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Dr. Richard Shoup

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

I’m eternally grateful to my parents for raising me to believe in God even though at times it was a struggle. I was born in Pennsylvania, and during my childhood, my parents and I worshipped in the Presbyterian Church. We moved around Pennsylvania several times during my childhood because of my father’s work. When I was about 12 years old, we moved back to the family stomping grounds in Ellington, Connecticut, a small rural town where my father’s mother had been born and raised. At that point we began attending the Congregational Church.

At the time we moved back there, Ellington was really changing. It had been very rural with many dairy farms. I remember doing a report on the town in high school. At the time, the town’s population was 7,707—a number that stuck in my head. Today, the population is easily double that. Most of the farms have gone out of business because it’s so hard to be a small farmer these days. All that once flat, gorgeous, fertile farmland is being turned into subdivisions.

I went to the public high school in Ellington, as did my wife. I was convinced that after I graduated high school I would never come back; I would leave town and that would be it. Well, I did go away to college, but apart from that, I haven’t left Ellington since.

In my senior year in high school, I started asking a lot of the big questions: Who am I? What is the fullness of truth? What is the true nature of the universe? I ended up, figuratively speaking, walking down church row and asking questions. Among them was this: How do you pick out a church from among all these choices? I didn’t know it then, but there are at least 25,000 denominations of Protestantism.

As I was going through this process, I made a connection with a teacher in high school who was serious about things religious. He was also, by far, one of the best teachers we had in the school. He had a Ph.D. and could teach almost any subject as well as, or even better than, the other teachers. His name was Evan Lawn. In freshman year, Dr. Lawn taught my Government class. As a sopho-more and junior he taught me Geometry and Alegbra II. Senior year he oversaw a program for the academically gifted of which I was a part, which included AP European History and English.

One day at school I asked Dr. Lawn, “Why do you believe in God?” He told me, “You know I can’t answer that question in a public school. But you’re welcome to come to my house and talk.” That was the start of my big adventure. At first we talked mostly about why, specifically, he believed in God. His answer was that it’s a lot easier to believe in God if you can see some sort of objective signs of His existence. At that point, I didn’t think such a thing was possible. But through a series of conversations with Dr. Lawn, my mind began to change.

The pivotal truth for me was the incorrupt body of St. Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary who was visited by Our Lady at Lourdes. Dr. Lawn introduced me to the miracle of her body’s preservation from decay. My reasonably good science background told me that this was an occurrence that couldn’t happen in the natural order of things. A person dies; their body decays. When St. Bernadette’s body had been dug up her flesh had not decayed and was even supple. Yet the rosary, with which she had been buried, had rusted away. That was very striking to me.

I also learned about apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette when she was a young girl, and about the many miracles associated with Lourdes. Dr. Lawn told me about the spring that appeared when Bernadette began digging in the ground, and about how many people have been healed after going to Lourdes and drinking or touching the water from that very spring. Many things that couldn’t happen in nature began to flood together in my mind. These things told me very strongly that God existed in ways I previously could not have conceived.

Anyway, that got me started. I began to visit Catholic churches from time to time, just to be with God. Throughout the summer I continued to visit and talk with Dr. Lawn. In the fall I went off to Dartmouth College and there I continued to explore. I read books Dr. Lawn recommended and talked to the campus Catholic chaplain, Monsignor Nolan. A remarkable priest, he had gotten a Catholic student center started just off campus, which gave me a place to go and talk with people. Chief among them was Sheila Flanigan, the sister of my friend and classmate, Tim.10 She and I talked a lot and shared stories, and she recommended more books I could read. A lot of us would go to the center to study in the evenings. Every evening at five o’clock they had a Mass for students. Some faculty members would attend as well. At 10 o’clock there was a study break, and we’d all say the rosary.

10. Dr. Timothy Flanigan is the subject of Chapter 2 of this book.

The Catholic student center provided a context in which I could begin looking at things Catholic. I think some of the other students were surprised at me. I was not yet a member of the Catholic Church but I was certainly hanging around a lot and acting pretty interested. I guess you could have called me something of a “Catholic wannabe.” The thing that held me back from conversion was my parents’ vehement objection. It was very hard on them; they felt betrayed and even disgusted.

I really think my mother had the hardest time putting it together. She had lived for many years in a mining town in Pennsylvania, where the Catholics were coal miners and hard drinkers. To put it mildly, they apparently didn’t set the highest moral example. So I think that colored my mother’s perception of Catholic life. She thought that I was giving up everything she had raised me to believe. But nothing could have been further from the truth. Ironically, every time I came to understand a different aspect of Catholic teaching, it was as if a light would come on. I felt like I was completing, rather than rejecting, what I had been raised to believe.

For example, as a Protestant I had been taught that the Bible was it, the ultimate authority for Christian teaching. But in digging into the history and origins of the Bible, I realized that it didn’t just drop from heaven. It was the Church councils that approved the canon of the Bible.11 The process involved a group of men making decisions guided by the Holy Spirit. And those men were Catholic; at that time in history, all Christians were Catholic.

11. In the year 393, the African Synod of Hippo approved the canon of the New Testament and the Septuagint books of the Old Testament. This decision was further ratified by the Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419.

In addition, I began to see that both Scripture and Tradition are essential for the Christian life. Tradition comes out of Scripture and Scripture is informed by Tradition. One is not greater than the other, but they are intimately intertwined and hold each other together. As I came to understand this, Scripture actually took on greater importance for me. This knowledge enriched my insight into passages of Scripture and ways of looking at the Bible that I had grown up with.

The view of the Catholic Church towards the Bible really impressed me. The Church took the words of the Bible much more seriously than anything I had seen growing up. There comes a point where, if you really believe the Scripture is the word of God and is inspired by the Holy Spirit, then you pay serious attention to every word. You pay attention to the translation, to where those words come from, because the nuances of the words in a translation can dramatically affect the meaning.

For example, the so-called Good News Bible is really a businessman’s paraphrase. People think it’s a translation, but it’s not. If you compare those words to the Greek of the New Testament and the Hebrew of the Old Testament, there’s a drastic difference between what the original text says and what the so-called translation says. The way something is translated takes on a huge, huge significance.

During my freshman year at Dartmouth I kept talking with my former teacher, Dr. Lawn, who had become a close friend. I spent time delving deeply into the Bible, taking it more seriously than ever before. I also spent time with God, in prayer and meditation. I even tried to be received into the Church at Dartmouth. But Monsignor Nolan wasn’t too keen on that idea. My parents were still very much against my conversion and he didn’t want to cause trouble with them.

In the summer of 1976, when I got back home to Ellington, I went to talk to Dr. Lawn. He told me about several students from my old high school who had decided to join him the next year in private study of the Scriptures. The more he told me about it, the more I wanted to do it too. So four of us put aside our other commitments and studied for a year with Dr. Lawn. We studied the Bible in its original languages, in Greek and Hebrew, and in translation. We spent time reading the writings of the Church Fathers and learning about the lives of the saints.

That turned out to be a wonderful year for me. I lived with Dr. Lawn and his wife in their home, where the four of us students led a life of study and prayer, daily Mass and daily rosary, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and other devotions. We were assisted by Dr. Lawn’s father-in-law, Moses Bailey, who had retired from his position as a professor of the Old Testament at the Hartford Theological Seminary. An unusually bright man and a wonderful scholar, he taught us Hebrew and Latin. He certainly thought Catholics were...