“If Peter was indeed given authority over the whole church; if his successors, the bishops of Rome, have the same authority; if God has providentially preserved an unbroken succession … then it is reasonable to expect that all popes would meet the basic New Testament standard for bishops, or at the very least be persons of sincere faith in Christ” (p. 39).  Of course, the lineage of the papacy meets none of those basic qualifications, and in that case, “Roman Catholics often retreat to making very modest claims about the papacy” (p.49).

Ernest Hemingway’s first commercial success, “The Sun Also Rises”, was built around the metaphor of an emasculated war hero, Jake Barnes, who had been wounded in World War I and lost the functionality (or more) of his genitals. 

“Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed. … Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny. … My head started to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded.… I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett [with whom he had fallen in love] when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it” (emphasis added). 

Hemingway was raised Protestant but converted to Catholicism as a young man after being severely wounded in World War I, where he was baptized on the battlefield by an Italian priest. He later reaffirmed his conversion in 1927 ahead of his marriage to his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, a devout Roman Catholic woman. Hemingway identified strongly with Catholicism at times, stating in a couple of personal letters that year, “If I am anything I am a Catholic… I cannot imagine taking any other religion seriously.”

As it turned out, he couldn’t take his Roman Catholicism seriously either. Hemingway’s own complicated relationship with Catholicism, which he initially embraced and eventually neglected, mirrors the broader instability of many modern conversion stories.

He eventually divorced Pauline, and he was married two other times. He lived the life of an explorer, and he made his reputation writing about adventures in Europe and Africa and the Caribbean, before ending his own life in 1962. 

There are seemingly a lot of conversions to Catholicism these days, especially among “intellectuals”, and Roman Catholic writers like to publicize these stories. Less publicized are the “de-conversion” stories. 

On the flip side of that coin, there are the people who are pressured to convert to Roman Catholicism, who nevertheless have the ability to think through the important issues and who decide not to convert.

Jerry Walls is one of these individuals, who faced a great deal of pressure to convert, but did not convert. 

His work, “Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic”, published earlier this year, tells of that story and his thought process. A long-time professor of philosophy at Houston Baptist University (later Houston Christian University), Walls studied at, and has degrees from, among other places, Princeton Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Notre Dame. 

“My first serious engagement with Roman Catholicism that I can recall came when I enrolled as a graduate student in the philosophy department at Notre Dame in the fall of 1984,” where, he said, “Notre Dame was in the process of building a great Christian philosophy department” (from the Introduction, pp. xi–xii). 

He wrote a dissertation on “damnation”, which he later published as a work on Hell. Following up, he also wrote works on Heaven and Purgatory, and through that pathway, he came into the orbit of the journal First Things, its editor Father Richard John Neuhaus. 

“Shortly thereafter [Neuhaus] invited me to join the Dulles Colloquium, an ecumenical theology discussion group hosted by him and [Cardinal] Avery Dulles, after whom it was named…. I regularly defended the Protestant view in these discussions with Neuhaus and other members of the group. 

“In retrospect, I suspect that an unofficial agenda of the Dulles Colloquium—and I say this with all due affection—was to be a Catholic Conversion Club, particularly with the aim of converting Protestant intellectuals to Rome” (from the Introduction, pp. xii–xiii). 

In 2017, he and the former Roman Catholic Kenneth Collins (now a professor of Church History at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky) published “Roman but Not Catholic”, an academic work that was intended to be used as a seminary text on the topic. 

In this new work, Walls describes his current thinking on the topic in a way that he describes as “a friendly, ecumenical explanation”. 

The tone may be friendly, but in the course of the argument, Walls takes on some serious issues. His first target is “the papacy”, the contradictions of which he explores in depth in the first three chapters. 

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