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The Power of Truth
Mr. Scott Ferrier, MJ

God calls each one of us to holiness. But it seems that some of us may take a little longer than others to hear the call.

In 1990, curiosity led me into a Catholic bookstore near my home in Denver, Colorado. I was thirty-nine years old. That was the day i met the owners of the bookstore, faithful lay Catholics, Howard and his devout wife, Mary Ann.

I was thumbing through, i think, Etienne Gilson’s God and Philosophy—one among many in a rack at the front of the store.
“So, you like philosophy?” Howard asked.

“I studied a little in college,” i replied. “Mostly the moderns, though. But i remember this fellow. I didn’t realize he was Catholic,” i admitted. “You’ll find many of the best thinkers are,” he replied.

Howard wandered off to the back, leaving me to ponder these new discoveries. I spent the better part of an hour, looking up and down the aisles—things i might have heard vaguely of before but, not being Catholic, knew nothing about. In fact, i was a recently converted evangelical Christian and had, for the past three years or so, been reading everything i could find on all matters pertaining to Christianity.

As i completed my first purchase from Mr. Clampitt’s Sacred Heart Book Store he thanked me for my patronage and, with a smile, gave me Gilson’s book as a gift. My visit to this store and making the acquaintance of this pious couple was to change the course of my entire life.

It marked the beginning of my vocation to a life with God.

At this time, i was living in Denver and Hawaii, an airline pilot for a major airline. I was traveling the world, leading the “the good life,” as some might see it. But before i was to find comfort in, and the peace of, Christ Our Lord, i was, inside, a very unhappy young man.

All the while, i held fast to a false image that i had devised for myself: successful, popular, confident, self-sufficient. No one was the wiser—except for me. In private moments of despair, i began to acknowledge a deeper need inside my soul—a spiritual one which cannot be satisfied by anything in this created world. The One who is more than an Idea—the God Who is Really There—was calling to me through the circumstances of my life—and, for the first time, i was beginning to listen.
I decided to give up the worst of my vices. I laid aside as many false ideals and assumptions as i could identify, rejecting for the first time some of the knucklehead ideas and philosophies that had been at the root of such unhappiness. A period of spiritual and intellectual formation began for me with my introduction to the Catholic faith by the Clampitts.

I was now reading hours a day (when not flying airplanes) and replacing all my Protestant books with Catholic ones. New vistas were opened to me that i had not realized existed. Answers about the Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, His mission, the Providence of God, the role of the Church and the saints in salvation history—all previously unknown to me, began to fall into place.

A significant step in my acceptance of the Catholic Church came while exploring the teaching on artificial contraception. Shortly after my introduction to Catholicism, i was experiencing some of the social stigma towards Catholic things that those brought up in the Protestant tradition will invariably have, of one degree or another. I wondered, “Why do they teach this?” And i knew this also: “I can’t be a Catholic if i don’t agree with this.”

This led to my discovery of the sublime teachings of the Church on human sexuality. The teaching of the Church on love, sexuality and marriage is founded upon the natural law. God is the Creator, the Author of human nature and knows the whole truth about mankind. When i read the writings of Pope John Paul II on the “theology of the body,” and his reflections on the Book of Genesis, i was stunned. These were profound, metaphysical reasons that this teaching of the Church was not a law arbitrarily imposed upon men and women by a man-made, patriarchal institution but the expression of an unchanging, substantial reality—truth revealed and handed down, taught always and everywhere, one which preceded even the founding of the Church!

As i processed these new truths, i was making the Faith my own—a gift of God to a prodigal son! I came across, and was challenged by, a statement made by His Holiness John Paul II which came from Dignitatis Humanae, 2 and no. 2467 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear witness to it: it is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons…are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth.”

These words from the Heart of the Church seemed directly aimed at me at this time of my life. I was being drawn to a life consecrated to God and guided by the following of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This attraction first manifested itself to me by a desire on my part to make reparation, in some way, for the many sins of my life. By choosing to live the way that God intends for me to live—by obedience to His will—i can do what the Lord gives me to do to make a troubled world right and, God willing, to save souls.