Sometimes I counsel people to convert to Catholicism slowly. Many non-Catholics and former Catholics who “discover” Catholicism want to come into the Church posthaste, but that can be their religious downfall. They enter bright-eyed and expectant, only to discover that the folks in the pews hardly seem to appreciate what they have in the Church and that the faith is more complex and subtle than the converts had imagined. Such revelations can be disconcerting to new Catholics—so disconcerting that they find themselves in a revolving door, leaving as suddenly as they entered.
If there is a time for everything under heaven, there is a time for a person to enter the Church: when he is ready, intellectually and spiritually, and not before. Imagine what would happen if the non-Catholics you pass each day on the street registered at the rectory tomorrow morning. Unprepared either to understand or live the faith, they would be one-week Catholics. They would go back to their old lives with, if not an animus toward the faith, at least disgruntlement. By rushing their conversions they would undermine them.
Then there are more subtle cases, people who enter the Church at the right time but seem never quite able to leave behind beliefs or attitudes that should have been left behind. This problem comes home most poignantly to me when such people are engaged in my line of work. Today there are scores of people working in apologetics full time, and hundreds labor part time. What a pleasant change from even a decade ago! But some of these folks—almost all of them converts or reverts—have trouble developing a Catholic habit of mind.
Over the last few months I have been looking on, from the sidelines, at a sad case playing out mainly on the Internet. A prolific writer with a once-promising apostolate has promoted a constellation of odd ideas. First he plumped for geocentrism, arguing that this astronomical theory is taught officially by the Church. Then he criticized at length the U.S. bishops’ committee statement “Reflections on Covenant and Mission.” Which is fine—I criticized it myself—but he did so in language that other Catholic apologists took to be anti-Semitic. He even went so far as to quote, without attribution, what turned out to be Nazi propaganda literature. Most recently, this man has been embraced by the fortnightly publication that styles itself the flagship of the “Traditionalist” movement.
Why has a formerly reliable apologist taken up eccentric and even unsavory ideas, in the process allying himself with a raucous fringe? Perhaps the problem arose from what might be termed an incomplete conversion, if not to the Catholic faith propositionally speaking then to the Catholic way of thinking. And there is a Catholic way of thinking. One component of it is a largeness of mind—a kind of intellectual humility, really—that insulates one from crank theories and groups.
How disconcerting it is to see those most on fire for the faith getting burned. It is all the worse when the burns are self-inflicted.