Sioux Falls Catholic convert tells her story: I grew up thinking Catholicism was a cult

A convert to Catholicism from Evangelical Protestantism has written an account of her conversion that discusses how she overcame prejudices against Catholicism to eventually embrace it.

Laura Bennett’s conversion story, published July 29 in the Diocese of Sioux Falls Bishop’s Bulletin, begins by describing a childhood rooted in Scriptural study. However, the Bible was always presented to her with an anti-Catholic slant.

“Part of my upbringing also included being taught that Catholicism is an outright cult and that Catholics don’t know the Bible, which is why they hold so many outrageously erroneous beliefs on Mary, the Eucharist, etc.,” Bennett wrote.

When she first attended Mass in 2015, though, she was “shocked” to hear “familiar Bible verses left and right: passages from the Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels and Psalms, the direct quotes from Jesus at the Last Supper, and even scriptural echoes sprinkled throughout the Mass.”

Bennett wrote that the experience of attending Mass helped her realize how little Scripture was used in the Evangelical worship services she had grown up attending. She was particularly surprised to realize how rarely her own worship had involved praying the Lord’s Prayer in union with others, which she writes as seeming “very bizarre” once she considered it.

Bennett began to question what other falsehoods she believed about Catholicism. Her investigation led her to realize that many of her views had been distorted, and that Catholicism is deeply rooted in Scripture.

Bennett still had some “stumbling blocks,” though. Catholic beliefs about Mary, she explained, posed as one of the biggest challenges.

But when Bennett began thinking more seriously about the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, she had an epiphany. When Mary is visited by Saint Gabriel the Archangel and told that she will conceive and bear a child, she responds, in the language of the King James version of the Bible Bennett read as a child, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” (Luke 1:34).

Bennett realized that Our Lady’s response was “very strange, very telling.” If Mary had intended to have a normal marriage, she would not have been surprised by the idea of becoming pregnant.

“The very fact that [Mary is] not simply assuming this promised baby will be conceived [normally] is a strong indicator of her lifelong vow of chastity,” Bennett writes.

Bennett had similar moments of clarity while investigating doctrines like the Eucharist. When studying the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, she writes of how she realized that it “ironically, is one of few Bible passages not taken literally by Evangelicals.”

“Whether we’re talking about Mary or the Eucharist or any number of other sticking points for Protestants in regard to Catholicism, I found that the Bible is a very Catholic book, if you read it right, which, as in these brief examples, I became convinced is sometimes as simple as honestly reading the black-and-white words on the page and taking them to their logical conclusions,” Bennett wrote.

Bennett was received into the Catholic Church in 2021 and is now a parishioner at the Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Sioux Falls.

“I hear the Word of God faithfully preached, receive the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist,” she wrote, “and enjoy a relationship with Mary, Ever Virgin, as my Blessed Mother, who leads me closer to her Son.”

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