Two students find their roots in traditional Christianity
Reported by Genevieve Wolf
If you had told Claire Pierce’s freshman self that within three years she would be Roman Catholic, she would have been horrified.
“[She] would think I was a horrible heretic and a really bad Christian just because I have so many wild and crazy views about Christianity now,” Claire said, laughing. “But then I think my freshman self would hear me out and hear my reasons why I believe what I do.”
Pierce, a senior philosophy major, entered the Catholic Church in October 2018. Jack Reamy, a junior studying computer engineering and computer science, became Eastern Orthodox last Easter. Both said their studies in the William Penn Honors Program (WPHP) laid the foundation for their conversions.
Pierce said her discernment process began while she was attending a church in Newberg. She described a traumatic experience watching families and friends at that church pull apart over their different understandings of how the Bible addresses same-sex relationships.
“These people were…doomed to look at the Bible through their own lens[es] and read it in their different ways [with] no one to guide them into conflict resolution amongst different ways of reading the Bible,” she said. “And that was super hard, [and I thought] ‘Wow, well, if this is what Christianity is, just doomed to dissolve into petty disagreements about how to interpret the Bible, I don’t really want to be a part of that.”
While participating in the WPHP and reading texts written during the early church, Pierce found an answer to her problem.
“[I was] realizing that...historically there actually has been an answer to these problems of interpreting the Bible,” she said. “It’s called the Church and it’s the authority structure that the Church has – the Magisterium – in which the leaders of the Church guide you into a correct interpretation of Christian theology rooted in scripture and in Christian tradition.” She believes she has found this church structure still existing in the Catholic Church of today.
Reamy had a similar experience in the WPHP.
“I got...[an] understanding of what the early church looked like,” He said. Reamy then quoted a Bible verse that weighed on his mind at the time: “Thus says the Lord:/Stand at the crossroads, and look,/and ask for the ancient paths,/where the good way lies; and walk in it,/and find rest for your souls.” (Jeremiah 6:16, NRSV)
Reamy believes that those ancient paths are a reference to the ancient church, “which is still here.”
During his discernment process last year, Reamy said he did “lots of searching, lots of asking questions” while exploring the Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox churches. He said that one of his most important questions was asking what claim these churches had on being Christ’s church founded at Pentecost.
“My basic principle was that the people that followed Christ probably knew what it meant to be Christian,” he said. “Orthodoxy's answer...is that through unbroken apostolic succession it's preserved the practice and teaching of the church fathers throughout the ages.”
Reamy also said that sacraments began to hold a new importance for him. “I grew up basically non-denominational and sacraments were not a part of my picture of church. [But] the church fathers are pretty clear about the sacraments,” he said.
Both Pierce and Reamy said that studying chapter six of the Gospel of John gave them a new understanding of the Eucharist and taking communion. Reamy described this passage as “where Jesus basically says, 'No really, you have to actually eat my body and drink my blood.'”
Pierce reminisced about one discussion on this passage in her WPHP class, where she and her classmates were discussing the Eucharist as a symbol. But one professor’s comment stopped Pierce in her tracks.
“She said: ‘If it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.’ And that really stuck with me, her saying that... If it’s just a symbol, then really, why is it important to go to church to take communion?” Pierce now believes in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: the belief that Jesus Christ is made physically present in the Eucharist. “The very literal way in which Christ physically comes into the world through the Eucharist has now…helped me see the importance of the Eucharist.”
When asked what it is like to live his faith at George Fox, Reamy said: “It’s hard when people see the decision I’m making as either invalidating their faith or rejecting their beliefs or things like that.”
But it’s not, he said, and he appreciates having a common background of faith with his peers.
Reamy said: “When I enter an Orthodox church it feels like I'm home again, whether it's the one I regularly attend, or one where half the service is in Greek.”
Pierce said that since becoming Catholic, “The major difference [is that] I have this confidence in my mind, I have a theological structure to turn to when I have questions about things or when I am looking for an explanation to something in life that I think...a lot of my peers don’t have.”