Things You Should Know Before You Convert From Protestantism

Brief Overview

• Converting from Protestantism to Catholicism is not simply adding new practices to your existing faith; it means accepting a fundamentally different framework for how Scripture, Tradition, and the Church’s authority work together to communicate divine truth.
• Your Protestant baptism is almost certainly valid and recognized by the Catholic Church, which means you will not be re-baptized, but you will still need to go through the full RCIA process to receive confirmation and the Eucharist.
• Some of the beliefs you held most firmly as a Protestant, including the idea that Scripture alone is the final authority and that faith alone saves, are positions the Catholic Church directly and clearly rejects.
• Your relationships with Protestant family members, friends, and your former faith community will very likely face real tension after your conversion, and no one in RCIA will prepare you adequately for how personally costly that can be.
• The Catholic parish you enter will almost certainly not match the vibrant fellowship and enthusiastic worship culture you experienced in many Protestant settings, and adjusting to that difference takes genuine patience and commitment.
• Becoming Catholic gives you access to the fullness of the sacramental life, including the Eucharist, confession, and confirmation, and the Church’s position is that this fullness is something your Protestant faith, however sincere and genuine, did not yet provide.

You Are Not Starting Over, But You Are Changing More Than You Think

Coming from Protestantism, you are not starting from zero in the faith. You almost certainly know and love the Scriptures, you pray, you have a real relationship with Christ, and you take the Christian life seriously. The Catholic Church acknowledges all of that and does not ask you to pretend your Protestant years were spiritually empty. The Catechism is explicit that baptized Protestants are genuinely incorporated into Christ through their baptism and that the Holy Spirit truly works in their communities (CCC 818). But what you are doing when you convert is not simply adding a few Catholic practices on top of your existing Protestant framework. You are adopting a different account of how God reveals himself, a different understanding of what the Church is, a different view of the sacraments, and a different relationship to authority in faith and morals. These are not minor additions or upgrades. They are structural changes to how you think about the entire Christian life. Many converts underestimate this and then feel destabilized when they realize, a year or two in, that accepting Catholic teaching requires more than intellectual assent to a list of doctrines. It requires a genuine reordering of how you read Scripture, how you approach moral questions, and what you think the Church actually is. Go into this process knowing that the change is real and significant, and give yourself time to let it take root properly rather than assuming a quick intellectual conversion covers everything.

Your Protestant Baptism Is Valid, But Your Initiation Is Not Complete

One of the first things a Protestant considering conversion wants to know is whether they will be re-baptized. In almost all cases, the answer is no. If you were baptized with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church considers your baptism valid and will not repeat it (CCC 1256). The Church teaches that baptism leaves a permanent spiritual mark on the soul, called a character, that can never be removed or repeated (CCC 1272). This is genuinely good news, because it means the Church takes your entire prior Christian life seriously as something real. However, valid baptism is only the first of the three sacraments of initiation. Confirmation and the Eucharist are the other two, and without them, the Church considers Christian initiation incomplete (CCC 1306). This means that however formed and mature your Protestant faith was, from the Catholic perspective you still need to receive confirmation and the Eucharist before you are in full communion with the Church. You will receive both of these at the Easter Vigil after completing RCIA. For many Protestant converts, especially those from traditions with strong sacramental theology, this feels straightforward. For those from traditions where communion is a purely symbolic act and confirmation does not exist, the Catholic understanding of these sacraments will require serious study and genuine theological rethinking. Do not rush past that rethinking, because receiving the sacraments while still holding a Protestant view of what they are will leave you spiritually confused rather than genuinely formed.

Sola Scriptura Is One Belief You Cannot Bring With You

If there is one Protestant conviction that creates the deepest friction for converts, it is sola scriptura, the idea that Scripture alone is the final and sufficient authority for Christian faith and practice. This is not a peripheral disagreement between Catholics and Protestants. It is the central structural difference between the two traditions, and it shapes everything else. The Catholic Church teaches that divine revelation comes through two channels, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, both of which flow from the same divine source and must be received together (CCC 80-82). The Church also teaches that the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church led by the pope and bishops in communion with him, has been given the task of authentically interpreting both Scripture and Tradition (CCC 85). This means that in Catholic theology, the Bible is not a self-interpreting document that any individual or congregation can read and apply independently of the Church. It means that Tradition is not a collection of human customs that add to or corrupt the pure biblical message. It means that the Church’s teaching authority is not a human invention but a divinely established structure. For a Protestant who has spent years treating their own reading of Scripture as the final court of appeal, this is not a small adjustment. It is a fundamental reconception of how truth in the faith is known and transmitted. Many converts work through this intellectually and find the Catholic account compelling, often precisely because they see how sola scriptura has produced thousands of competing Protestant interpretations of the same texts. But accepting it emotionally and practically, not just intellectually, takes considerably longer.

Sola Fide Is Another Teaching You Will Need to Genuinely Rethink

Closely related to sola scriptura is the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, salvation by faith alone. This was one of Martin Luther’s central convictions, drawn from his reading of Paul’s letters, particularly Romans 3:28 and Galatians 2:16. The Catholic Church does not teach salvation by faith alone, and the Council of Trent explicitly defined this position in the sixteenth century in direct response to the Reformation. The Catechism teaches that justification is received through faith, but that faith works through charity and that good works done in a state of grace are genuinely meritorious before God (CCC 1815, CCC 2010). This does not mean Catholics believe they earn salvation or that grace is not primary, because the Church is clear that every good work is itself a gift of God’s grace. But it does mean that the Catholic understanding of how salvation works is more complex and more demanding than the simplified Protestant formula. The Church points to James 2:24, where the text states that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone, as a key scriptural grounding for this position. For a Protestant who has found enormous spiritual comfort and clarity in the assurance that faith alone suffices, the Catholic position can initially feel like a burden being added to the gospel. Working through that feeling with a good spiritual director or catechist is important, because the Catholic understanding is not about earning or anxiety but about the nature of genuine faith as something that necessarily expresses itself in love and action. The difference is real, the stakes are high, and you deserve a thorough and honest explanation of it before you commit.

Mary Will Challenge You More Than Anything Else You Encounter

Ask almost any Protestant convert what gave them the most difficulty, and the majority will say Mary. This is not surprising. Protestant traditions have, for five centuries, been deeply suspicious of Marian devotion, often viewing it as idolatry or as an obstacle to the proper relationship between the believer and Christ. The Catholic Church, by contrast, holds a series of defined dogmas about Mary, including her Immaculate Conception, her perpetual virginity, her divine maternity as the Mother of God, and her Assumption into heaven body and soul. These are not optional beliefs or matters of private devotion. They are defined doctrines of the faith that all Catholics are required to hold (CCC 490-495, CCC 966). Beyond the dogmas, Catholic popular devotion to Mary, including the rosary, Marian apparitions, statues, and the invoking of her intercession, can feel genuinely foreign and even uncomfortable to someone shaped by Protestant sensibilities. Understanding the Catholic position requires grasping how the Church thinks about Mary’s role in salvation history, which is rooted in Scripture from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 12. It also requires understanding why honoring Mary is not the same as worshipping her, a distinction the Church draws with clarity and precision (CCC 971). Most converts report that their relationship with Mary grows gradually rather than arriving fully formed. You do not need to have it settled before the Easter Vigil, but you do need to be honest about your resistance and willing to keep working through it rather than simply setting it aside as something you will deal with later.

Purgatory Is Real Catholic Teaching and You Need to Understand It

For most Protestants, purgatory is one of the clearest examples of Catholic teaching that has no biblical foundation and represents a corruption of the pure gospel. That is the standard Protestant critique, and it is one you have probably heard or held yourself. The Catholic Church’s teaching on purgatory is that those who die in God’s grace and friendship but are still imperfect undergo a final purification before entering heaven (CCC 1030-1032). This purification is not a second chance at salvation and it is not a place of punishment in the same sense as hell. It is a state of cleansing in which the soul is made fully ready for the presence of God. The Church grounds this teaching partly in 2 Maccabees 12:46, a book that is included in the Catholic canon but not in most Protestant Bibles, and partly in passages like 1 Corinthians 3:15, which speaks of being saved as through fire. The practice of praying for the dead, which is connected to the doctrine of purgatory, is ancient in the Church and predates the Reformation by many centuries. For a Protestant convert, accepting this teaching requires first accepting the Catholic view of the biblical canon, which includes seven books not found in most Protestant Bibles. It also requires accepting the Catholic understanding of how the Church’s Tradition carries genuine doctrinal weight alongside Scripture. These connections matter because purgatory is not a freestanding doctrine that you can evaluate in isolation. It is embedded in a whole network of Catholic convictions about Scripture, Tradition, the nature of purification, and the communion of saints. Take the time to understand it in context rather than as a standalone claim.

The Mass Will Feel Strange and That Feeling Lasts Longer Than You Expect

If you come from an Evangelical, Baptist, or charismatic Protestant background, your experience of worship has likely been characterized by expressive music, accessible preaching, strong community feeling, and a relatively informal atmosphere. The Catholic Mass is a liturgical rite that follows a fixed structure, uses ancient prayers, involves significant amounts of silence, and places the Eucharist rather than the sermon at the center. For a Protestant convert, attending Mass for the first time often feels disorienting. The congregation may seem passive. The homilies are often shorter and less exegetically developed than what you heard in a strong Protestant pulpit. The music may be uninspiring or even frustrating. The overall atmosphere may feel impersonal compared to the warm fellowship culture of a Protestant congregation. These are real differences and honest converts should acknowledge them rather than pretending they do not exist. The Catholic understanding of the Mass is that it is the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, the offering of that one eternal sacrifice to the Father, and the encounter with the living Christ in the Eucharist (CCC 1366-1367). Whether the music is good or the homily is excellent is genuinely secondary to what is actually happening at the altar. Coming to appreciate the Mass in those terms takes time and requires a genuine shift in what you think worship is for. The shift from entertainment and inspiration as the measure of a good worship experience to the actual presence of Christ in the Eucharist as the center of the entire liturgy is one that most converts report taking a year or more to fully make at an emotional level, even when they have already accepted it intellectually.

The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist Is Non-Negotiable

Nothing in Catholic teaching divides it more clearly from Protestant Christianity than the doctrine of the Real Presence. The Catholic Church teaches, with full doctrinal authority, that in the Eucharist, Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine (CCC 1374). This is not a metaphor, a memorial, or a spiritual presence in the sense of Christ being present wherever believers gather. It is the literal presence of the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ in the consecrated host and the consecrated cup. The Church uses the term transubstantiation to describe how this happens, meaning that the substance of the bread and wine is wholly changed into the body and blood of Christ while the outward appearances remain (CCC 1376). For a Protestant from a tradition where communion is a purely symbolic act of remembrance, this teaching is not just unfamiliar; it is genuinely difficult to accept. The intellectual and historical case for it is strong. The early Church Fathers, including Ignatius of Antioch writing around 110 AD, Justin Martyr in the second century, and Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century, all speak about the Eucharist in terms that are clearly realist, not symbolic. The scriptural case rests primarily on John 6:51-58, where Christ says his flesh is true food and his blood is true drink, and on the Last Supper accounts where he says “this is my body” and “this is my blood” without any qualifying language indicating metaphor. For a Protestant convert, accepting the Real Presence is the central theological act of conversion in many ways. If you can genuinely accept that Christ is present in the Eucharist, everything else about Catholic life will begin to make far more sense.

Confession Is Going to Be the Practice That Surprises You Most

Most Protestants have no practice that resembles sacramental confession to a priest, and encountering it for the first time often produces a combination of intellectual resistance and emotional discomfort. The Church teaches that Christ gave the apostles the authority to forgive sins in his name, citing John 20:23, where the risen Christ says “receive the Holy Spirit; whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” The Church understands this authority as something passed down through apostolic succession to bishops and priests. Sacramental confession, formally called the sacrament of penance and reconciliation, involves three acts by the penitent: contrition for sin, confession of sins to the priest, and satisfaction or penance as assigned by the priest. The priest then absolves the penitent in the name of the Trinity (CCC 1448). For a Protestant who has been formed in the conviction that confession goes directly to God alone, speaking your specific sins to another human being feels unnecessary at best and theologically wrong at worst. The Catholic understanding is that the priest does not stand between the penitent and God but acts in the person of Christ, so the absolution given is Christ’s absolution given through a human instrument. Many converts find that once they actually go for the first time, the experience is far less intimidating than they feared and that the concrete, specific nature of naming sins and hearing clear absolution produces a peace that general prayers of confession do not replicate. But it takes real courage to enter the confessional the first time, and dismissing that fact would be dishonest. Prepare for it, understand it theologically, and do not let fear of it become a reason to delay or avoid it.

Your Relationships With Protestant Family and Friends Will Be Tested

This is the dimension of conversion that Catholics often discuss only softly, and it deserves a direct and honest treatment. When you convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, you are not simply changing your Sunday morning routine. You are, in the eyes of many Protestants, leaving the true gospel for something they regard as unbiblical, works-based, or even idolatrous. That perception is genuinely held by many sincere and loving Protestant Christians, including people who love you. For converts from Baptist, Evangelical, or fundamentalist backgrounds especially, the family reaction can be intense. Parents may grieve your conversion as a departure from the faith. Spouses who remain Protestant face real practical complications about where to worship, how to raise children, and what sacramental life looks like for a mixed household. Friends from your Protestant community may pull away or become distant, not from malice but from genuine theological unease. Catholic teaching is clear that Protestant communities are genuine ecclesial communities in which the Holy Spirit works (CCC 819), and the Church does not encourage converts to view their Protestant family members with contempt or to treat Protestantism as though nothing valuable was present there. But the Church also does not soften the truth that full communion with the Catholic Church is a different and fuller thing than what those communities offer. Holding both of those realities at once, genuine gratitude for what Protestant Christianity gave you and genuine conviction that the Catholic Church is where you are called to be, is not easy, and it is a tension you will carry for years. Be honest with your family early, be respectful of their perspective, and do not be surprised if the relational cost is higher than you anticipated.

You Will Grieve Things About Protestantism and That Is a Legitimate Response

No honest account of conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism can avoid naming the grief involved. You are leaving a community, a practice, a set of relationships, and possibly a deeply personal spiritual identity that shaped who you are. The style of worship you loved, the friendships you built, the specific ways you encountered God in your Protestant community, these are real goods and losing them involves real loss. The Church does not ask you to pretend that loss is not real or to act as though everything in Protestantism was worthless. The theological tradition of the Reformation produced serious thinkers, sincere believers, and genuine communities of faith, and acknowledging that honestly does not contradict your decision to enter the Catholic Church. What it does mean is that conversion carries a cost, and that cost is emotional and relational and spiritual, not just intellectual. Many converts describe a period of grief in the first year or two after their reception, sometimes coinciding with the flat feeling that follows the initial excitement of the Easter Vigil. That grief is normal and it does not mean you made the wrong choice. It means you are human and you loved what you had before. The healthy response is to let yourself grieve honestly, to talk about it with a spiritual director or a trusted Catholic friend, and to allow the richness of Catholic spiritual life, the sacraments, the saints, the depth of the Church’s intellectual and mystical tradition, to gradually fill what was left behind. Do not rush that process, and do not let anyone in your Catholic community make you feel that grieving your Protestant past is a sign of weakness or incomplete conversion.

The Intellectual Tradition You Gain Access to Is Genuinely Substantial

One of the genuine and understated gifts of entering the Catholic Church from Protestantism is the sheer breadth and depth of the intellectual and spiritual tradition you are entering. The Church has produced two millennia of theological reflection, philosophical inquiry, mystical writing, and artistic expression that most Protestant traditions simply do not have access to in the same way. Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Newman, Chesterton, and countless others have addressed nearly every serious question about faith, reason, suffering, prayer, and the nature of God with a rigor and depth that is genuinely impressive. The tradition of natural law reasoning, the scholastic theological synthesis, the rich tradition of lectio divina and contemplative prayer, the theology of the body developed by John Paul II, the social teaching of the Church from Leo XIII to Francis, all of this becomes part of your inheritance as a Catholic. For Protestant converts who came to Catholicism partly through intellectual conviction, this is often one of the most satisfying aspects of the new life they enter. You will never run out of things to read, questions to ask, or thinkers to engage. The Church also has a long tradition of taking the relationship between faith and reason seriously, insisting that genuine faith and genuine intellectual inquiry are compatible rather than in tension (CCC 159). This means that your questions about science, history, philosophy, and culture are not threats to your faith but invitations to a deeper engagement with a tradition that has been wrestling with exactly those questions for centuries. If you loved ideas in Protestantism, the Catholic intellectual heritage will give you far more than you found before.

The Saints Are Not Competitors With Christ, They Are Part of His Body

Another conviction that most Protestant converts bring with them is the belief that devotion to the saints represents a spiritual problem, either a distraction from Christ, a form of superstition, or an unbiblical addition to simple Christian piety. The Catholic Church’s teaching on the saints is grounded in the doctrine of the communion of saints, which holds that all members of the Church, living and dead, are united in one body in Christ (CCC 956). Asking a saint to intercede for you is theologically equivalent to asking a fellow Christian to pray for you; the only difference is that the saint is fully alive in God rather than physically present. The Church does not teach that saints have power of their own or that they replace Christ as mediator. The one mediation of Christ is affirmed clearly in Catholic theology (CCC 956), and the saints intercede within and through that one mediation rather than alongside it or in competition with it. The biblical grounding for this includes Revelation 5:8, where the twenty-four elders present the prayers of the saints before the throne of God, and Hebrews 12:1, which speaks of a “great cloud of witnesses” that surrounds the faithful. The Church also canonizes saints not to create objects of devotion but to officially confirm that specific individuals are in heaven and can serve as models of Christian life. For Protestant converts, the practical dimension of Catholic devotion to the saints, wearing medals, praying novenas, visiting shrines, lighting candles before statues, can feel difficult to reconcile with a Protestant sensibility shaped by the Reformation’s rejection of what reformers saw as superstition. That reconciliation takes time, patience, and a willingness to understand what these practices actually signify before judging them by what you assumed they meant.

The Church’s Authority Will Require You to Rethink How You Handle Disagreement

In Protestant Christianity, when you disagree with your pastor or your denomination on a doctrinal or moral question, you have several options: you can argue your case, you can find a new church, or you can simply hold your own position privately. The assumption underlying all of these options is that your personal reading of Scripture is at least as authoritative as any institutional teaching. The Catholic Church operates on a fundamentally different model. The Church teaches that the Magisterium has been given the authority to teach definitively on matters of faith and morals, and that when the Church defines a doctrine as binding, the faithful owe it the assent of faith (CCC 891-892). This does not mean that Catholics never ask questions or that every statement by every bishop is infallible. The conditions for infallible teaching are specific and rarely invoked. But it does mean that defined Catholic doctrines, including those on contraception, divorce and remarriage, ordination of women, the Real Presence, and papal authority itself, are not positions you can privately dismiss while calling yourself a fully faithful Catholic. For a Protestant convert shaped by the principle of individual interpretation, this is one of the hardest adjustments of the entire conversion process. It requires a genuine act of trust, not blind trust but an informed trust grounded in the evidence for the Church’s divine authority, that the Church’s teaching office will not lead you into error on matters of faith and morals. Many converts describe this trust as something that deepens over years rather than arriving fully formed at baptism. Be honest about where you are in that process and keep working through the questions rather than suppressing them.

Some Things About Catholic Parish Life Will Genuinely Disappoint You

Part of giving an honest account of this conversion means telling you directly that the Catholic parish you enter will probably not match the vibrancy, the quality of preaching, the fellowship culture, or the worship experience you knew in a good Protestant congregation. This is not a complaint or a criticism unique to any one parish. It is a broad reality that experienced Catholic priests and writers discuss openly. The fellowship in many Catholic parishes is less warm and less intentional than what Protestant converts are accustomed to. The homilies are often shorter, less scripturally rich, and less personally engaging than a strong Protestant sermon. The music in many parishes, while improving in many places, often lags far behind what a well-resourced Evangelical or mainline Protestant church offers. The overall culture of Catholic parishes tends toward anonymity, with large congregations whose members may attend the same Mass for years without knowing each other’s names. None of this changes the theological reality of what the Church is or what happens at the altar during Mass. But it does mean that you will need to adjust your expectations and actively seek out the fellowship, the solid teaching, and the spiritual community that you will not automatically receive simply by attending Sunday Mass. Many converts find this by joining Catholic small groups, Catholic Bible studies, third-order communities connected to religious orders, or parish ministries that put them in regular contact with other intentional Catholics. The richness is there in the Catholic Church. It is just not always where you first looked for it.

The Papal Office Will Require More Than Surface Acceptance

Most Protestant converts are well aware of the Catholic doctrine of papal authority before they enter RCIA, and many have worked through the biblical and historical arguments for it sufficiently to accept it. The Church teaches that the Bishop of Rome, as successor of Peter, holds a unique office of authority and unity in the Church, including the capacity to teach infallibly under specific defined conditions (CCC 882, CCC 891). But accepting the papal office as a matter of principle and living with an actual pope whose statements, priorities, and governing style may not match your expectations are two different things. The papacy has a complicated history that includes periods of genuine spiritual leadership and periods of significant institutional failure. Converts who enter during a papacy that aligns well with their own theological sensibilities sometimes find later pontificates more challenging, and vice versa. The important distinction to hold is between the defined teaching authority of the papal office, which the Church considers divinely protected, and the personal opinions, pastoral priorities, and governing decisions of individual popes, which are not infallible and are legitimate subjects of respectful discussion and even criticism within the Church. Many converts discover this distinction only after they have been Catholic long enough to see a papal transition or to encounter a papal statement that troubles them. Knowing it clearly from the beginning keeps you from either uncritical papolatry, treating every papal utterance as divine revelation, or from the opposite mistake of treating difficulties with a particular pope as evidence that the Catholic claim to authority is false. Neither extreme serves you well as a Catholic.

Your Bible Reading Will Need to Expand to Include Seven New Books

One of the practical surprises for Protestant converts is the discovery that the Catholic Bible contains forty-six books in the Old Testament rather than the thirty-nine found in most Protestant Bibles. The seven additional books, Tobit, Judith, First and Second Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch, along with portions of Daniel and Esther, are called deuterocanonical by Catholics and apocryphal by Protestants. The Church includes these books as part of the inspired canon of Scripture, and they were part of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament used by most of the New Testament authors (CCC 120). Protestant traditions removed them from the canon during the Reformation, partly on the grounds that they were not in the Hebrew Bible as it had been preserved by Jewish tradition. For a Protestant convert, accepting these books as Scripture is part of accepting the Catholic understanding of how the biblical canon was established and who has the authority to determine it. The Church’s position is that the same Magisterium that protects and interprets Scripture also determined which books belong in it, and that both the Protestant and Catholic traditions rely on the Church’s historical authority for the canon even if Protestants do not acknowledge that dependence explicitly. Beyond the theological argument, the practical reality is that you will encounter these books in the Catholic liturgy and in Catholic theological and devotional writing, and not knowing them will leave gaps in your formation. Set aside time early in your Catholic life to read through the deuterocanonical books with a good commentary, because they are part of your inheritance now and they are worth knowing well.

The Conversion You Are Making Is One the Church Takes Very Seriously, and So Should You

The Catholic Church does not treat the reception of a Protestant into full communion as a minor administrative step. The RCIA process, the formal rites of the catechumenate, and the Easter Vigil itself all signal that the Church regards this as a significant and weighty event. That weight is appropriate, and you should carry it with the seriousness it deserves. The Church teaches that entering full communion is not the end of conversion but the formal beginning of a sacramental life that will continue for the rest of your days (CCC 1427-1428). What happens at the Easter Vigil does not complete the work of becoming Catholic; it inaugurates it. The years after your reception will involve ongoing formation, ongoing struggle, ongoing growth, and the very real possibility of encountering aspects of the Church or of Catholic culture that test your commitment. The converts who stay and thrive are those who chose Catholicism not primarily because it was intellectually satisfying, aesthetically beautiful, or relationally appealing, though it can be all of those things, but because they became genuinely convinced that the Catholic Church is what it claims to be, the Church founded by Christ and entrusted with the fullness of the Christian faith (CCC 830). That conviction, tested over time and deepened by experience, is what will sustain you through poor homilies, imperfect parishes, difficult Church history, and the ongoing challenge of living a Catholic moral life in a culture that is frequently hostile to it. Be honest about your reasons for entering. Be patient with the process. Be serious about the commitment. And be ready for a life that is more demanding, more rich, and more grounded in historical Christian reality than anything Protestantism, at its best, was ever fully equipped to offer you.