I'm a convert to Catholicism and will be confirmed this Easter.
I was raised as a Protestant in a 'rock concert' Megachurch and was taught to believe that God communicated directly to the individual through the Bible. I had also been lead to believe that the Catholic Church was established and paganized by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century.
Over time, I became disgusted with my church's practice and grew to see the whole things as being phony and so deconverted.
I was an atheist for a while and then I started studying Buddhism.
A few years later, I started reading the Old Testament again but instead of reading it the way I was taught as a protestant, I read it more like I had been taught to read the eastern texts and over time I realized that the God of the Old Testament was the real God of the universe.
This lead me to believe that the Bible really was the inspired word of God after all, but that not all interpretations of it are divinely inspired.
From studying both Jewish history and the history of the early church, it became overwhelming clear that scripture was written, canonized and interpreted all by the guide and light of tradition. It also became overwhelmingly clear that all those practices that I once thought were pagan were actually held over from Judaism, that Constantine's pagan ideas about Jesus (or any other pagan practice from that time) never found their way into church teaching and that the early church could not have even survived had it not been unified (or catholic).
I am so glad to have finally found the real thing.
But at the same time, it's kind of bittersweet. I wish I had found Catholicism much earlier in life but I didn't even know to look. I was cheated out of the real thing for a long time because I was given a fake that used the same name as the real thing. And so when I finally went looking for the real thing, I didn't know what to look for because I had already been lead to believe the real thing was a fake.
