Influencer son of evangelical pastors shares how he embraced the Catholic faith

Jonatan Medina, son of evangelical pastors, shares how he converted to the Catholic faith. / Credit: EWTN News ACI Prensa Staff, Oct 26, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA). Jonatan Medina Espinal is a young Catholic influencer who, as the son of evangelical pastors, was considered unlikely to embrace the Catholic faith, but he did so five years ago after a long and intense spiritual journey.Now, with clearer ideas about the faith, the young Peruvian has become a defender of Catholic doctrine, promoting it on his social media as well as in his Spanish-language book “Toward the Barque of Peter: My Journey from Protestantism to the Catholic Church.”For Dante Urbina, a Catholic author, teacher, and lecturer who also influenced Medina’s conversion, the book is “a testimony of profound conversion and intellectual depth that invites us to enter and persevere in the Catholic Church.”Medina is a professional audiovisual communicator and describes himself as “a truth seeker.” In an interview with “EWTN Noticias,” the Spanish-language broadcast edition of EWTN News, he shared that he had already felt Catholic “at heart” since 2017, when he “began this journey that took [him] about two or three years.”On Dec. 8, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and on the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, Medina received the sacrament of baptism, officially becoming part of the Catholic Church.Medina pointed out that it was necessary for him to receive the sacrament in the Church, considering that the one he had received in his Christian group might not have been entirely valid.The entire process that led to his conversion, continued Medina — who is part of the Catholic Advancement Movement — began “paradoxically, with a period of agnosticism ... I was agnostic for a good few years of my life, then tried to embrace a more reasonable faith, one based on evidence.”Guided by various Christian figures such as Protestant C.S. Lewis and Catholic G.K. Chesterton, Medina questioned his affiliation with an evangelical church. “I began to embrace a more historical faith, with greater cogency.”After “discovering all the fragmentations … of Protestantism, I said: How can the Gospel be so divided? And I saw that the Church appears with its unity, although obviously that doesn’t imply that there aren’t tensions or certain divisions, but there is a teaching that helps us to be bound together and gives us that guarantee of unity.”Medina also explained that another milestone in his conversion was overcoming the Protestant concept of “sola Scriptura” (“Scripture alone”), which postulates that the Bible is the sole source of Christian faith and practice, ignoring tradition, a source of revelation that is accepted by the Catholic Church.“I had discovered the error of sola Scriptura: I remember when I discovered it and realized that obviousness, that lack of logic, was so clear,” he recounted, and he understood “that Scripture itself was already tradition, only written down. That’s when I said, ‘Hey, this makes sense to me.’ Sola Scriptura began to fall apart for me.”Medina, the author of the short Spanish-language film “Neighbors” about guardian angels, is particularly grateful for having come to love the Virgin Mary through the example of another convert, Dante Urbina, a Catholic professor and lecturer and author of several Spanish-language books such as “Does God Exist?” and “What Is the True Religion?”“He also worked at the university where I work, and it was providential that we met one day, and I started asking him questions about Mary specifically, and he helped me a lot. I definitely believe that Mary has been key in my conversion,” Medina emphasized.This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.