In my own journey from American fundamentalism to the Catholic Church I once got into an argument with a robust Franciscan about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. After exhausting him with my nit-picking arguments he heaved a great sigh and rolled his eyes and retorted: “Well, we believe the Immaculate Conception because the pope tells us to.”
In other words, the bottom line was Church authority, not particular points of argumentation.
Some years later I engaged in an email discussion about the Virgin with an old college friend named David. While I had moved through Anglicanism to the Catholic Church, David got stuck in the Episcopal Church of the USA. Given our shared fundamentalist background, we were both fairly handy with the scriptures and David had done his homework on Catholic beliefs. Eventually our discussion developed into a book manuscript published as Our Lady?
