Kathleen Gavlas

Kathleen Gavlas

Put simply, my need to know the truth is why I’m Catholic. To be clear, I don’t mean secular truth — I needed to know which Christian communion had the fullness of truth I longed to embrace.

I was brought up Episcopalian, and believed I had all the truth I needed to love God and my neighbor. But a radical change in our lives tossed that assurance aside. At age 13 my widowed mother took us from our church into the Assemblies of God. I learned many good and useful things there, as I gave myself completely over to “the movement,” trusting that I had truly found the “fullness of the faith.” But after 20 years, in which I earned a B.A. in Bible, I came away exhausted after trying to hang onto some of their beliefs that I could no longer accept — ones vital to the truths of our salvation.

As I had read the Gospels, I found verses that led me to question our interpretations, such as Jesus commanding us to “eat his body and drink his blood” (Jn 6:51-47). We were taught to read such verses metaphorically, and yet, I saw no hermeneutic that supported doing so. We said that we didn’t believe anything not explicitly stated in Scripture.

And yet, we believed many things outside that definition, things, I later learned, that had been hammered out by the Catholic Church centuries ago, when Scripture alone wasn’t enough to settle difficult theological matters. I saw that “sola Scriptura” couldn’t settle differences in interpretation of key passages in our day, either. I prayed a great deal over these things, asking God to guide me to the one true Church, even if I had to go to the — “gulp” — Catholic Church to find it.

I feared the Catholic Church because we were taught that it was errant, encrusted with man-made traditions, idolatrous, that it misled its people with its errors, etc. But I had begun to read works that convinced me otherwise, beginning with C.S. Lewis, whose writings we read avidly and used in our apologetics. I saw that as a devout Anglican, he defended traditional Christian beliefs passed down through the centuries, ones held in common with other liturgical communions.

Then I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Ring” trilogy, and though not an apologetic work, its Catholic imagery warmed my heart towards venerating Mary and the saints. John Anthony O’Brien’s “The Faith of Millions: The Credentials of the Catholic Religion” deftly refuted my misunderstandings about the Catholic Church’s teachings. And so, after a lot of reading, with much prayer, I felt my fears dissolve, and came to believe that the fullness of truth subsists within the Catholic Church.

I attended RCIA and entered the Church — now more years ago than the number of years I spent outside her, lost and confused. As a Catholic I have found the truth I sought, and the faith that nourishes my soul and keeps me grounded in Christ, and in the Church he founded.

Gavlas, 72, and her husband are longtime members of Epiphany in Coon Rapids. She is a published author and her husband is a retired computer tech. They are aunt and uncle to their many brothers and sisters’ children.