[did you know?] Patty Patrick Bonds

Did you know?  Many have "come home" back to the Faith.

Former Protestants or non-practitioners have taken the initiative to learn and understand the history of the Church and the reasons why we are doing certain things today that seem to be constantly under attack from non-Catholic groups.  And yet here they are, converting "back" to Roman Catholicism.

Read this article from http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/s2.htm, a very touching, very inspiring must-read for all of us Catholics and non-Catholics alike...

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Patty Patrick Bonds Conversion

I was born and raised a Baptist. As a Baptist I enjoyed a close,
intimate walk with God. I read His Word and I obeyed Him and He was
everything to me. I was willing to follow Him anywhere and serve Him in
any capacity. I never dreamed He would lead me far from my upbringing
and to a place I would have never chosen to go.

I believed that any Catholic who had genuine faith in Christ and
respected the Bible as the Word of God would follow Christ out of the
Catholic Church. I honestly believed there were only a few misled
Christians in the Catholic Church.

One day I came across the writings of St. Patrick of Ireland. I was
looking for historical evidence of his existence, but never dreamed I
would discover God's will for my life. What I found in the writings of
St. Patrick was evidence of deep devotion to Christ and a spiritual
intimacy with Christ that I knew right away was true Christianity. He
was my brother. Yet he was also a Catholic Bishop. This birthed in me a
desire to understand Church history and when and where the Catholic
Church had gone wrong (since my assumption from childhood was that the
Catholic Church was apostate).

(See the Catholic Encyclopedia article on St. Patrick of Ireland
[http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11554a.htm])

For the next several months I read the writings of those men who had
learned the Christian faith from the very mouth of Christ and the
Apostles. I began to familiarize myself with the culture and time of the
Apostles and realized that Christianity in its earliest days was not
Bible centered (indeed most of the NT was not written yet and later was
not available for the masses) but Tradition centered. I learned that
when the early Christians went to Church their services were not sermon
centered but centered around the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, which was
not seen as a symbol but as the actual Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of
Our Lord Jesus Christ. It was guarded and protected as such. Not a crumb
was to be lost nor a drop spilt. I was shocked to find that the early
Church did not even resemble my own Baptist church.

This led to many more months of earnest study of the Catholic faith.
What I discovered is that everything I had been taught about the
Catholic Church as a Baptist had been erroneous. Every objection that I
had been engrained with since childhood was a falsehood about the
Catholic Church and was easily refuted by an honest look at Church
history.

By coming to an understanding of the time and culture and beliefs of the
Early Church, my Bible began to read very differently. I realized that
no document, even the inspired Word of God, can interpret itself. No one
comes to Scripture without a grid through which they interpret it. My
grid had always been very Protestant and very anti-sacramental. But
after investigating the Early Church, I could clearly see that the Bible
was a Catholic book; written by Catholics, for Catholics, canonized by
the Bishops of the Catholic Church and preserved for Catholics for
millennia to come.

I also discovered that I was one of many Christians devoted to Christ
and willing to follow Him anywhere even at great personal loss that were
reversing the mistakes of the Reformation and flocking back home to the
One Church Christ established on this earth. I discovered through a
series of books called, Surprised by Truth, that I was one of many that
were headed home to Rome. (My story has been included in the third
edition if you would like to learn more).

May God grant you the openness to see Him in His Holy Roman Catholic
Church.

Patty Patrick Bonds MI

Patty can be reached on her blog
Abba's Little Girl [http://abbaslittlegirl.blogspot.com/]