Originally published at The Catholic Thing
On this day, the 31st of October, All Hallows’ Eve, many of our Protestant brothers and sisters celebrate Reformation Day – the momentous day in 1517 when the Augustinian friar Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
The date always brings to mind my return to the Catholic Church some thirty years ago. Major factors in that homecoming were nagging questions about the proper relationship between Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. (Another was a growing hunger for the Eucharist, which was less a matter of the head than of the heart; as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.)
I’ll always be grateful for those evangelical Protestant churches that nurtured me in the faith for so many years, including instilling the sound practice of daily Bible reading. In the mid-1990s, however, after having gravitated to the Reformed/Presbyterian wing of evangelicalism, I began a quest that eventually would lead me to take my place among the ranks of “reverts” to Catholicism.
Prior to that return, I was becoming increasingly concerned that the decades-long crisis of authority within Mainline Protestantism was also beginning to manifest itself in
