I just recently found out that best-selling author Dean Koontz is a devout Catholic who converted from Protestantism. I was reading an interview of his conversion, and he wrote something that hit home to me.

 

Catholicism permits a view of life that sees mystery and wonder in all things, which Protestantism does not easily allow. As a Catholic, I saw the world as being more mysterious, more organic and less mechanical than it had seemed to me previously, and I had a more direct connection with God.

 

http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/2013

 

I found this too be so true. Being a Catholic has opened to me an enchanted world, a world of mystery and wonder! For instance, the first Friday of every month, my church has 24-hour perpetual Eucharistic Adoration. People sign up for an hour throughout that period. The host is exposed in front of the chapel, and people quietly come into that chapel throughout that 24-hour period. Some people sit, some kneel in from of the Blessed Sacrament, some silently pray the Rosary, and some read a devotional book. But whatever they do, you can hear a pin drop. That is because we take Jesus at His word when He held up the bread and said “This is my body”. After the bread is consecrated by the priest, it is the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus in His divinity is everywhere. But Jesus in His humanity is not everywhere, just in special places. Jesus in His humanity is in heaven; He will also come again in His humanity in the end time. But now in the present with us His humanity is in the form of bread. This is so like Him to do this. 2,000 years ago He came to be with us by humbling Himself by giving up His throne for a while and being a mere man, just the son of carpenter and a poor peasant. Now He humbles Himself by coming to be us in a much lower form – by being in the form of inanimate bread!

 

We just had Christmas. I recall the story of the shepherds leaving the sheep and the wise men leaving their countries just to behold the greatest wonder of the world – God coming down as a newborn baby! They came to adore the Christ-child.  O come let us adore Him! How much I used to wish that I could have been there! But as I knelt in front of the Eucharist, I realized I was experiencing something just as good, maybe even better. Just as shepherds gazed into the manger, so I can gaze into the Eucharist. In both cases, it shows Christ’s humility and desire to be with us. But when the shepherds peered into the manger, I do not think they understood that they were looking at God in the flesh. We Catholics have a better understanding of the great miracle that is happening right before us when we adore Christ in the Eucharist.

 

There are other wonders that we have. We have the Blessed Virgin Mary, with her appearances at Lourdes and at Fatima. We also have the communion of the saints. The saints pray for us, we pray for the holy souls in purgatory, and the souls in purgatory pray for us when they get to heaven. We Catholics even talk to our guardian angels. This all gives me more of the sense of an enchanted world.

 

This does not mean that we Catholics just believe in childish fairy tales! Koontz wrote of his conversion to Catholicism:

 

I did become engaged, more and more as the years went by, by the intellectual rigor that lies behind the Catholic Church. A lot of people will possibly laugh at that but if you know St. Thomas Aquinas and some of the other famous writers of the Church — or laymen who wrote brilliantly from a Catholic perspective like G.K. Chesterton — then you understand what I’m talking about. There is a deep intellectual basis behind it and that always appealed to me.

http://catholicexchange.com/2009/08/01/120925/

 

 

This also hit home with my conversion experience. Sometimes as an evangelical, I would wince at some of the anti-intellectual rants I heard from my fellow evangelicals. It would be embarrassing at times. But I found in Catholicism this deep intellectual foundation that Dean Koontz talked about. I found this intellectual tradition in Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry New\man, G. K. Chesterton, etc.

 

Koontz went on the say at the same website:

 

The birth of science comes out of the Catholic Church. People always say, "No, no, Galileo." They don’t really know the history; they just know talking points. The reality is through various times in the Catholic Church; various sciences were founded and encouraged. There is no distance between (faith and science) except for what people try to make for political reasons.

Without the Catholic faith, we would never have had science. So even though the Catholic faith gives us the sense of mystery in the world, the Catholic faith gave us the tools needed to unlock some of those mysteries. The tools we needed was the faith that God created the world and we can expect law and order in the universe because of this. No other religion except the Judeo-Christian religion held onto that simple postulate. Paganism saw each individual aspect of the world was caused by the peculiar whim of a particular god. The Eastern religion did not see the world as an entity separate from God. In fact, the East would doubt that the physical world even existed. If atheism was around at that time, atheism would not have given man a workable belief system to do science. Atheism teaches that since there is no God, everything happened by chance. If everything happened by chance, then it would be pointless to do science. To ask why things happen the way they do implies an underlying purpose of why things happen as they do. Atheists no doubt protest to my appraisal of atheism. But the only reason atheists today accept modern science is because science has been proven to work. In the Middle Ages, they did not know yet that science would work; that came centuries later. All they had to hold onto was that God created the world with law and order in it. From this idea science became workable.

 

 

As it was for Dean Koontz, I re-gained my child-like wonder of the world and a strong intellectual foundation in the Catholic faith.