When Ben Fox transferred to Wheaton College last fall, one of his new friends wasn’t sure if Fox would go to heaven.
Fox, a junior international relations major from Howard Beach, N.Y., said he feels that Catholicism is often misunderstood in Protestant-dominated circles like Wheaton.
“What is so different about us Catholics that we can’t be saved?” said Fox.
According to the college’s Office of Institutional Research, there are 42 Catholic students at Wheaton – 1.5 percent of the student body. Faculty and staff are required to sign the college’s Statement of Faith every year, whose tenets “identify the College not only with the Scriptures but also with the reformers and the evangelical movement of recent years.” Students are not required to sign the Statement, but they do express their personal faith during the admissions process. The Community Covenant, which all students, faculty and staff do sign, does not prohibit students from partaking in Catholic traditions.
Fox, who was raised Catholic, transferred to Wheaton from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania because he felt Wheaton would challenge him. He was looking for a stronger faith in God, better relationships and a new swim team.
“While I greatly appreciate the academics and professors at Gettysburg, my relationships here with everyone are stronger through Christ,” said Fox.
Fox didn’t expect students at Wheaton to make such a strong distinction between Protestants and Catholics. He believes this difference comes when people focus on practices and beliefs that vary between the two groups, rather than the doctrine that they share.
“I think what Protestants miss a lot is that we worship the same God,” said Fox.
Wheaton’s distinctly Protestant identity, especially at the faculty level, has come into tension with Catholics before. Joshua Hochschild was a professor of philosophy at Wheaton when he converted to Catholicism in 2004.
When it became apparent that he had converted, Hochschild assured the administration that he still agreed with the Statement of Faith. But he was the first Catholic to hold a full-time teaching position in the history of the college. Then-President Duane Litfin ultimately decided to dismiss Hochschild to maintain the college’s all-Protestant faculty, a move that made national headlines.
Hochschild accepted the college’s decision and moved to Mount St. Mary’s University to become the dean of the College of Liberal Arts in 2005.
“Some people found it hard to understand that I fully respected the college’s right to draw boundaries for the sake of its religious identity,” said Hochschild in an email to the Record.
In an email to the Record, President Philip Ryken said that Wheaton’s hiring practices have been “explicitly Protestant” since its founding.
“Although Wheaton does not have a specific hiring policy, the college does not regard principled Roman Catholics as being able to sign our Statement of Faith, which explicitly grounds our doctrinal beliefs in the Protestant Reformation,” Ryken said.
When asked why the college maintains an all-Protestant faculty, Ryken pointed to the college’s mission and interpretation of the Bible.
“The Board of Trustees believes that our spiritual and intellectual mission is advanced best by consistently and explicitly teaching from a Reformation perspective, which we also believe is most faithful to Scripture.”
Hochschild also places importance on the variety of ways to approach God within Catholicism, which can be missed because of emphasis on doctrine in conversations between Catholics and Protestants.
“Catholic-Protestant discourse often settles into a mode, apologetics, which is good for sharing arguments and evidence,” he said. “A harder thing to share about the Catholic Church is the richness and diversity of spirituality and modes of prayer.”
Fox is not the first Catholic student at Wheaton to note the differences he feels. In September of 2017, a student posted on Wheaton’s forum wall, describing feeling excluded from prayers in chapel. In a Record article that fall, Catholic Wheaton students discussed the 500th anniversary of the Reformation and articulated that they often felt as though their Protestant peers approached modern Catholicism like it was still the religion of the sixteenth century.
Although Fox is conscious of the differences between his Catholic beliefs and the evangelical positions held by his peers and professors, he has come to appreciate how those differences emphasize aspects of God’s nature. In largely Protestant environments like Wheaton College, he has found beauty in more prominent refrains about mercy, forgiveness and unconditional love.
“It’s really great because for most of my life, I’ve had the same Catholic perspective,” Fox said. “But here I just see all different perspectives of their spiritual lives and faith, and it really has amazed me.”
The Catholic Society of Pope John Paul II, a Catholic campus club, seeks to educate and bridge the gap between Protestants and Catholics on campus. It has been started, paused and restarted over the years depending on the availability of Catholic students to lead it. Most recently, in the 2021-2022 school year, Emily Brabec ‘23 helped restart the club after it had been inactive for several years.
Brabec joined the leadership of the club after transferring from Ave Maria University in Florida to study secondary education for English.
In her first year with the Catholic Society, Brabec was a member of the cabinet along with three students who had converted to Catholicism while at Wheaton. They led weekly prayer meetings and hosted monthly club meetings for Catholic students.
Brabec also found connections to her Catholic faith within the classroom, first while reading the book “Silence” by Shūsaku Endō, a required reading for all freshmen and transfer students.
“There are Catholic overtones in the novel,” said Brabec. “Having discussions on apostasy and ‘should he have done what he did?’ within a class space was super helpful.”
“Silence,” which tells the fictional story of a Jesuit missionary, Sebastian Rodrigues, sent to Japan in the seventeenth century, also helped Fox learn more about his faith.
“We read about how Rodrigues betrayed Jesus by stamping on this tapestry, and he apostatizes from that, but what we learn is that God is very merciful and that Jesus understands betrayal,” Fox said. “It made me see Judas, one of his apostles, in a much more different light.”
Julia Morrow, a senior at Wheaton double majoring in philosophy and theology, converted to Catholicism during her time at Wheaton. She said Catholicism felt more inclusive to people of different ideas and positions, as long as they were part of the church.
“There’s a sense of unity, even if people disagree on things, because belonging isn’t really contingent on agreement in the Catholic church so much as you’re part of the mystical body of Christ,” Morrow said.
Since converting, she said she has found it is easier to reconcile her politics with her faith, something she wasn’t able to do in the Evangelical Free church, her former denomination. In her Protestant context, she felt that her belief system and her views on social justice issues had to be absolute. But the issues she cares about have complicated tensions, and thus the openness of Catholicism feels more welcoming to her.
“I felt the need to have my politics and my faith align perfectly, and when I didn’t it was a very isolating thing,” she said. “As a Catholic, I can hold things in tension and that’s what still leaves room for empathy and growth.”
Morrow, who is from Anaheim, Calif., came to Wheaton because she had wanted to study theology for most of her life, and wasn’t satisfied with the options at secular universities. Since high school, she had stopped identifying with the label “evangelical,” so the tight-knit Protestant community of Wheaton wasn’t much of a factor in her decision.
“It was less about finding like-minded community and more about what I wanted to study,” she said.
Last summer, Morrow stayed at a monastery in Baltimore where she listened to the insights of the Catholic sisters on how diversity can lead to unity. She went looking to reset her mind and upon arriving, Morrow was in awe of how those who lived there were radically different types of people.
One sister told Morrow that paying attention to God should be rooted in how everyone is a child of God, each person with a different journey and experience of their faith. This kind of faith was best, the sister said, when one wasn’t hyper-focused on ideological agreement.
Morrow said she finds comfort in knowing she is a part of a historic tradition of Catholics, who were free to disagree politically and belong to the same church.
“It is something that existed long before I was born and will continue long after I die, and even if the people that I’m sitting next to at mass don’t agree with each other on something, it’s still special,” Morrow said. “We’re still holding that tension together.”
She wished that the conversation could be aided by speakers in chapel emphasizing different faith traditions, including ones with more liturgies familiar to the Catholic tradition.
“I think just if we got more diversity with chapel services in general, even just incorporating other, more liturgical denominations, there’d be more of a sense of unity on campus,” said Morrow. “We all have different ways of reaching God.”
Mack Ibrahim, a junior English writing major who is also Catholic, shared Morrow’s desire that Wheaton would acknowledge and elevate the traditions of its Catholic population.
“You’ll hear every once in a while a professor or a student being like, ‘Oh, you know, we believe this and this and this obviously, because we’re not Catholic,’” Ibrahim said. “I wish that they would know better, but Wheaton’s a very Protestant school, so I don’t expect better.”
While in the college decision process, Ibrahim had a desire to go out of state. The choice ultimately came down to proximity to home in Old Bridge, N.J., and Ibrahim’s parents’ preference for Christian schools.
Bible and theology professors in particular have been the most approachable, Ibrahim said, because they understand the nuances of Protestant-Catholic discourse. Even without Catholic mentors among the faculty, Ibrahim’s faith has been shaped by community at Wheaton, especially among peers who might never have met Catholics before.
Ibrahim wishes that Protestant students would try to understand the basis for which Catholics believe salvation is possible. It’s not as simple as “works-based salvation,” a common phrase in Christian theological discussion that refers to the belief that one’s eternal fate depends on good or bad actions in life, Ibrahim said.
“We do believe in ‘sola fide,’ in faith alone, and at the same time, your works are evident,” Ibrahim said. “Your faith is made evident by your works.”
Brabec, along with Fox, Morrow and Ibrahim, discovered in Catholicism a way to worship God without imposing judgment upon Protestantism, especially while a minority at Wheaton.
“Just because I’m Catholic and I believe this particular tradition and expression of faith, I don’t judge you for believing something different,” said Brabec. “When it boils down to it, we believe in the same God. We worship the same God.”
