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C l a s s i c A p o l o g e t i c s
MY CONVERSION TO THE CATHOLIC FAITH
By MOST REV. DUANE G. HUNT
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This Rock
Volume 4, Number 10
 October 1993 
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THE facility with which some converts
have described the processes by which they found their way to the
Catholic Church has always amazed me and aroused a certain feeling
of envy. For my own part, it has invariably been a difficult assignment
to sit down and attempt to detail the story of my approach to the
Church. In the first place, and I say this without any illusion of
false humility, it is not a particularly stirring or important story.
In the second place, I confess to a certain distaste for advertising
my personal adventure in grace.
There, doubtless, emerges the irreducible puritan in my make-up. But
if the narrative, for all it lacks of the spectacular, may serve as
aid and comfort for those embarked on the same pilgrimage I made so
many years ago, that is reason enough for embalming it in print.
I was born in the very heart of American Protestantism, the Middle
West in the '80s of the last century. It is hard for me to evaluate,
much less to put in writing, the debt I owe my parents. They gave
me a good home; they set before me a constant example of plain living
and honest thinking. Devout Methodists, their faith was untinged with
fanaticism, and they stood foursquare for all those principles of
fundamental Christianity upon which the nation itself had been built
and preserved through the ordeal of the Civil War, which was still
a living memory to them.
With my hand in my mother's I was introduced as a youngster to the
mysteries of Sunday School. Vivid memories of those days survive,
colored by the Bible stories, conned and repeated, and the prints
and the chromos which were a part of the familiar apparatus. As I
advanced in years, I was introduced to the regular church services,
and at some date, in my early teens, I formally "joined the Church."
During this period of unclouded faith, what were my beliefs? As closely
as I can clarify them now, they would seem to have been straightforwardly
and typically Christian. There was certainly no question as to the
existence and spirituality of God. With equal certitude I accepted
the divinity of Jesus Christ, though it may well have been that an
analysis of my belief would have revealed its imprecision and lack
of any positive intellectual basis.
As for the Bible, my respect for it was profound. It was the work
of God, the source of divine instruction and guidance for the human
race. Unhesitatingly I would have avowed my belief in its inspiration,
though what I would have meant by that term is something that recollection
fails to indicate. In a word, during my adolescent years I was an
avowed and professing Protestant, a thorough conformist.
That there was such a thing as the Catholic Church, I was, of course,
dimly aware. My childhood and youth were passed without any more contact
with the actual Church than my acquaintance with a single Catholic
family, though fortunately the example there was solidly edifying.
Bypassing this exception, however, I swallowed in its entirety the
general verdict of my friends and associates, that Catholics were
people on a lower social level than ourselves, ignorant and inferior,
held in durance vile by the evil machinations of
the hierarchy. Some day, unquestionably, their emancipation would
come (emancipation was still a word to conjure with) and they would
all become good and enlightened Protestants.
With the sophomorism of youth I condemned the Church as hopelessly
out of date and obscurantist. Quite possibly the first centuries of
Christianity were blameless, though my ignorance of the history of
the early Church was appalling. Sometime in later centuries, it goes
without saying, the Church had yielded to corruption of the worst
kind and had fallen into the hands of leaders who were tyrannical,
cruel, and despotic. Hints of the Spanish Inquisition provided the
lurid background, and there was always the convenient figure of Pope
Alexander VI.
Against this nightmare of religious degradation, I reasoned, an enlightened
Europe had at last revolted. Where the Church retained some semblance
of her power, there the same old evils were continued. My contempt
was particularly marked, good democratic-republican that I was, for
the monarchial powers of Catholic officialdom. This was the negation
of the democratic ideal and the mainspring of the utter servility
of Catholics everywhere. My analysis was devastating and made up in
cocksureness what it lacked in originality.
It is interesting to recall now the strength of my dislike for the
ceremonial of the Catholic Church, especially since at the time my
acquaintance with that phase of the liturgy was entirely theoretical.
But from what I had heard, it was easy to denounce it out of hand
as a relic of empty formalism. Never having met or even seen a priest,
my judgment bore heavily upon the reputed greed of all who wore the
Roman collar, upon their alleged habit of charging for confessions,
and upon the dubiousness of their morals generally. I should add that
few of these prejudices were derived from my parents themselves. They
did not like the Catholic Church, but they refrained from backstairs
gossip.
With this as my religious frame of reference I went to college. This
was a sound Methodist institution in the heart of Iowa, the type of
school that believed in fundamental education and instilled precepts
of severe self-discipline. As I recall my freshman year, it was a
period of quiescence; there was little that disturbed the even tenor
of my theological prepossessions.
For myself, as for the majority of my fellow students, there was the
smug assurance that Protestantism was the only possible way of life,
offering, as it seemed to do, the maximum of security in the relatively
untroubled world of the early twentieth century. We would emerge,
unquestionably, as the anointed leaders of our communities, the continental
Pharisees. I cannot remember any particular religious fervor as a
characteristic of my life during this phase, but simply a bland satisfaction
with things as they were.
To the best of my recollection, it must have been somewhere along
the course of my second year in college that the first rumblings of
doubt began to make themselves heard in the recesses of my mind. The
original source of the disturbance was the "revival," which
was then, and for many years thereafter, an accepted feature of Mid-Western
Protestantism. The recurrence of these periodic religious orgies began
to arouse my distaste, and it was not long until they awakened an
active disgust. They began to impress me as crude and sensational,
quite the opposite of anything I could conceive as a fitting expression
of Christianity, and certainly as an unstable and highly emotional
method of confessing religious convictions. If this were actually
the substance of religion, I thought, and its effect on me was so
adverse, perhaps there was something lacking in my approach. These
musings, half-formulated, continued to bother me, though I shared
my disturbance with none of my companions in college.
As time went on, moreover, my difficulties became greater. Other features
of the popular Protestantism of the day began to annoy me. There was,
for example, the matter of extemporaneous prayers, and there was the
exasperating practice of "giving testimony." Attendance
at Sunday morning services and the weekly prayer meetings, punctuated
with these usages, became increasingly obnoxious. Impromptu prayers,
as I analyzed them, seemed to specialize in informing God about what
was going on, information which surely he did not need; the testimonies,
"see what God has done for me," impressed me as a macabre
kind of boasting.
Neither struck me as reverent or properly humble. Even today, after
the lapse of all the years, my dislike for them remains as strong
as ever; my advice to Protestant leaders, if it were sought, would
be to jettison them. They started me on my way out of Protestantism,
and they have had the same effect on many others. (If such advice
seems inconsistent with my secure happiness in the Catholic Church,
then I hasten to express my gratitude for these irritating features.)
The story of my religious discontent would not be complete without
at least a brief reference to my reaction to the puritanism with which
I was surrounded. There were the so-called "questionable amusements,"
for instance, such as card playing and dancing. I was brought up in
the belief that to take part in them was wrong and unchristian. It
was a matter of conscience. Even in college such was the current interpretation
of Christianity. At first, as in all other departments of thinking
and behavior, I was a strict conformist and a sincere one.
It was only a matter of time, however, until the denunciation
of "questionable amusements," following other and more important
features of my religious environment, should come in for its share
of criticism and challenge. It may well be that the puritanism of
my locality was not fully in accord with Protestant theology; I didn't
know about that. All I knew was that, practically speaking, the Christian
religion was closely bound up and identified with prohibitions. It
appeared as a composite of negations.
In the same category was my disapproval, once I started to disapprove,
of the prevailing attitude toward even moderate indulgence in tobacco
and liquor. This, too, was proscribed as unchristian. As an illustration
of the extreme to which such thinking can be carried, I recall the
insistence of some of my associates that the wine served at the marriage
feast at Cana and the Last Supper was merely grape juice. To the reader
of these lines it seems incredible that such an opinion could have
been held in college circles. It was so held, however, and was passed
on to me in all seriousness. Need I add that disillusionment was inevitable?
As a college junior my dissatisfaction became so keen that I could
no longer refrain from seeking counsel. The faculty members and ministers
whom I approached were uniformly kind in their response, but their
answers never satisfied me. Even so, my desire to remain within the
bounds of conformity, my sense of loyalty to all that I considered
my heritage, demanded that I make the best effort I could to accept
the proffered solutions.
Some of my questions come to mind: What does it mean to say that "Jesus
saves"? I hear my fellow students testify that they have been
saved: How do they know? I hear them declare that they have chosen
Jesus as their "personal Savior": What can such a statement
mean? Are "questionable amusements" sinful? If so, why?
What is my status relative to the Church? Who has authority to tell
me that I am bound to attend church services? Who put the books of
the Bible together? How do I know that they were inspired? How does
it happen that the same Bible is the seedbed of so many contradictory
doctrines? Why cannot religious truth be easily recognized?
Granted that these questions were clumsily stated and were far from
boasting analytic maturity, still they embodied the doubts which tortured
me. The Protestant critic of today might well say that my failure
to find satisfaction in the solutions suggested by my advisers reflected
rather upon my judgment than upon the answers themselves. He might
insinuate, with some degree of accuracy, that for a young man I was
too introspective, that I did not expose my mind with sufficient candor.
All I can say is that these doubts and difficulties were painfully
real to me. They were no mere passing phase of restless youth. If
my mentors in college did not grasp the depth of my disturbance, neither
did I myself. I was floundering in what Bossuet has called the "variations
of Protestantism," and I could discover no anchor-hold for my
wavering faith.
This was a time of acute spiritual distress. I continued my attendance
at the regular services, but my attitude was hardening into one of
contemptuous tolerance. Probably the only thing that attracted me
to church at all was my pleasure in singing. The sermons and testimonials
I sat through with grim cynicism; the extemporaneous prayers I endured
with ill-concealed ridicule and scorn. Christianity itself had ceased
to evoke my reverence. Doubtless I was conceited and altogether too
cocky, a very disagreeable young man going through a very disagreeable
experience. However, I kept my thoughts to myself, unwilling to put
them into words. They were too frightening. I sat back, detached,
fretful, and worried.
A temporary interruption of my college course gave me an opportunity
to recoup my finances by accepting a teaching position. This brought
me to a small Iowa community where there was a Catholic church. Probably
for no other reason than absorption in my own religious problem I
found myself reading some of the stock volumes of Catholic apologetics,
obtained from newly found Catholic friends.
Quite vividly do I recall my first reaction to Cardinal Gibbons' well-known
Faith of Our Fathers. I read it, though it is doubtful if
the book has ever had a more supercilious reader. Its conclusions
I dismissed summarily; the Catholic Church was false and had to be
false. The thought never crossed my mind that she might have something
to offer me; she was the last place I would have considered as a source
of truth. Nevertheless, I read on, and in some undefinable way was
impressed.
As I look back on those days I remember thinking how utterly foolish
it was for anyone to attempt any sort of defense of the Church on
the basis of facts or logical deductions and wondering how on earth
this prelate, Cardinal Gibbons, could have the effrontery to try it.
Still and all, the questions he posed were questions that had been
disturbing me, and the answers he gave, as I reluctantly admitted,
seemed to fill the bill. Because they were Catholic answers they had
to be wrong, but there they were, in black and white, and they held
my attention.
The chain of Catholic reasoning annoyed me by its clever linking of
fact with fact, deduction with deduction. There was the divinity of
Christ, the establishment of a Church by him, and the conclusion that
the Church so founded could never disappear and could not teach error.
If the linking was genuine, then the Church must be Christ's Church,
authorized to teach me. But of course, I stoutly maintained, there
had to be a flaw somewhere. However inevitable the logic, the conclusion
could not follow, because my first and last premise was that the Catholic
Church was ruled out of court. Not even to myself would I admit that
my reading had made a deep and lasting impression upon me. I scoffed
at myself for bothering with the Catholic claims at all, but even
as I scoffed the fascination grew upon me.
All the bigoted charges that I had ever heard against the Church came
back to mind to reinforce my resistance. She was the Scarlet Woman,
an impostor, corrupt, even diabolical. Far from being attracted to
her, I knew I ought to resent, with all my power, her very existence
as an insult to human nature. If, among her impostures, her logic
intrigued me, then it was up to me to expose its basic fallacy.
I suppose it must have been at this time that I found myself, one
day, actually reasoning in reverse. Since the Church, a priori,
was false, and inasmuch as I was unable to disprove her foundation
by Christ, then it followed that Christ himself must have been a mere
human being and a misguided one at that. He could not have been divine,
otherwise the Church of his making could not have failed, as it obviously
had. Such reverse reasoning pushed me to a denial of our Lord's divinity.
No longer a bumptious collegian, I could not be happy about this,
for it brought a clean break with all Christianity, with the things
for which I still retained an unconscious reverence.
If Christ were not God, why should I be interested in Christianity,
a merely human religion? My mind turned momentarily to the religion
of the Chosen People; was there anything there to hold me? The answer
came quickly: If Christ and his transcendental claims were false,
there was nothing in Judaism that could claim my allegiance. Similarly,
the most cursory glance at the other religious systems of mankind
sufficed to justify their abrupt dismissal. I felt myself drifting,
drifting into skepticism if not into positive atheism. The very ground
seemed insecure beneath my feet; my faith in everything seemed to
totter. Yet all this while, and the experience continued through several
years, I continued, quite inconsistently, though I hope not hypocritically,
to attend Protestant church services. It was a way of trying to force
myself to hold on, in the desperate hope that some salvation might
be held out for me.
Sheer honesty compelled me, ultimately, to face squarely the root
problem of Christ's divinity. As I review, at this long remove, the
process of my study, with the limited and imperfect means I had at
my disposal, the wonder is, not that I reached the correct answer,
but that I was able to reach any answer at all. It is quite clear
to me now that the grace of God was guiding me through the inadequacies
of my equipment and the pitfalls of my imperfect theology to a definite
intellectual conviction of the Godhead of Jesus Christ.
This was, at any rate, the outcome of my study, the first and firm
step along the road. For me, I concluded, Christ was indeed the Emmanuel,
the Incarnate Word. He had come into the world to teach, to guide,
and to save me, and I was bound to believe what he had taught, bound
to obey whatsoever he had commanded, bound to worship him according
to his own terms.
There was no escaping the inevitability of the logic which, once more,
brought me squarely up against the Catholic Church. I had to believe
in Christ, but, with something bordering on frenzy, I still sought
to find a way not to believe in the Church he had founded. I was looking
for a comfortable middle course, one that would be Christian but not
Catholic.
My struggles to find that way continued for several years after graduation
from college, during most of which time I was teaching in the public
schools of Iowa. Here are some of the things I did in my anxiety to
escape from the impasse in my thinking. On one occasion I remember
browsing in a bookstore in a large city and, with a small-town youth's
respect for the learning of the metropolis, asking the attendant for
books on the Catholic Church. I was shown several typical works of
apologetics, but I explained hastily that I wanted something against
the Church--the strongest to be had. I purchased the books that
were offered, hurried home, and read them eagerly. They left me completely
cold.
On another occasion I called on the pastor of the Protestant church
I was attending at the time. I asked him to let me sing in his choir
and to keep me so busy with other activities that I would have no
time to worry about the Catholic claims, hoping to discover eventually
that they were only a passing illusion. He tried, and I believe I
can honestly say that I tried, but it was of no use.
Again, I found myself at a summer encampment of the YMCA, at Lake
Geneva, at which prominent Protestant leaders were scheduled to speak
and hold conferences. By appointments I called on several of these
men and presented my problem with the distinct plea that they would
show me how to "keep out of the Catholic Church." Their
answers were varied. Some were patient with me and evidently concerned
over my state of mind; others were casual and offhand; one of them
ordered me from his presence. I left more discouraged than before.
Naturally enough, my friends were apprehensive. While I kept my questing
to myself as much as possible, it was inevitable that some echoes
of my struggle should reach them. In all good faith, I am sure, they
did their best to head me off, supplying me with even more horrendous
disclosures of the evils of Rome than the bookstore had furnished
me. I do not recall now if they descended to Maria Monk, but Pere
Hyacinth was a fairly recent discovery in those days, along with Alfred
Loisy and others of the current Modernist dissenting group. Alas,
they were wasting their efforts so far as I was concerned. With ever
waning hope, I still consulted men I felt I could trust, ministers
and former college professors; always the result was the same, a growing
feeling of the inevitability of the step which I yet refused to take.
It was out of such processes of thinking that I was ultimately brought
squarely up against a startling question: Is there nothing between
the Catholic religion and atheism? If the former is rejected does
the latter become inevitable? Is there no middle ground? Is the Catholic
faith the only way of saving me from the loss of all faith and the
repudiation of all religion? Is it God's way of saving me and all
other men from cynicism and despair? The answer was inescapable. With
conclusive finality I admitted to myself that there was nothing between
Christ and chaos, nothing between the Catholic faith and atheism.
The realization then struck me that I had been playing the part of
a coward. Why should I be afraid of the Catholic Church? If facts
and logic converged upon her, if reason demanded her as the answer
to my problem, why should I allow my worn-out prejudices to stand
in the way? I made up my mind to be fully honest with myself, to face
the realities of the situation without flinching. The moment I made
that resolution the doubts disappeared. As I was to learn later, I
had begun to cooperate with the grace of God.
It was then, as I remember in clear detail, that I reviewed once more
the whole process of my thinking. Starting all over again, I set down
the premises which were undebatable. As though it were yesterday,
I recall sketching my analysis: I believe in God; I need to be taught
the truths which he wishes me to believe; since Christ is God and
came on earth to teach me this truth, it is to him I must look. But
how does Christ teach me? There could be, I answered, only three ways:
(1) by direct and personal revelation; (2) through a written record
(the Sacred Scripture); (3) through the agency of men, that is, through
an organization commissioned by him for that purpose.
Did Christ, I asked, teach me by direct revelation? Not that I was
aware. Furthermore, if, in spite of this insensitiveness on my part,
he really had chosen this means, then he must teach all men in the
same way. Honesty of intention and the sincere desire to hear his
voice would be the only prerequisites. But how, then, could the fact
be explained away that so many men of obvious and unquestionable good
will held so many and such contradictory beliefs? With a gesture of
finality, I discarded the first possibility.
Did he teach me through the Bible? Here was old ground, well-trodden,
thoroughly mulled over. But how was I to know that it was
the Bible, the inspired record of God's dealings with men? Perhaps
it contained much spurious matter; perhaps its canon was uncertain--books
left out which should have been retained, books incorporated which
should be rejected. Again, how could I know the real meaning of the
many disputed passages?
There were, I reminded myself, over two hundred religious groups all
claiming the Bible as their font and origin, all asserting their particular
interpretations as correct. My common sense repeated what I already
knew, that Christ must have appointed some agent to compose the Sacred
Scripture and to interpret its meaning for all men.
Why should I gag, then, at considering calmly and dispassionately
the possibility of the third answer, even if it led directly to the
Catholic Church? Who else could this appointed teacher be? What could
she be but infallible? My right to certitude was as great as that
of the fortunate few who heard the Master speak, who saw him pass
along the way. And if he was in truth divine, and if he had appointed
his agents to teach and govern and sanctify in his name, he could
not help but make them share his infallibility. I needed no biblical
texts to bolster my assurance that his Church was founded upon a rock;
it could not be otherwise. Her infallibility was as inevitable and
as inescapable as his own. It was his own.
Perhaps this is the correct point in my narrative to indicate explicitly
how I reacted to the stock argument against the Catholic Church. As
my decision became apparent it was unavoidable that I should be asked
for explanations. Why was I attracted to the Church? Did I not know
that she had ingloriously failed? How could I get around the facts
of history?
No doubt the reader is thoroughly informed about the oft-repeated
premise that the Catholic Church had been untrue to her divine calling
and had failed some time during the early centuries or Middle Ages.
(There is no agreement among the critics about when the failure occurred.)
The Church fell into evil ways, the argument continues; her ministers
became selfish, dishonorable, and corrupt, even a few of the popes
falling into public sins.
According to the argument, further, the Church departed from the original
gospel of Christ and introduced spurious doctrines of faith. Therefore,
the argument concludes, the Church lost the grace of God and the authority
to speak as his agent. A reformation was necessary. The old Church
had to be abandoned; a new organization (or organizations?) was needed
to lead Christianity back to its pristine purity.
Over and over again I had heard and read this argument. As it failed
to hold me back, my friends asked why. Was I ignoring it? Had I closed
my mind to obvious facts? Let me say most emphatically that I had
not ignored the argument. I had analyzed and studied it to the best
of my ability. The result? The more I thought about it the more illogical
it seemed. How was it possible, I asked, for the Church to fail when
the divine Lord had guaranteed that she would not fail? But then there
were the evil deeds of the Church leaders. What about them? They could
not be erased from the record. They were there for all to see and
contemplate. Were they not conclusive? They seemed to be conclusive
for others; why not for me?
Perhaps these facts were conclusive for me; but if so, it was in the
other direction. If they proved anything it was that the Catholic
Church is indestructible. She must be solid indeed, I reasoned, not
to have been destroyed. The Church had lived through enough calamities
to annihilate a merely human institution. The salient fact is that
the Church had lived through them, a feat of survival which becomes
more extraordinary the more the historical mistakes are played up.
The sad experiences of the Church, to which my attention had been
called, only demonstrated her divine nature. Far from frightening
me away from the Church, they helped open the door for me.
In this same connection there was the defensive claim of the Church
that she had not written into her doctrines any effect of the misdeeds
of her leaders. Was this true? Let me admit frankly that when this
question first came to my mind the facts were hopelessly confused.
Posing the question, however, set me in search of facts and pointed
my thinking in what I now know to have been the right direction. I
knew of other institutions that had accommodated themselves
to the records and mistakes of their representatives. In fact, such
was the usual experience. Was it true that the Catholic Church was
different? Was she the one institution in human history that was foolproof,
the one institution that could not be contaminated by the mistakes,
no matter how great, of people and clergy?
What about the biblical proof that the Church had amended the gospel
and introduced new doctrines? I had been told repeatedly that if I
would only read the Bible with an open mind I would see for myself
the falsity of Catholic doctrines. By the time in my conversion when
this paragraph is pertinent, I had become very impatient with all
efforts to disprove the Catholic Church from the Bible. How could
the non-Catholic critic, I asked, interpret texts of Scripture more
accurately than the Catholic Church? What possible advantage did he
have? Could he read Greek manuscripts any better than Catholic scholars?
Did he understand New Testament conditions and its Hebrew background
any better? Was he in closer touch with apostolic times? Did he have
more complete knowledge of early Church history?
The questions answered themselves. All the advantage was on the side
of the Church. She had not broken with the past, as the critic had
done. She had preserved an unbroken continuity through all generations
back to the apostles. Leaving aside the divine and supernatural protection
against error, as promised by our Lord, the Church had every human
and natural advantage in defining the doctrines of faith.
As a matter of course, my attention was called to particular doctrines.
How could I believe in praying for the dead? How could I believe in
the infallibility of the pope, in the Eucharist, in indulgences, in
the veneration of saints, and in the resurrection of the body? How
could I confess my sins to a priest? How could I harmonize the pageantry
and elaborate ceremonial of the Church with the humble simplicity
of early Christianity? These and other similar questions, which seemed
to be particularly interesting to my contemporaries, were put to me.
I answered them as best I could.
If the truth must be told, however, I did not consider myself capable
of running down all the evidence for or against particular doctrines
and practices. Such a task would have been prodigious. My mind kept
insisting that the way to find the doctrines of faith was to trace
down to them from our Lord and his Church rather than up to them from
my self and my limited knowledge.
In fairness to myself let me say by way of parenthesis that the more
I considered and thought about particular doctrines, those that had
been held before me in warning, the more reasonable they seemed. And
yet, I continued to insist, they were true not because I happened
to like them but because the Church taught them.
As I tried to explain to those who cross-examined me, I had reached
the point where I was compelled by force of logic to believe whatever
the Church taught whether I liked it or not and whether it seemed
reasonable or not.
My thought was centered in Christ and his Church. If he was divine
and if he established a Church,facts which I could
no longer doubt, then it followed that I was bound to be a member
of that Church and to believe what she taught. I must accept the doctrines
of the Church precisely because they were doctrines of the Church.
So it was that at last I took the step toward which all my thinking
had pointed through six years of troubled doubting and distress of
soul. Finding myself in Chicago, in the autumn of 1912, enrolled in
the law school of the University of Chicago, I sought out the nearest
Catholic rectory, St. Thomas the Apostle. I introduced myself to the
priest who met me in the parlor, Rev. Michael Shea, and asked for
admission into the Catholic Church, expressing my eagerness to take
all the instructions which were required.
My time for reading was limited, but the fundamentals were already
so fixed in my mind that all the rest followed with the ease of completing
a picture-puzzle once the key had been discovered. I am afraid I was
a somewhat disappointing convert to my instructor. My battles were
all over before I had rung his doorbell.
Here I must pause to relate one very unusual and pleasing incident.
Shortly after I began my formal instructions in the catechism, a few
good friends prevailed upon me to consult a certain prominent Protestant
minister who lived near the University. They were disturbed about
me and hoped that with the help of the minister they could turn me
aside from my charted course.
So it was that one evening, with these friends, I engaged in a long
discussion about religion; it lasted half of the night. In the discussion
I was not only outnumbered, about four to one, I was outpointed. I
was sure that I had made a poor showing of my reasons for becoming
a Catholic.
At the conclusion of the session, however, the minister made a most
extraordinary statement, one that must have surprised my friends as
completely as it did me: "My advice for you," he said, "is
to go into the Catholic Church as soon as possible. Your mind is Catholic.
You can be nothing else." If I could recall his name, I would
publicize it now, in appreciation of his broadmindedness.
My baptism (January 1913) was a private ceremony witnessed by the
priest and my sponsor only. My first Communion at an early Mass the
next morning likewise was unnoticed, as I expected and wished. No
one was interested in what I was doing. My coming into the Catholic
Church was unannounced. It attracted no attention; it deserved none.
The rest of my story, being aside from the purpose of this present
writing, may be dismissed with a few words. Sometime in the spring
of 1913 I engaged to teach at the University of Utah in Salt Lake
City. When I came here in the fall of that same year I had not the
slightest expectation that from then on my life would be set in Utah.
The only plan I had, in so far as I can remember, was to teach here
a year or two and then take more postgraduate work in my newly chosen
department, that of public speaking, looking to some higher scholastic
degrees.
It was soon apparent, however, that God and my own inclinations had
charted an entirely different course for me. One day I was suddenly
aware of a discovery, the discovery that the only thing that I was
really interested in was the Catholic religion. I thought about it;
I talked about it, whenever I could find a listener; I read about
it; I consulted priests to learn more about it; I was deeply concerned
about its welfare; I wished to be a factor in its progress.
I found myself impatient with non-Catholics, amazed that they could
resist the magnificent appeal and logical claims of the Church. Perhaps,
I said to myself, if I could state clearly and correctly the position
of the Church, perhaps someday I could win other converts to her fold.
Here was a new challenge. Together with the realization that the Catholic
Church meant more to me than anything and everything else in the world,
it led me to the necessity of another decision.
This time I made no effort to resist the will of God. After a reasonable
period of testing myself, necessary for certainty, I called on the
Bishop of Salt Lake, the Most Reverend Joseph S. Glass, C.M., D.D.,
and asked to be adopted as a seminarian. Being accepted, I was sent
to St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, California, where I studied
under the Sulpician Fathers. I was ordained in June of 1920 for the
Diocese of Salt Lake.
If certain of my former Protestant friends and acquaintances chance
to read this story, I trust that they will find in it the answer to
the question which at one time was in their minds. They wondered,
some of them at least, if I would not be disappointed in the Church.
Well do I remember the warning they held over me. I was attracted
to the Church, they insisted, only because I did not know her as she
really was. Someday, if I should enter the Church, which God forbid,
I would be sadly disillusioned. Then, when it was too late, the real
character of the Church would be exposed, with the mask of virtue
torn off. What a pity for me to choose a course which could have but
one end, heartaches and bitter regrets.
On the other hand, there were one or two close friends who were most
helpful to me, a help which I wish I could acknowledge to them directly.
They gave me the opportunity, through repeated discussions and arguments,
to clarify my thinking. They understood the problem I was trying to
solve and, although they did not approve the step I was contemplating,
they expected me to be honest and to follow my conscience.
They would be genuinely sorry if the Catholic faith had not proved
to be the answer to my quest.
If any reassurance is needed for them let it be seen in my life as
a priest. As to whether or not my priesthood has been and is useful,
only God can judge. But at least it gives me the opportunity to save
my own soul. Certainly it is a thrilling adventure. It demands the
best that I have, indeed far more than I or any other man has to give,
but its rewards are superlative.
I close with this further comment. The more I know about the Church
the more do I regret that I lost so much time coming within her fold.
Without intending the slightest reflection on my parents, I have wished
many times that I had had the good fortune to be born and reared a
Catholic. Perhaps my point of view is sufficiently expressed in the
motto I chose to mark my episcopacy: "Through the Church to God."
Bishop Duane G. Hunt's conversion story first appeared
in 1949. He was bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake City from 1937
until his death in 1960.
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