Early on in my years of protestant ministry a few friends of mine joined the Catholic church in a rather short span of time. I remember thinking that their inspiration must be that they wanted all the answers. Catholicism looked so small and unimaginative to me. I loved theological inquiry and exploration, I thought that the being a Catholic meant giving up on that and simply submitting to a rigid and unbending hierarchy. No thank you!

I think this is the common understanding people have of the Catholic Church. It is, however, far from the truth. Now that I am in the Catholic Church I can testify that

. The Church does have dogma, but that is not developed to answer every question but rather to safeguard the mystery of Jesus. Dogma is the fertilizer in the soil of theology that assures that theological conversation will be healthy and bear fruit. The protestant world I was living in, it turns out, was much smaller theologically. We defined ourselves by what made us different from others, and found our identity in the theological controversies that had inspired our formation centuries before. This had the effect of keeping us locked in one paradigm, often continually fighting theological battles that the world around them had long forgotten were important.