Convert-Making the Old-Fashioned Way
Convert-making used to be reserved for priests only, or so it seemed. When I was young we didn’t hear much about laymen seeking converts.
We may have read collections of conversion stories, and somewhere along the line we may have stumbled across and read the greatest conversion story ever written, Augustine’s Confessions, but we thought of conversion as something that occurred to other people and that was effected by third parties who were unknown to us and who probably were quite unlike us. Our part was to appreciate the end result, not to help bring it about. We were expected to admire the picture, not to paint it.
All this was a misperception. The lay Catholic’s task always has been to take the faith to every corner of the world, starting with the four corners of his own backyard. If we didn’t realize that, partly it was because no one told us about our duties. Even some priests, who should have done the telling from the pulpit, thought convert making was their bailiwick: LAYMEN NEED NOT APPLY. In this they were wrong, even when they were successes in bringing new souls into the Church.
There were many other priests, more than we knew, who were successful evangelists and who didn’t make this mistake. They sought to engage laymen in convert making, and often they succeeded. In most cases laymen weren’t the instructors-conducting inquiry classes was reserved almost universally for priests-but they were the means through which the classes were populated. The laymen went into the highways and byways, bringing prospective converts to the rectory.
The system worked-so well that we now rub our eyes in disbelief as we read the numbers. We marvel that a single parish in Harlem (an area not known for a high percentage of Catholics) could produce an average of 440 converts a year for fourteen years. Many dioceses are unable to match that number today. We wonder how it was that parishes routinely brought in 100 converts a year, with no access to television, direct-mail, or a fat bankroll.
Winning Converts explains how converts can be made-in large quantities and without much expense. Originally published in 1948 and just this month released in a revised form by Catholic Answers, this is a collection of how-to accounts by eighteen successful convert makers, all but one of them priests.
After surveying “The Contemporary Scene in America,” Fr. John A. O’Brien, the editor, explains “How You Can Win Converts.” He argues that America can be converted to the Catholic faith, but only if “we have found a way of harnessing the good will and latent zeal of our laity.”
Calling for a “new crusade,” he explains how this can be done, giving as an example a one-armed railroad laborer who could take credit, over 25 years, for bringing about 100 people into the Church. The man didn’t have the advantage of formal education; he had what was more important, zeal and good sense.
The key is to use casual contacts, says O’Brien. One day he drove into a filling station and struck up a conversation with another motorist. “I said to myself: ‘I’m going to see if I can land this soul for Christ.'<|>” He asked the man if he would be interested in seeing the new altar his church had just erected.
A few minutes later they were touring the church, O’Brien explaining everything from the stained glass windows to the confessionals. The man agreed to attend an inquiry class, and three months later, having returned to his own town, sent O’Brien a telegram: “Just received my First Holy Communion. Am the happiest man in the world. Many thanks.”
Finding prospects for conversion is one thing-everyone not already a Catholic qualifies-but finding interested prospects is more difficult, because it involves igniting interest in people who otherwise have little or none. How to accomplish that?
Perhaps the best way, says Msgr. John A. Gabriels of Lansing, Michigan, is through the inquiry class. Each month he made a radio pitch for his classes, telling hearers that the classes “are designed for five groups of people: (1) those mildly interested in the Church, but who do not wish to become Catholics; (2) those about to marry a Catholic or who already have married a Catholic; (3) those married outside of the Church and afraid to call on a priest; (4) those baptized Catholics who have never made their first confession or First Holy Communion; (5) those Catholics who want to brush up on the faith that they have.”
Giving precise instructions for handling an inquiry class, Gabriels and other contributors show how people in the first category-those mildly interest in the Church-can be transformed into catechumens. (The other four groups are even easier to deal with.) At the start, those mildly interested do not suspect that the Catholic Church is what they’ve been searching for their whole lives, but by the end of the class they know.
One of the most intriguing chapters is by Fr. James F. Cunningham, the superior general of the Paulists. He was one of the priests who began the “trailer mission” apostolate in rural areas of Texas, South Carolina, Utah, Missouri, and Tennessee.
The trailers had cramped sleeping quarters (and little privacy) for two priests, plus a tiny chapel. When the Paulists arrived in a new hamlet, they lowered the back flap of the trailer, mounted large speakers powered by a portable generator, and put on the Catholic equivalent of a “revival.” A portable screen would be set up, and for a few minutes the children would be entertained by clips from The King of Kings (silent movie version). This satisfied them and kept them quiet during the subsequent talks to their parents.
Trailer missions were hard and lonely work, and of all the techniques recounted in Winning Converts, they produced the fewest new Catholics- but, as Fr. Cunningham asks, “How valuable is one soul?”
Fr. Benjamin F. Bowling, another Paulist, emphasizes that tact can win people over. One day a young man approached his rectory. “I . . . I … would like to talk to a priest!”
“Well, I’m a priest; come in and have a chat.”
The young man hesitated, fumbled at his collar, and spluttered, “But I’m a Protestant!”
Stepping back and feigning horror, the priest exclaimed, “Good Lord, no! Not that!”
“We both laughed, and the ice was broken. Later the young man confided to me that he had been walking up and down before the rectory door for ten minutes, trying to get up courage to enter. I have never forgotten that incident and ever since have wondered how many other non-Catholics are, metaphorically speaking, walking up and down before Catholic churches, trying to get up the courage to come in.”
When I first spotted Winning Converts, I recognized it as a long-lost gem, an instructional manual that should have been written long ago-and was! A short review can suggest only a few of the dozens of techniques discussed in considerable detail; each technique is as applicable today as it was then. There is no parish so poor or so inexperienced that it can’t put them into play. There is no individual Catholic who can’t polish his convert-making skills by reading this delightful work.
The world is still ours to win. We already have the truth of the Catholic faith. Now we just have to pass it along. Here’s the game plan.
— Karl Keating
Winning Converts
By John A. O’Brien
San Diego: Catholic Answers
272 pages
$14.95
Up from Moonie-ism
Twenty-five years ago I was in my room in the dormitory. Someone next door yelled, muffling a distant groan, and students ran and shouted along the balcony. “He’s on fire! He’s on fire!” I rushed to a room on the far side of the building and peered over shoulders onto the quad six floors below. I could see a knot of people surrounding a clumped figure. A trail of ashes looped out to where he had put a match to the gasoline.
Later that day the war protester died. I didn’t know him and wouldn’t have recognized him in life. To me, he died anonymously and uselessly. If I expected him to be forgotten by the next morning, I was wrong.
The spot where he fell wasn’t cleaned up by the custodial crew. They weren’t allowed near it. Mourning students barricaded it off with chairs and ropes, and it quickly became a sacred spot, almost an altar. For weeks kids camped around it, the ashes from his charred clothing hidden beneath flowers and perpetually-lit candles. It was as if the student who immolated himself had founded a short-lived religion.
I thought the whole thing repellent, and it was then that I realized, in a visceral way, that many in my generation had no faith but were endlessly hungry for God. On entering the university they abandoned whatever religion they were brought up in, but they couldn’t get religion out of their systems.
Later I discovered G. K. Chesterton, who noted that when a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing — he believes in anything. If that is true of someone who drops out of religion entirely and tries to adopt atheism, it also is true of someone who abandons Christianity but still finds himself seeking God-seeking him anywhere except in Christianity.
I was one of the fortunate ones. Although I attended a secular university, I never abandoned my faith. I never ceased attending Mass on Sundays. I never quit going to confession, although the months between confessions multiplied as my need for absolution increased. I never found myself reduced to a “cultural Catholic.”
Many around me concluded that, while there was a God, he wasn’t to be found in Christianity. They looked elsewhere, some of them joining cults.
There’s the word: “cult.” For most of us it is a barrier. Once a religion is labeled a cult, we can’t take its members seriously. Back then, when we heard the word, we thought of the Hare Krishnas or Eastern fakirs (and flakes). Later the word brought Jonestown to mind, still later Waco.
In each case “cultist” referred to someone entirely unlike us: alien as a spaceman, spacey as a kid on uppers. We didn’t bother to think about what the existence of cults was telling us, and we didn’t pay much attention to the people who were in them or who had gone through them.
Big mistake. The cult experience is in a way an exaggerated example of what millions have gone through. The cult, whatever form it takes, is a refuge from a society that has lost its bearings and doesn’t know why. How do we express this situation in the right way?
For years I had read screeds about cults, most written by Protestants, a few by Catholics. They demonized the cult experience to such an extent that cultists nearly ceased to be human. Unable to see why otherwise intelligent and kindhearted people would be attracted to cults, these authors left us thinking that cults drew only people who checked their brains at the door. I knew this wasn’t so, but I didn’t have any way to tell people otherwise.
From my experience in apologetics I knew that cultists are people who are indistinguishable from our “normal” neighbors. I suppose one could say that most of them actually have a higher-than-average spiritual sense- it drew them away from secularism and to the cults in the first place.
As I say, I was at a loss, unable to point to anything that rightly explained the phenomenon-until I came across Moonie-Buddhist-Catholic. Thomas W. Case spent seven years with the Moonies, leaving them twice until finally leaving them for good. Later he investigated Buddhism and other religions, and in the end he learned that even the most crooked road leads to Rome.
In the Moonies Case found a sense of “family,” something missing from so many middle-class lives. He found a purpose and a divine plan, one he could be part of. He also found reasons to leave the Moonies, but leaving wasn’t easy. It wasn’t that he was “brainwashed.” It was that he hadn’t found something else to fill the spiritual void, so he had trouble breaking away.
He explored other faiths, abandoning each in turn as he came to realize there was only one answer. “I didn’t care for the ‘Jesus people’ who sent everyone to hell who didn’t believe the way they believed,” writes Case. “I did not believe in justification by faith alone, and I had a hard-won antipathy for sectarian religion of any sort.”
After the Moonies Case moved to Colorado, where he settled in with high-society followers of Buddhism: famous poets, people with money, people with names. Their fake Eastern spirituality wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but being around them highlighted the need to become a Catholic. Still, there were problems.
“To become a Catholic would be an utterly uncool thing to do. In Boulder society, in the crowd I ran with, to announce that you were seriously considering the Catholic Church was to elicit looks of troubled condescension or shocked disdain . . .
“It meant going backwards, to authority, to ‘patriarchy,’ to heresy-hunts and Inquisitions, before the great liberation. It made my friends (some of them) sick to their stomachs to hear about it. But I was beginning to think it meant growing up.”
Tom Case didn’t have an easy time “growing up” or getting into the Church. He smarted over “cold receptions” by a priest and a theologian who had trouble seeing why anyone would want to become a Catholic. He was put off by other Catholics he met. Yet maybe it needed to be that way.
“Entering the Church was proving to be difficult, but in the outcome, that was all to the good. It made me look past persons and into the heart of the matter. God sent me on a trip of false turnings, showed me the ocean without a compass, so I would finally come back humbled. It is also possible that I learned things about the faith itself in these other places.”
In fact, he did, and in Moonie-Buddhist-Catholic he passes along insights appropriated the hard way, through mistaken turns and repeated frustrations. He expresses these insights, as he expresses the whole of his story, in words often eloquent, often moving.
His narrative concerns himself at one level, but a whole generation at another, and what he says will profit not only those who once found themselves involved in cults, but especially those who remained on the periphery, wondering how others could find themselves traveling so far afield when what they really wanted was in their spiritual backyard.
— Karl Keating
Moonie-Buddhist-Catholic
By Thomas W. Case
Cincinnati: White Horse Press
239 pages
$12.95