Catholicism and atheism are the only stable options, says a Harvard law professor who recently converted to Catholicism.

“Ultimately, I think with Newman,” Dr. Adrian Vermeule told Christina Dearduff in an interview published in the October issue of Inside the Vatican, referencing Bl. John Henry Newman, “and with the Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory – that there is no stable middle ground between Catholicism and atheistic materialism. One must always be traveling, or slipping unintentionally, in one direction or the other.”

Gregory in 2012 published the book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, which, among other things, pinned the blame for various modern ills on sola scriptura, the hermeneutic of the Protestant Reformation.

Vermeule explained how he was eventually convinced of the Church’s authority from apostolic succession.

“The intellectual logic is unoriginal and Newman-derived. Raised a Protestant, despite all my thrashing and twisting I eventually couldn’t help but believe that the apostolic succession, through Peter as the designated and primus inter pares is in some logical or theological sense prior to everything else – including even Scripture, whose formation was guided and completed by the apostles and their successors, themselves inspired by the Holy Spirit.

“A corollary is the very great evil of schism and private judgement, brought home to me when the Episcopal Church essentially decided to go its own way based on novel views, even in the face of faithful admonition by the broader Anglican Communion.”

He also said he wasn’t worried about “turmoil” in the Church: “…[I]t’s always true in greater or lesser degree, but the depths of the Church are not disturbed by the storms that pass to and fro on the surface.

“Perhaps I speak now with the naiveté and enthusiasm of a convert, but the Church seems to me an institution whose foundations are as strong as iron. The turmoil will pass away; episodes, scandals and debates will come and go; but the line and witness of Peter’s successors will never fail.”

What great faith!

Pray for more conversions!

[See also: Harvard Prof Indicates Mystical Encounter with Mary Led to His Conversion]

[See also: The Little-Known Story of John Wayne’s Deathbed Conversion to Catholicism]