic, he would not speak to me.

  After months of study and periodic phone debates, Bill’s direction was becoming clear. His research was leading him closer and closer to Rome. Jack and the church elders took steps to counteract his potential defection. At times it got mean and nasty. This only intensified his wife’s resolve to study Catholicism more fairly. As a result, both of them, along with Kimberly, kept reading and talking more and more.

  Up to this point, my confrontational tactics with Kimberly had not accomplished anything constructive. Attempts to engage her in debate were fruitless. Any books I would recommend were thereby sealed with a kiss of death. God was trying to teach me to back off so that the Holy Spirit might have more room to operate.

  Instead of offering apologetic arguments, I went back to sharing my personal feelings; not, however, as an alternate strategy by which I could maneuver and manipulate her more effectively. It was simply the only respectful and loving way to deal with our differences. I gradually accepted the fact that Kimberly might never become a Catholic; nor was her conversion to be my perennial project.

  After moving in and making some new friends in the community, Kimberly and I began encountering the toughest brand of anti-Catholic either of us had ever come across before, the ex-Catholic fundamentalist. Unlike typical anti-Catholic Protestants, who enjoy nothing more than intense biblical debates over Catholic issues like Mary and the Pope, the ex-Catholic fundamentalists we would run into were filled with such rage and resentment toward the Church that it rendered them incapable of rational discourse. To them I was demon-possessed, so they urged Kimberly not even to listen, since Satan was using me to lure her with his lies. With an independent and intelligent woman like Kimberly, that advice was bound to backfire.

  Most of the time, I looked forward to conversations with anti-Catholic fundamentalists who were concerned for my salvation. I appreciated their evangelistic zeal.

  One night at dinner, I related to Kimberly a conversation I had had earlier that day with a fundamentalist who, upon learning that I was Catholic, went right to work on evangelizing me.

  Of course, he started by asking, “Have you been born again?”

  I replied, “Yes, indeed I have. But what do you mean by it?”

  He look puzzled. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”

  I smiled broadly and said, “Yes, indeed I have. But that’s not why I’m born again. I’m born again because of what Christ did through the Holy Spirit when I was baptized.”

  He still looked stumped, so I continued. “You see, the Bible nowhere states, ‘You must accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.’ It’s a great thing to do, but it’s not what our Lord was talking about when he told Nicodemus in John 3:3 that he had to be ‘born again’. Jesus clarified what he did mean when he said just two verses later, ‘You must be born of water and the Spirit’, which he stated with reference to baptism. John made that point clear to the reader, because as soon as he finished describing Jesus’ discourse with Nicodemus in verses 2-21, he stated in the very next verse that ‘After this Jesus and his disciples went into the land of Judea; there he remained with them and baptized’. And a few verses later, John reported how ‘the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John.’ In other words, when Jesus said that we must be ‘born again’, what he meant was baptism.”

  I freely admitted to Kimberly that I might have come on too strong. I went on to explain why I thought it was wrong for fundamentalists to assume that Catholics aren’t really Christians just because they don’t use certain biblical phrases in the same way; especially when fundamentalists don’t even interpret those phrases properly in their original context. She completely agreed.

  Shortly after that, I came back from attending a conference for theologians at Franciscan University of Steubenville. It was the first time that I had visited there. I was amazed to have met so many orthodox Catholics with such evangelical zeal. I was even more astonished by what I saw during the noon Mass: the chapel was packed with hundreds of students who were singing their hearts out, with a great love for Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

  I could hardly wait to tell Kimberly about it. She was thrilled to hear that the evangelical zeal she grew up with could find a home in the Catholic Church.

  I told a friend in my parish about the ongoing struggle to share the Catholic Faith with my evangelical wife. I described the enthusiastic singing, the dynamic biblical preaching and the warm fellowship—all of which Kimberly had experienced since childhood. He made a curious suggestion. “Scott, personally I think Protestants have all those things because they don’t have the Blessed Sacrament. Once you have the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, you don’t need all the rest. Don’t you agree?”

  I bit my tongue. I did not want to react, but I needed to correct what I took to be a disturbing oversight. “I think I know what you’re trying to say, that eucharistic worship can be quiet and reverent without losing any depth or power. I agree with that. In fact, I’m coming to a real appreciation for Gregorian Chant and Latin in the liturgy; but I would say it differently. I would rather say that because we do have Christ’s Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, then we—even more than Protestants—have something to sing about, to preach about and to celebrate together.”

  There was awkward silence for a moment. “Yeah, who can disagree when you put it that way?”

  Wondering out loud, I said, “But why is it that we don’t always put it that way?” He had no answer; nor did I.

  I have always wondered why so many Catholics never delve more deeply into the mysteries of their Faith. It has always amazed me to discover how each and every mystery is grounded in Scripture, centered on Christ and somehow preserved and proclaimed in the liturgy of the Church, the covenant family of God. This really came home to me one day after I attended the Mass on All Souls’ Day. Kimberly wanted to know the significance of the feast. In no time at all, the conversation was deteriorating into another debate over the doctrine of Purgatory. I decided to transpose the doctrine into a major key, so to speak, by framing it in terms of God’s covenant love.

  “Kimberly, the Bible shows how many times God revealed himself in fire to his people in order to renew his covenant with them: as a ‘fire pot and naming torch’ with Abraham in Genesis 15; in the burning bush with Moses in Exodus 3; in the pillar of fire with Israel in Numbers 9; in the heavenly fire which consumed the altar sacrifices with Solomon and Elijah in 1 Kings 8 and 18; in the ‘tongues of fire’ with the apostles at Pentecost in Acts 2. . . .”

  Kimberly interrupted, “All right, Scott, what’s your point?”

  I had one chance to get it right. “Simply this. When Hebrews 12:29 describes God as ‘a consuming fire’, it isn’t necessarily referring to his anger. There’s the fire of hell, but there’s an infinitely hotter fire in heaven; it’s God himself. So fire refers to God’s infinite love even more than his eternal wrath, God’s nature is like a raging inferno of fiery love. In other words, heaven must be hotter than hell.

  “No wonder Scripture refers to the angels who are closest to God as the Seraphim, which literally means ‘the burning ones’ in Hebrew. That’s also why Saint Paul can describe in 1 Corinthians 3:13 how all the saints must pass through a fiery judgment in which ‘each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed wi
th fire. . . .’

  “Clearly, he’s not talking about the fire of hell, since they’re saints who are being judged. He’s talking about a fire that prepares them for eternal life with God in heaven; so the purpose of the fire is manifest: to reveal whether their works are pure (‘gold and silver’) or impure (‘wood, hay and straw’).

  “Verse 15 makes it clear that some saints who are destined for heaven will pass through fire and suffer: ‘If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.’ The fire is there for the purpose of purging saints. That means it is a purgatorial fire; one that purifies and prepares the saints to be enveloped in the consuming fire of God’s loving presence forever.”

  I had said a lot; perhaps too much. I sat there waiting for Kimberly to react with anger and frustration, as she had every other time I had raised the subject of Purgatory. Instead, she sat there, quiet, with a thoughtful expression on her face. I could tell by her eyes that she was pondering what she had heard. I decided not to push it any farther—for once.

  In the middle of the fall ‘89 semester, I got a call out of the blue from Pat Madrid of Catholic Answers, which I knew to be the finest Catholic apologetics organization in the country. Based in San Diego, Catholic Answers was founded by Karl Keating, author of Catholicism and Fundamentalism, the book I found more useful than any other for helping people answer the fundamentalist attacks against the Church. It was good finally to connect with such kindred spirits.

  We stayed in close touch for the next few weeks. As I talked with them about future job possibilities, they expressed interest in flying me out for an informal interview and having me do an evening seminar for them at Saint Francis de Sales Church in Riverside, California. The arrangements were then made.