Escaping from the Hornets’ Nest

I found this letter (pictured) while looking through some old papers, and I thought it was too rich not to share it.

The letter is a response to me by Donald Wuerl, who now is the disgraced Cardinal Archbishop of Washington DC, having forgotten that he knew about Cardinal McCarrick’s homosexual abuse of minors and Roman Catholic seminarians, but who then (1984) was the rector of St. Paul’s Seminary in Pittsburgh.

I had apparently written to him requesting information about admission to the Seminary, and in this letter, he referred me to the “Vocations Director” for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. By the end of that year, I had applied for and was accepted to this seminary program, and I remember having attended a small lunch at the Seminary, for incoming students, that was hosted by then Father Wuerl. That’s where I met him.

Most people know me as someone who knows Roman Catholicism in a very thorough way. My Protestant friends look to me for advice when they interact with Roman Catholicism in one way or another. Some Roman Catholics know me as an apostate, and some (Dave Armstrong Google Alert) consider me to be a bitter anti-Catholic.

But this letter reveals my bona-fide credentials as a genuine Roman Catholic, back in the day.

To make a long story short ...

A Credible “Proposition”

In October 1984, I was accepted into a program to study for the priesthood by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. As a recent college graduate, who hadn’t majored in philosophy, I would be required to complete a year-long program of philosophy, prior to entering the theological seminary. I was 24 years old at the time.

I thought I was to begin in January, but the Diocese wanted me to take the full year in residence with other students (probably simply to keep me on a September-May schedule), which would have begun in September 1985. So, since I had nearly a year to wait (and think), I went back to Memphis to spend yet another year “on the road” with my good friend, Jeff Steinberg.

While I was in Memphis, I became a (loose) part of the Roman Catholic community there. When I was not traveling with Jeff’s ministry, I attended Mass daily at the small local Catholic Church near where I lived. As well, I befriended a priest at one of the larger churches, and in fact, I took a missionary trip (as a “seminarista”) to spend some time with a missionary church in Zacatecas, Mexico.

But at the small local church I attended daily, there was another, older Roman Catholic seminarian (perhaps in his 30’s). in fact, I think he had been ordained a Deacon, and was in preparation for ordination to the Priesthood. I’ll call him “Fr. Bernie”. He had in fact graduated from St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. I didn’t know it at the time, but St. Mary’s had a reputation, being known as “the Pink Palace”.

In 2002, a genuinely devout Roman Catholic writer, Michael Rose, wrote a work entitled “Goodbye, Good Men”. The book discussed a broad range of “liberal” issues within the network of Roman Catholic seminaries, including a “gay subculture”.

The book was trashed by conservative Roman Catholic writers. But one paragraph rings true to me:

“a large number of students had been convinced by some liberal teacher that sexual promiscuity with the same sex was not a violation of celibacy”(pg. 59)

This is precisely the appeal with which “Fr Bernie” approached me. I was too unsophisticated to know what this was about at the time, but in retrospect, this did seem to me as if he had been trying to proposition me. I tended to avoid him after this.

Interestingly, “Fr Bernie” is still a priest in Memphis. I recently saw videos of several of his recorded Masses on YouTube.

Jeff Steinberg, “Tiny Giant”: Celebrating 43 Years

My friend Jeff Steinberg celebrated his 43rd anniversary in ministry yesterday. I worked for Jeff from 1981-1986, as his sound man, driver, and personal assistant. Jeff posted this video from Jerry Falwell's "Old Time Gospel Hour", where he first sang for a national audience. He was 21 years old at the time:



He is still doing his thing; you can have Jeff sing at your church for a love offering and expenses. Visit http://www.tinygiant.com, or call him at 901-754-5333. Tell him John Bugay sent you.

Thoughts on a 25th wedding anniversary

Today is our 25^th wedding anniversary; here is a photo of Beth and me from that day, June 1, 1987. We are both a little worse for the wear, but she still looks to me to be the same woman I married. Somewhere, there is a proverb about a homely man and a beautiful wife. I’ve often joked that we are the personification of that proverb. When I was in my early 20’s, I traveled with a handicapped Christian singer named Jeff Steinberg. Life on the road is lonely, and during those years, I wanted to be married more than anything. Beth is the wife that God gave me.

It’s true, the time goes by quickly. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I’m 52, and I have been married almost half my life, although, it’s virtually all my adult life. The good times seem to go past very quickly; the bad times drag on. We have six children, and I was present at the (conception! and) birth of every one of them. Beth had been in the U.S. Army before we met. At 9/11, she, being a long-time housewife and mother of five, wanted to “do something”. She joined the Army Reserve, thinking that this would not entail overseas duty. At one point she signed a longer re-enlistment, and not a week later, she was “involuntarily transferred” to a unit that was headed to Iraq. That was January 2003. 

She served six months in Iraq, from April-October 2003. She was in the 203^rd MI BN, the “weapons intelligence” group that was supposed to track down and catalog the “weapons of mass destruction”. There were no WMDs, but she was exposed to plenty of other weaponry, including ordinance and tanks, which contain depleted uranium, and thus a low level of radiation. We can’t prove it, but we think it’s very likely that her exposure, either to DU, or to benzene from (diesel fuel) burning trash and waste, that caused her recent bout with leukemia. Military service and leukemia form the book-ends that have shaped the second half of our 25 years.

In spite of the quickness of it, I’m eager to put these last 10 years behind us. Marriage is a gift; that we seem to have more time is another gift. It is hard to describe the feeling I have. To be sure, it has been difficult. And there is certainly a sense that we want more time together. We have spent far too little time alone, it seems. We’re going to do some of that this weekend, Lord willing.

My favorite Jeff Steinberg story

This is at a small church in central PA, where some of the footage from Jeff's documentary was filmed. I think this is the one and only video that exists of yours truly. My son made it on his cell phone, and that accounts for the quality.

At the start of the video, I was talking about the 1979 Ford Van that I used to drive. It had a dual gas tank, and the first tank was almost on empty. Our host, Carol, had booked Jeff on a Sunday for two church services, Sunday morning in Plattsburg, NY, and then in the evening, about three hours to the south. That's where this picks up, with me describing that trip between concerts:

New Feature Documentary on my friend Jeff Steinberg

I worked as Jeff Steinberg's driver, sound man and personal assistant from 1981-1985, (often scratching his back, which is what appears to be happening in the initial scene in the video here). Jeff was born with no arms and "barely a leg to stand on" as the advertising material says. Actually, he's got two legs, but they're not very good at all. Still, he makes them work, and in the process, he has managed to put together a singing career and ministry that has lasted 40 years now.

TINY GIANT // FEATURE DOCUMENTARY // TRAILER from HOLY COW FILMS on Vimeo.

It's Jerry Falwell introducing him in the film. Jeff got a start on Falwell's "Old Time Gospel Hour" in the early 1970's, and he's been traveling and singing ever since. He mostly sings in churches, and he only asks that a love offering be taken. If anyone is interested, you can learn more at www.tinygiant.com or contact him at steinbergs@tinygiant.com.

Jeff Steinberg, a Masterpiece in Progress

My dear friend Jeff Steinberg turns 60 today, and I’m conflicted. I want to tell him “you’re an old, old guy,” but on the other hand, I recognize that I’m not far behind him.

Jeff was born in 1951 with no arms and deformed legs – you may have heard the term “Thalidomide baby” – Thalidomide seems to have been introduced some time after his birth, but Jeff’s physical deformities are very similar to those you’ll find among children who can trace their maladies to that drug.

In those days, such children were institutionalized, and Jeff mostly grew up at Shriner’s Hospital in Philadelphia and later at the Good Shepherd Home in Allentown, PA. There, a local Christian couple “adopted” him, took him into their hearts and into the church, and they introduced him to the genre of Northern Gospel Music that’s still popular in that part of the state. He taught himself to sing by singing along with the albums of his favorite Gospel groups, and in 1971 he started a singing trio and has been singing and traveling ever since.

Working for Jeff was my first job out of college. He was singing a song called “The Glove” by Gordon Jensen – “Lord, let me be the glove you wear today”, like a glove worn “on a carpenter’s, or on a surgeon’s hand”. He has a driving and powerful voice, with a raspy Neil Diamondish character. And in his younger day, he could pop around a church stage like nobody’s business.

I had something like a journalism degree, and he had me driving hundreds of thousands of miles in a 1979 Ford van, setting up audio for hundreds of concerts he performed in hundreds of different churches from 1981-1986. In the process, yes, I also held some of the hair-washing and hair-spraying duties you’ll see in the video below.

It’s hard to say how deeply those years have affected my whole life since. When we first found out my wife was sick, and I called him, wondering how we were going to get through it, Jeff’s advice to me was “you’ve got to fight like hell every step of the way.” That wasn’t just idle advice. He lived that way. For years I had the privilege of watching him do it. It’s not right to say that nothing ever got him down. But nothing ever has kept him down.

On the video below, about seven minutes, you’ll see clips of him performing small portions of his signature songs, “I’m a Tiny Giant”, and “Masterpiece in Progress”, autographing a T-shirt by signing with a Sharpie pen in his mouth, and ministering to a group of prisoners in prison, among other things. Jeff has never had a lot of huge success in the world, but he’s been a huge success in my own life and the lives of the thousands of others he’s touched in 40 years of ministry now.

He’s booking his fall tour now, and he’s always got a few available dates open. If you’d like to have Jeff perform for your church or function, give him a call at (901) 754-5333, or email booking@tinygiant.com.

Motivations

I’m a guy who, seeing an empty pickle jar in the kitchen sink to be washed, thinks, “nice, we’ve got a new drinking glass.” And my second thought, inevitably is, “we’ve got to eat more pickles now so we can have a matching set.”

I don’t plan to talk much at all about myself. But since I’m new here, I just want to say a few introductory things.

Many readers here will know me from Beggars All, and maybe if you’ve been around for a while, you might know me from the old NTRMin discussion board. I’ve described my conversion story briefly, here.


Finding my way around
As a young man, in the early 1980’s, I traveled extensively, working for a disabled Christian singer named Jeff Steinberg. My life consisted mainly of (a) helping Jeff with his personal needs, (b) driving long distances to a place I’d never been to before, setting up a fairly extensive sound system, running sound for a concert, then packing it all up and frequently driving a couple more hours to get to our next location. I did that for about five years, from 1981-1986.

Often we’d make arrangements for local hosts to do a number of concerts in an area, and that would require that I quickly get to know my way around a new city or town. Over time, I developed a method for understanding my new short-term environment. That involved finding one main highway that I could understand and recognize, then branching off into other areas before finding my way back to that one main highway.

There’s precedent in our day for this method of learning theology and church history, too. Robert Jewett, in the introduction of his commentary on Romans, notes the requirement of “a firm chronological structure” – that one main highway, because “chronology is the skeleton of history.” (Romans, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, pg 18). You expand your learning by finding that one main highway that you trust – in my case, theologically, it has been the Scriptures, and then branching off into other, lesser known areas.

As a person who has wrestled with Roman Catholicism all my life, on both sides of the Protestant/Catholic divide, the one question that kept coming back to me was, “why is the Roman Catholic religion so different from ‘the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3) that’s so plainly evident in the New Testament?”

Not long ago, I was talking with my Pastor about all of this. (I am a member of a PCA church that’s located near the University of Pittsburgh campus.) And from a pastoral point of view, he said that many converts from Roman Catholicism don’t seem to struggle with those kinds of issues. His own mother-in-law and father-in-law are a case in point. Once their daughter married a Presbyterian minister, they stopped attending their Roman Catholic church and started attending our PCA because they just felt more of a love of the Lord in the Presbyterian church.

And I’ve talked to his father-in-law. There was no angst. It was, as Carl Trueman has noted, a case in which Roman Catholics are “generally cultural rather than committed,” and the love for the Lord was far more evident in their new church than their old one.


“Proudestants”
I did not have it so easy. When I decided to leave Roman Catholicism for the first time, my father and I had terrible wars over it. I was in college at the time, certainly dependent on him financially, and he, having grown up in a poor rural area during the depression, had developed a hatred for “Proudestants” some time during his youth, that I was not aware of. He was determined that his son was not going to be a “Proudestant”.

Most teens in those days, the late 1970’s, were rebelling with “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” I was rebelling by reading the Bible and going to prayer meetings. And it was almost immediately following my graduation from Pitt that the Lord put Jeff Steinberg in my path.

During my years with Jeff, he was active in the pro-life movement, and we interacted with a number of devout Roman Catholics. Of course, the question asked of me was, “why don’t you come back home,” and eventually I did. And as I’ve mentioned in my brief conversion account, I considered and dismissed the idea of becoming a priest, married, had six kids, and spent probably the next 15 years as a devout Roman Catholic.

It was the publication of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” in 1994 that started me thinking about all of my old questions again. At first, I was overjoyed that Evangelicals and Catholics were getting together, but as I read the statement, and read the reviews from both sides, it was apparent that there were some folks on both sides who were not happy about such a development. The 1997 statement, The Gift of Salvation, was one of the last straws for me, particularly this paragraph:

The New Testament makes it clear that the gift of justification is received through faith. "By grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8). By faith, which is also the gift of God, we repent of our sins and freely adhere to the Gospel, the good news of God’s saving work for us in Christ. By our response of faith to Christ, we enter into the blessings promised by the Gospel. Faith is not merely intellectual assent but an act of the whole person, involving the mind, the will, and the affections, issuing in a changed life. We understand that what we here affirm is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone (sola fide).

While it’s true that Roman Catholics view all of “salvation” as a “gift,” – it’s also true, as the priest was telling me as I walked out of confession for the last time, “We’ve gotta do our part too.”


Spending Your Life on the Sacramental Treadmill
But for Roman Catholics, “our part” means spending a lifetime on the sacramental treadmill. Most Roman Catholics are baptized as babies, and so they are never urged to repent, they are never called to conversion to Christ.

On the other hand, when Roman Catholics say that “works” are required, they don’t mean “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners in jail.” Those things are helpful, but the works that are genuinely required by Church law are known as “the precepts of the church”. My older version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (ccc) says they are “the indispensable minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort, in the growth in love of God and neighbor.” (ccc 2041). It’s the least that you are required to do in order to assure yourself that “you have been good enough to get to heaven when you die.” (To miss Mass on a Sunday, without getting to confession, involves Mortal sin.) In newer printings, this has been edited to read “The obligatory character of these positive laws decreed by the pastoral authorities is meant to guarantee to the faithful the very necessary minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort, in the growth in love of God and neighbor.” These are:

The first precept ("You shall attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation and rest from servile labor") requires the faithful to sanctify the day commemorating the Resurrection of the Lord as well as the principal liturgical feasts honoring the mysteries of the Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the saints; in the first place, by participating in the Eucharistic celebration, in which the Christian community is gathered, and by resting from those works and activities which could impede such a sanctification of these days.

The second precept ("You shall confess your sins at least once a year") ensures preparation for the Eucharist by the reception of the sacrament of reconciliation, which continues Baptism's work of conversion and forgiveness.

The third precept ("You shall receive the sacrament of the Eucharist at least during the Easter season") guarantees as a minimum the reception of the Lord's Body and Blood in connection with the Paschal feasts, the origin and center of the Christian liturgy.

The fourth precept ("You shall observe the days of fasting and abstinence established by the Church") ensures the times of ascesis and penance which prepare us for the liturgical feasts and help us acquire mastery over our instincts and freedom of heart.

The fifth precept ("You shall help to provide for the needs of the Church") means that the faithful are obliged to assist with the material needs of the Church, each according to his own ability.

So there you have the “Sacramental Treadmill”. Catholics will affirm that God gives the grace to accomplish all of that through a lifetime. That’s why they say it’s a “gift.” But as the priest said, you surely gotta do your part.


What it takes to interact effectively with Roman Catholics
In recent weeks, Steve provided an overview of what’s needed in order to interact with Roman Catholicism in our day. I have always taken this advice to heart.

I think a lot of people would like to forget Roman Catholicism, but if you want to go back in time about 900 years, imagine that your government is your religion, and that government rules the world. (At least, the only world you know. But all of it.) There is nothing else: you’re born, you’re baptized by the government; the government gives you sacraments that promise “eternal life”; you get married by the government; your kids have to be baptized by the government. It’s true, there were civil authorities in those days, “lesser authorities” but it was the Roman Church that was asserting authority over all of it. You knew who was in charge. Especially given that there was a lot more death around to help focus the mind.

The Reformation and the American Revolution were fought to break out of that cycle, which is, unfortunately, still evident in many ways in our day. (The “sacraments” no longer apply to your eternal life, but to your natural one. Health care is the big one now, but I’m sure you can think of others.)

I’ve told Steve Hays in the past that I’m a “one-trick pony” – the trick that I seek to understand is Roman Catholicism. And to be sure, Roman Catholicism is a big trick. It’s a bait-and-switch of of the first magnitude. For a long time, it was a huge, unexplored world. But now, within that world, I’ve found that one main highway that I understand and trust. I’ve read a lot. I’ve branched off into those areas that I hadn’t been previously familiar with. And in the process, I’ve gotten to understand this multi-dimensional world of church history, theology, and the breadth of the Protestant/Catholic divide. My hope is to be a trustworthy guide for those who want, for some reason, to explore that world.