The chapel was in a basement, and it was nearly empty.

It was a weekday at noon on the campus of Marquette University in Milwaukee.

A young Protestant scholar slipped through the door and took a seat in the very last pew.

He had made himself a promise before he walked in.

He would watch.

He would take mental notes.

And he would not kneel.

His name was Scott Hahn, and for most of his adult life he had believed the Catholic Church was badly, dangerously wrong.

The Man Who Pulled Catholics Out

Hahn's faith caught fire when he was a teenager through an evangelical youth ministry.

He devoured the writings of Martin Luther and John Calvin.

He became convinced that the Reformation had rescued the Gospel from a corrupt Church.

And he did not keep that conviction to himself.

By his own account, he handed a well-known anti-Catholic book to a girlfriend who had been raised Catholic.

In youth ministry, he focused on Catholic high school students and worked to persuade them to leave the Church.

He has said that when he received his late grandmother's rosary, he tore it apart.

He was not curious about Catholicism. He was at war with it.

A Rising Star

Hahn studied at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston and graduated at the top of his class.

He married Kimberly, a pastor's daughter who shared his passion for Scripture.

He became the pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Virginia and taught at a local Christian school.

Then he began teaching seminary students.

Everything about his life pointed toward a long, respected career as a Protestant theologian.

But Hahn had a dangerous habit.

He followed the Bible wherever it led him.

The Cracks Begin

The first crack came from his wife.

In seminary, Kimberly researched the question of contraception for an ethics course.

She was startled to discover that every major Christian tradition had opposed it until the twentieth century, and that the Catholic Church alone still held the line.

Her findings unsettled them both.

Then came Hahn's study of covenant, the idea that God binds himself to his people as family.

Then came the Gospel of John, chapter six, where Jesus tells the crowd that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Hahn noticed that when many disciples walked away over that teaching, Jesus did not call them back to explain it was only a symbol.

He let them go.

The more Hahn read, the more his arguments against the Church felt like they were collapsing under him.

Even his core conviction, that we are saved by faith alone, began to look shaky when he searched Scripture for the phrase.

One day a student told him he was going to end up Catholic.

Kimberly joked that he might become Luther in reverse.

Neither of them was laughing for long.

Into Enemy Territory

Hahn decided to pursue a doctorate at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Milwaukee.

He told himself he was there for the scholarship.

But one question would not let him go.

He had studied the Mass in books for years.

He had never actually seen one.

So he walked down to the chapel at the Gesu church, sat in the back, and braced himself.

Ordinary people drifted in.

Some were students.

Some were older men and women on their lunch hour.

They knelt and prayed quietly, with a simple reverence that caught him off guard.

The Bible Came Alive

Then the Mass began.

Hahn had expected empty ritual and human tradition.

Instead, he kept hearing Scripture.

Readings from the Old Testament and the New.

Prayers soaked in the language of the Psalms and the prophets.

Words he had preached from his own pulpit were now being prayed back to God all around him.

As a scholar of the Book of Revelation, he began to recognize the heavenly worship John describes, with its altar, its Lamb, its holy, holy, holy.

The Mass was not hiding the Bible. It was the Bible being lived.

Then came the consecration.

The priest lifted the Host.

Hahn later recalled that his last doubts drained away in that moment, and that he found himself whispering the words of the apostle Thomas.

My Lord and my God.

The man who had promised himself he would not kneel was undone.

Coming Back Again and Again

He did not walk out of that chapel and sign up for classes the next day.

But he could not stay away.

He returned to Mass again, and then again, until it became part of his daily life.

The longing he felt was physical and real.

He wanted to receive what he now believed was truly Christ.

And he could not, not yet.

The Cost of Saying Yes

Conversion came with a price.

Hahn's growing convictions strained his marriage.

Kimberly felt that the man she had married, and the future they had planned together in Protestant ministry, was slipping away.

Friends and colleagues were bewildered.

Some were angry.

At the Easter Vigil in 1986, Scott Hahn was received into the Catholic Church.

Kimberly was not ready, and she did not come with him that night.

She wrestled with the questions for several more years, on her own terms and in her own time.

Eventually she too entered the Church, and the couple later told their intertwined story in the book Rome Sweet Home.

What One Mass Can Do

Today Hahn is one of the best-known Catholic Bible teachers in the world.

He has taught theology for decades and written dozens of books helping Catholics fall in love with Scripture.

Countless converts point to his story as the spark for their own.

It is easy to forget that it all began with a skeptic in the last pew, arms crossed, determined to stay unmoved.

He came to observe.

He left having been observed, known and called by name.

If you have a friend who thinks the Mass is empty ritual, his story suggests a simple invitation.

Come and see.

Your turn: Was there a single Mass that changed the way you saw your faith? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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