By Susan.

As a child I attended Catholic parochial schools in the Chicago area. My parents were devout in the church and would not talk to anybody outside of the Catholic religion. During my first year at The University of Texas in Austin, I took a New Testament class at the Newman Center. My New Testament teacher said that the four synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were possibly not written by the apostles for whom they were named. He also said many other things that were contrary to what I had learned all of those years growing up a religious Catholic child. It was not long into that class that I questioned all I had been taught, and it didn’t take long to become agnostic at the young age of 18.

A couple of years later, I met missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This church has come to be nicknamed the “Mormon Church” by many people of other faiths, and its members are often referred to as “Mormons.” The missionaries were about my age, and we struck up some great discussions about religion. Eventually, I realized that of all the Christian churches on the earth, the only ones who were claiming to be the Lord’s true church were the Catholics and the Mormon Religion.

I grew up with Catholic doctrine, so understood it well. Catholic doctrine taught me that Peter was the first pope of the Catholic Church and ever since Peter, the authority to act in God’s name went in a direct line from pope to pope down through the ages, until it rested upon the current Pope in Italy today. I also understood that the Catholic Cardinals were like the apostles during the time of Jesus’ mortal ministry on earth.

A photo of a Mormon young woman studying from a textbook.And then I was presented with the new concept from the Mormon religion about Joseph Smith, a young boy who received the authority to act in God’s name directly from God and Jesus, after a lengthy period of time they called the Great Apostasy, during which the same authority had been taken from the earth. Thus, Joseph Smith was being given the opportunity to restore the Lord’s true church upon the earth in the mid 1800s in the United States. He also received writings on metal plates which were translated into another testament of Jesus Christ and His divinity, a book we know as The Book of Mormon.

Being a scholarly type, I was not satisfied going by my emotions or my feelings or inspirations. I had to dig deep intellectually and find out which one of these two churches was really the right one. Which one had the full authority from God to perform the saving ordinances in the name of the Lord? The Catholic religion or the Mormon religion? I had to find out. So, I went to the library.

At the library, I found books outlining the history of the popes in the Catholic Church. I learned through secular history and through religious writings that the Catholic Church had not had a direct line of popes. I was pretty surprised. There had been two popes at once, there had been times with no popes, and there had even been one woman pope throughout the course of the history of the Catholic Church.

And then I realized something else: the Catholic Church was started long after the death of Jesus Christ, and long after all of the apostles which had been called and ordained by Jesus himself had died. So, who then would have had passed down the authority which Peter received directly from Jesus? There was nobody. They would have all been dead by the time the Catholic Church began.

There are no other Christian churches which claim to be The Church of Jesus Christ. That is a bold statement and declaration.  So, when I realized that historical evidence had discredited the claims of the Catholic Church to have authority to operate in the name of Jesus Christ, I decided to follow the suggestion of the representatives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and read the Book of Mormon to find out more about the Mormon religion.

I started reading the Book of Mormon on a weekend, so I could read without interruption, if I chose to do that. At first, I read a page or two and then I would stop and pray to Heavenly Father, asking him if this was his word. And then I would keep reading. Many of the names of the ancient prophets were odd, and it was kind of hard to keep track of everyone. But, it was so fascinating, and it wasn’t long before I could not put the book down.

Since I am a writer, and I do a lot of reading, it was obvious to me that different people had written the compilation called the Book of Mormon. The writing styles changed with each different person. It was also obvious to me that one person or even a committee of people living in America in the mid 1800s could not possibly have come up with the events which are recorded in the Book of Mormon. And if somehow they managed to come up with those events, there is no way they could have written it in some of those styles, which did not exist in the United States.

So, I realized through a scholarly approach that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be. And I deduced from studying the history of the Catholic popes that there was no direct line from Jesus to now. When I put those two together, I decided to investigate further the claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I looked at the organizing of the Mormon religion. I read the story of Joseph Smith. I read what happened in the Church’s rocky early history. Things were not easy for the early Mormon pioneers.

Finally, after reading and studying for over eight months, I decided to pray and ask our God, our Heavenly Father, if this is His Son’s church. I asked if it is truly what it claims to be. I will always be grateful that I got an answer in the affirmative and subsequently joined the church. My life and my family have been blessed tremendously.

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