Conversion of Peter Kreeft

A Calvinist, Kreeft regarded the Catholic Church "with the utmost suspicion."

A key turning point was when he was asked by a Calvinist professor to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church that it traced itself to the early Church. He said that on his own, he "discovered in the early Church such Catholic elements as the centrality of the Eucharist, the Real Presence, prayers to saints, devotion to Mary, an insistence on visible unity, and apostolic succession." The Church fathers such as Augustine and Jerome were clearly Catholic and not Protestant, he stated.

The "central and deciding" factor for his conversion was "the Church's claim to be the one Church historically founded by Christ." For this, he applies C. S. Lewis's trilemma -- either Jesus is a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord to the Church: "either that this is the most arrogant, blasphemous and wicked claim imaginable, if it is not true, or else that He is just what He claims to be."

On the Bible issue, he refers to the church preaching that forms the basis for writing the Bible and the approval needed from the church to ascertain the contents of the Bible. To this he applied the axiom: "a cause can never be less than its effect. You can't give what you don't have. If the Church has no divine inspiration and no infallibility, no divine authority, then neither can the New Testament."

His conversion took place as he asked God for help, praying that "God would decide for me, for I am good at thinking but bad at acting, like Hamlet." It was then that he says he "seemed to sense" the call of saints and his favorite heroes, to which he assented.

According to Kreeft's personal account, his conversion to Catholicism was influenced by things such

-the thought of the relatively small number of Calvinists vis-a-vis God's willingness to save many - because if the Bible tells us that God is going to save many, then it seems that he must be intending to do
-a simple way of understanding God's demands in terms of asking God what he wants us to do, and then doing it
- the logic of asking saints to pray for us as we ask friends to pray for us
- medieval art and philosophy (Gothic architecture, Thomistic philosophy)
- reading St. John of the Cross whose writings he viewed as really "something as massive and positive as a mountain range"
- a visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York when he was twelve years old, "feeling like I was in heaven... and wondering why, if Catholics got everything else wrong, as I had been taught, they got beauty so right. How could falsehood and evil be so beautiful?"