Why do adults become Catholics?

The most touching “convert story” in which I played an indirect role was told to me by the protagonists, an Indiana of couple who seemed a 21st century reincarnation of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, if much younger and far less grim. It was shortly after Easter 2003, and I was visiting a parish outside Indianapolis to give a lecture and to sign books. The couple came up to me during the signing and said that my book on the Long Lent of 2002 – the year of scandal in American Catholicism – had been the final push they needed to seek full communion with the Catholic Church, which they had just entered. I said that I was glad that my unsparing narration of what had gone terribly wrong in the Church hadn’t caused them to think again. They both said, with utter simplicity, “Well, we thought that any Church that could that honest about what was wrong with it was the right place to be.” I got up from behind the signing table and embraced each of them.

There are as many reasons for “converting” as there are converts. Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic with, by his own admission, “little emotion but clear conviction:” this was the truth, and one ought to adhere to it. Avery Cardinal Dulles, son and grandson of U.S. secretaries of state, wrote that his journey into the Catholic Church began when, as an unbelieving Harvard undergraduate long detached from his father’s staunch Presbyterianism, he noticed a leaf shimmering with raindrops while taking a walk along the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts; such beauty could not be accidental, he thought – there must be a Creator. Thomas Merton found Catholicism aesthetically, as well as intellectually, attractive: once the former Columbia free-thinker and dabbler in communism and Hinduism had found his way into a Trappist monastery and became a priest, he explained the Mass to his still-unconverted friend, the poet Robert Lax, by analogy to a ballet. One of the greatest men I have ever known, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, insisted until his death in 2007 that his conversion to Catholicism was not a rejection of, but a fulfillment of, the Judaism into which he was born; the cardinal could often be found at Holocaust memorial services reciting the names of the martyrs, including “Gisèle Lustiger, ma maman.”

Some of the great 19th century converts in the Anglosphere were geniuses of the English language: the theologian John Henry Newman, for example, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. This tradition of literary converts continued in the 20th century, and included the aforementioned Waugh, Graham Greene, Edith Sitwell, Ronald Knox, Walker Percy, and influential Columbia teacher, Mark Van Doren. That line of converts continues in spirit at Our Savior’s Church on Park Avenue in New York, where convert author, wit, raconteur and amateur pugillist George William Rutler presides as pastor today.

In early American Catholicism, the fifth archbishop of Baltimore (and de facto primate of the United States, Samuel Eccleston) was a convert from Anglicanism, as was the first native-born American saint and the precursor of the Catholic school system, Elizabeth Anne Seton; Mother Seton’s portrait in the offices of the archbishop of New York is somewhat incongruous, as the young widow Seton, with her children, was run out of New York by her unforgiving Anglican in-laws when she became a Catholic. On his deathbed, another great 19th century convert, Henry Edward Manning of England, who might have become the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury but became the Catholic archbishop of Westminster instead, took from beneath his pillow his long-deceased wife’s prayer book and gave it to a friend, saying that it had been his spiritual inspiration throughout his life.

If there is a thread running through these varied personalities, it may be this: that men and women of intellect, culture, and accomplishment have found in Catholicism what Blessed John Paul II called the “symphony of truth.” That rich and complex symphony, and the harmonies it offers, is an attractive, compelling, and persuasive alternative to the fragmentation of modern and post-modern intellectual and cultural life, where little if anything fits together and much is cacophony. Catholicism is not an accidental assembly of random truth-claims; the Creed is not an arbitrary catalogue of propositions and neither is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It all fits together. And in doing so, Catholicism helps fit all the aspects of our lives together, as it orders our loves and loyalties in the right direction.

But to return to where I began: you don’t have to be an intellectual to appreciate this “symphony of truth.” For Catholicism is, first of all, an encounter with a person, Jesus Christ, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” [John 14.6]. And to meet that person is to meet the truth that makes all the other truths of our lives make sense. Indeed, the embrace of Catholic truth in full, as lives like John Henry Newman’s demonstrate, opens one up to the broadest possible range of intellectual encounters.

Viewed from outside, Catholicism can seem closed and unwelcoming. As Evelyn Waugh noted, though, it all seems so much bigger, spacious, open from the inside. The Gothic, with its soaring vaults and buttresses and its luminous stained glass, is not a classic Catholic architectural form by accident. The full beauty of the light, however, washes over you from inside.

GEORGE WEIGEL is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

George Weigel  | Dec 28, 2011 10:46 AM