To speak of the Roman Catholic Church as glad tidings is to rouse scandal and incredulity in some quarters.

For example, some who were born into this Church will urge that their whole experience led them to conceive of the Church as of a tyrant. Whether it was a matter of having rote replies to the Baltimore Catechism drummed into their aching ten-year-old heads, or of their little knuckles being cracked with a ruler wielded by a fierce nun, or of guilt and confusion being compounded upon them in dire homilies Sunday after Sunday—one way or another, they will tell us, this Church can by no stretch of fancy be thought of in connection with any very encouraging tidings. Darkness and cringing bondage would seem to them to strike the note more exactly.

Others, especially zealous non-Catholic Christian believers who have watched this Church from the outside for a lifetime, will volunteer that, far from glad tidings, what Roman Catholicism purveys by way of gospel is a travesty. Instead of the invitation to come and be set free from your bondage and sin, they will tell us, Catholicism tangles one ever more deeply in guilt and uncertainty. Instead of the bright assurance that attends the conviction that one has at last been “saved”, we find Catholics toiling along wondering if heaven is too much to hope for. Instead of “let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace”, which we hear from St. Paul, we find peasants and Montagnards and crones in babushkas lighting candles and offering prayers at squalid shrines and grottoes in a forlorn attempt to find some modest toehold on the fringes of the Divine Mercy.

And yet others will point to history and ask what sort of gladness may be said to attach to crusades, inquisitions, revoked edicts, Borgia popes, and crafty diplomacy.

And besides all this, it is sometimes remarked, look how the simple message that brought joy to shepherds, to the poor, to the jailer in Philippi, and to the Ethiopian in his chariot, of “Fear not!” and “Believe!”—look how this has been choked with penances and confessions and obligations and anathemas and Purgatory. Where are these glad tidings? Where indeed?

The effort to mount a rejoinder to such observations must allow for the earnestness of the observers. No one has cobbled up such remarks about the Catholic Church out of thin air. Something lies at the root of all these strictures. The Church’s interlocutors can point to many things that have aroused their confusion and even their wrath. Protestant witnesses, for example, have in times past cried out in agony from Catholic bonfires; and concordats have been signed between the Vatican and various states depriving powerless multitudes of their freedom to worship as non-Catholics; and too many of the Catholic faithful themselves have, no doubt, gone to Christian graves never having quite grasped the “glad” aspect of the tidings.

It is with these anomalies in mind that I attempt the apologia that occupies the following pages. I myself am a late comer to the ancient Roman Catholic Church. My Christian nurture occurred in a wing of Christendom that stands at a polar remove from Rome; but it is to that Protestant Fundamentalism, ironically, that I owe my having at last found my way into the Church, for it was the Fundamentalists, most notably the figures of my father and mother, who taught me the apostolic faith. They taught me that there is nothing—nothing at all—that may be compared to the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus the Lord. They instilled in me the immense gravity of the matter, that to obey and serve God must swallow up all other contenders for one’s attention. And they taught me, I think, that the peace and order that follow upon such obedience and service, both in one’s inner man and in one’s household, are a treasure to be desired and sought most sedulously. Everything else is ultimately illusionary, fugitive, and perfidious.

It was from such a beginning that I set out on the itinerary that brought me eventually to the Catholic Church. I have told that particular tale elsewhere,[1] and it is not my task to repeat it here. I would like, if I can, to put forward the senses in which it may be said of the Roman Catholic Church that, despite the most baleful charges that can be brought against her, nevertheless, to hear what she teaches is to have heard glad tidings, and to have entered truly into her life is to have found the tidings to be true. It is to have come to that fullness of the faith toward which all other renderings of the Christian gospel tend.

To assert that the Catholic Church constitutes that fullness toward which all other forms of Christian profession tend is to send us back to the question of whether man is, in his essence, religious, and if so, in what does his “religiosity” consist? The assertion here is that it is only in the Roman Catholic Church that mankind may discover all that is implied in his native religiosity.