Rome Sweet Home

What Rome Sweet Home is

Rome Sweet Home is the 1993 conversion memoir of Scott Hahn and his wife Kimberly, published by Ignatius Press. Scott was a Presbyterian minister with Reformed seminary training; the book narrates the years-long process by which the two of them studied, argued, struggled, and eventually entered the Catholic Church — Scott first, Kimberly some years later. It is written in alternating chapters, each telling their own half in the first person, so the conversion reads as a shared event lived through very differently by two people in the same marriage.

The book is a memoir, not a systematic case. It moves through the questions that drove Scott's study — biblical authority and sola scriptura, the Eucharist, covenant theology, the role of Mary — but engages them as autobiography, in the order they surfaced in his life, rather than as a structured argument. The subtitle, "Our Journey to Catholicism," is precise: it is the story of how this couple got from one tradition to another, told from the far side, after they had arrived.

Why readers reach for Rome Sweet Home first

Most books in the Catholic-convert genre are built like arguments — premises, objections, a conclusion you are meant to reach. Rome Sweet Home is built like a marriage. Scott writes his chapters and Kimberly writes hers, and the gap between them is the whole drama: he moves first, she does not, and for a long stretch they live on opposite sides of the most important question either has ever faced. That turns a set of theological disputes into a story with people in it, which is why the book travels where drier titles stall out.

The result is a memoir a reader can finish even if they disagree with where it lands. A Protestant reader sees the Reformed framework Scott was trained in described from the inside, without caricature, before he explains why he left it. A Catholic reader gets a story to share that leads with warmth rather than confrontation. Anyone who has watched a faith change strain a family will recognize Kimberly's chapters at once. It is the rare conversion book read as much for the human story as for the theology — and that is exactly why it became the genre's founding title.

The alternating voices: a conversion told as a marriage

The structural choice that defines Rome Sweet Home is its dual narration. The chapters alternate between Scott and Kimberly, each writing in the first person about the same years from inside their own experience. Scott's chapters tend toward the intellectual — the books he was reading, the arguments that stopped working, the studies that pulled him forward. Kimberly's tend toward the relational and the costly — what it was like to watch her husband move somewhere she could not yet follow, the friendships that cooled, the grief of feeling the Reformed world they had built their life in was slipping away.

This is what separates the book from the apologetics shelf. A conversion narrated by one confident voice can read as a victory lap; one narrated by two voices, one of them in real pain for much of the book, reads truer to how these things happen. Readers consistently single out Kimberly's chapters as the ones that stay with them, precisely because she does not pretend the journey was clean. The dual structure is the book's heart, and the feature later convert memoirs most often tried to copy.

The questions that drove the study

The engine of Scott Hahn's half of the book is a sequence of questions his Reformed training had answered one way and his continued study began to answer differently. It walks through biblical authority and sola scriptura — Scripture alone as the rule of faith — which Scott describes coming to doubt could account for itself on its own terms. It moves through the Eucharist, through covenant as an organizing idea for reading Scripture, and through the place of Mary, which the book presents as one of the last and hardest thresholds.

Crucially, the book engages these from the Hahns' perspective rather than adjudicating them. It does not weigh the Catholic and Protestant answers side by side and declare a winner; it reports the answers Scott arrived at and the road he took to reach them. A reader who shares his conclusions will find the chapters confirming; a reader who does not will find a clear account of why one trained Calvinist came to see these questions as he now does. Either way the book is a perspective, openly and warmly offered, not a referee's ruling.

A door into Scott Hahn's larger body of work

Rome Sweet Home is the first thing most readers encounter from Scott Hahn, and it functions as the front door to a very large house. After this memoir launched him, Hahn became one of the most prolific Catholic Scripture teachers and apologists of his generation, writing extensively on the Mass, covenant theology, and reading the Bible within the Catholic tradition. The memoir itself stays light on that scholarship by design — it is the story, not the system.

That makes the book an on-ramp rather than a destination. A reader moved by the human story but wanting the theology worked out has a clear next step in Hahn's later, heavier titles. Read that way, Rome Sweet Home is the personal preface to a career — the chapter where the teacher explains how he got here, before the teaching begins.

Pricing

Where Rome Sweet Home falls behind

Not a balanced survey. The book is one couple's memoir and makes no claim to weigh the questions it raises from every side. A reader looking for an even-handed treatment of authority, the Eucharist, or sola scriptura will not find it here — that was never the book's job.

Light on scholarship. Scott Hahn wrote far more rigorous books later, and this early memoir gestures at the theology rather than working it through. On the heavier questions it raises, Rome Sweet Home is a starting point and an invitation, not a worked-out argument.

A perspective, openly held. The Hahns write from the far side of their conversion, as settled Catholics, and the book reads accordingly. Readers who do not share its conclusions will experience it as a case made for one tradition — which it is — rather than a neutral account, and that is worth knowing going in.

Some doubling from the dual structure. Because Scott and Kimberly each narrate the same years, a handful of episodes get told twice. Most readers find this enriching; a few find it slows the middle of the book.

Rome Sweet Home vs. The Seven Storey Mountain vs. Catholicism

These three are the books people reach for when someone asks about the Catholic faith from a personal angle, and they do different jobs. Rome Sweet Home (Scott and Kimberly Hahn, 1993) is the modern Protestant-to-Catholic convert memoir — a Reformed minister and his wife narrating, in alternating voices, their entry into the Catholic Church. The Seven Storey Mountain (Thomas Merton, 1948) is the earlier and more literary conversion autobiography — a restless young man's road to Catholicism and ultimately to a Trappist monastery, written in dense, searching prose. Catholicism (Robert Barron) is not a memoir at all but a guided tour of Catholic belief, art, and practice, built around a documentary series.

Different strengths. Rome Sweet Home is the most relational and accessible — the marriage-story structure and plain voice make it the easiest to hand to a friend. Merton is the deeper literary experience for a reader who wants interiority and struggle on a grand scale, though it is a heavier lift. Barron is the most systematic, for someone who wants the contours of Catholic belief laid out rather than a single life story. If you want one personal door into a contemporary conversion, it is still Rome Sweet Home. If you want a literary classic, read Merton. If you want the overview, read Barron.

All three are read widely, well beyond Catholic readers. Rome Sweet Home is especially common in conversations with Protestant readers because it leads with story and treats the Reformed tradition Scott left with care. Merton has a broad literary readership that reaches past any single tradition, and Barron's work is designed as an introduction used in parishes and classrooms alike.

Alternatives to Rome Sweet Home