People change their place in the Body of Christ for a variety of reasons, the most common of which is a desire, for the sake of family unity, to adopt the religious tradition of a spouse and children. Some individuals become so accustomed to attending worship services with loved ones or friends in a church other than their own that they gradually regard themselves as a part of that community.
Still others come under the influence of a strong personality, whether a priest or a lay person, who persuades them that they would be much better off, spiritually and perhaps also intellectually, in another church-tradition.
Several decades ago many Catholics and at least a few Protestants eagerly read the books and pamphlets written by the gentle street-preacher and convert-maker, Father John A. O'Brien (d. 1980). Two of his most popular works were "The Faith of Millions" (which may have actually sold millions) and "The Road to Damascus," which told stories of Protestants, including, for example, Clare Booth Luce (d. 1987), who "saw the light" and joined the Catholic Church.
Catholics of that post-World War II era were still struggling to achieve equal social, economic, and political status with their white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant neighbors, and it was a source of much pride and reassurance whenever one of these self-proclaimed "real" Americans found the path to Rome a compelling one.
Catholics of that post-WWII generation rarely stopped to ask themselves whether the road away from Rome and away from Damascus (where St. Paul had his own dramatic conversion experience from Judaism to Christianity) might also be clogged with travelers: Catholics leaving the Church and heading off to another.
There were always Protestants attracted to the Catholic Church in the pre-Vatican II era for biblical, theological or historical reasons, all of which were carefully laid out in Father John O'Brien's writings. With the Second Vatican Council, however, and with the ecumenical movement which the council and the popes had endorsed, it became practically impossible to present the Catholic Church any longer as "the one, true Church" and all other denominations as awash in error and falsehoods.
And so the traditional apologetical tactics --- "demonstrating" that Catholicism alone is right, while Protestantism is completely wrong --- were generally abandoned. If Protestants became Catholics in the late 1960s or in the '70s and early '80s, it was mainly for family reasons, or because they intended to marry a Catholic, or because they had grown familiar and spiritually comfortable with Catholic worship.
In the past two-and-half decades, however, we have seen something of a reversion to the pre-Vatican II approach. Many seeking entrance into the Catholic Church today do so as an act of rejecting their Protestant past and of embracing "the truth" found only in Catholicism.
Sometimes a strong personality (as mentioned above) serves as a catalyst, especially in the case of celebrity conversions. For the former Congresswoman and prolific playwright, Clare Booth Luce, it was the equally famous radio (and later television) preacher, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (d. 1979), who filled this role.
More recently, however, high-profile Protestants and even a few Jews with strongly conservative opinions about religion, politics and social values have found their way to a Rome that one would have thought no longer exists. It is an authoritarian, triumphant, polemical, anti-Protestant Rome (non-Christians weren't even considered) that flourished during the first half of the 20th century, but which experienced a thorough updating under Pope John XXIII. He convened the council in 1962 to open the windows and to let some "fresh air" into the Catholic Church.
Bishop Sheen is no longer with us, and there is no Catholic comparable to him who functions in the same capacity. But a priest in Washington, D.C., who runs the Catholic Information Center there and is a member of Opus Dei, has been doing an impressive job of drawing fellow conservatives into the Church.
His main celebrity converts are Robert Novak, the columnist who was at the center of the controversy over the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent; Larry Kudlow, an on-air financial adviser; and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, currently a candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States.
Senator Brownback had been raised a Methodist but later joined a non-denominational evangelical church. He became a Catholic in 2002.
Conservative Protestants and Jews who convert to Catholicism, especially of the Opus Dei kind, rarely shed the religious, social and political biases they had in their pre-Catholic life. It is true of Mr. Novak and Mr. Kudlow, and it is equally true of Senator Brownback.
More about him next week. Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. |