HISTORY (cont'd)

To my great surprise, after I began to research the possiblity that the Catholic Church was THE CHURCH, I found that every single solitary thing I'd ever thought I knew about the Church was not only factually wrong, but quite often a deliberate deception or careless ignorant assumption. More than surprise, I felt chagrin. I'd been sold a bill of goods about God's true Church by people I trusted. Not that I lacked reasons to be happily rid of my fundamentalist past, but this was the topper of them all.

I think back to working at the Piedmont Gospel Bookstore in Winston-Salem, back in 1985 or so, when I was a Bible College Preacherboy. One day a very nice man, a very polite and sincere man, came into the store and tried to convince Mr. Kinney to stop selling the Jack Chick series of tracts.

If you haven't seen them, don't bother. Suffice to say they are mean-spirited, wrong-headed, and horribly simplistic. They're to the Catholic Church what the of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is to Judaism, but with smaller words and cute little cartoon illustrations. But I digress.

Mr. Kinney wouldn't have any of it. They sold, and he didn't see any downside to that. The man pointed out that they were insulting to Catholics and not true to boot. I saw his point in a way, but was proud that we'd stood our ground against the Cult of Catholicism, as I wasn't immune to referring to Holy Mother Church in those days. Fast forwarding to 1998, I was mad that I'd been duped, but didn't stay mad long, because the wonder of discovering the truth seems to banish the disappointment of having wallowed in error. Besides, I had been a well-meaning ignoramus, and without the foundation of my Baptist roots might never have cared to search for the truth in the first place.