For converts looking back, the emotions can be complicated

[Michie]

“Back in my internet apologetics days,” my young friend Tim told me, “I mostly used converts as weapons against various strains of Protestantism.” He’d grown up Catholic and had read lots of conversion stories, and he found those converts’ testimonies about their former religions’ problems and failures useful.

He learned something else. He found the converts he liked the most “were not those who had the most devastating arguments against their former sect, but the ones who looked back on their previous experiences with sincere appreciation and affection. Ex-Catholic evangelicals often seemed to look back on Catholicism with bitterness or disdain, but Catholic converts saw God working in their lives before they crossed the Tiber.”

Three qualifications​

Tim’s observations generally fit my own as a convert, with three qualifications. First, I’ve known some Catholic converts who feel very bitter about the religious bodies they grew up in, especially if they grew up fundamentalist.

Second, grateful converts often remember with gratitude the good people they knew, but not so much the religion itself. They see goodness and holiness in people whose religion they came to believe is defective.

I credit my own conversion to serious Christianity in part to a saintly Baptist deacon and his son. They were wonderful people whose lives made the Gospel story credible, but they believed things I knew even then were wrong. Some of those things were destructively wrong, like their bigoted view of the Catholic Church, which they tried to impart to me.

Third, some people who talk publicly the way Tim describes are much more bitter and critical in private. A former Episcopalian I knew many years ago, and quite admired, who eventually became a friend, would talk about the wonders of the evangelicalism of his youth and the beauties of the Anglicanism to which he’d moved as an adult.

Continued below.

For converts looking back, the emotions can be complicated

Appreciation of former faiths shapes conversion, as Catholics balance honesty and charity inviting others to the fullness of the Church.

www.oursundayvisitor.com

 

[Bob Crowley]

I was originally Presbyterian (and atheist before that). I actually enjoyed my time in the particular Presbyterian Church I went to, not because it was "Presbyterian" but because of the people there, and in particular the pastor and his family. He actually predicted I'd become Catholic.

We also had a gym under the church and that was a drawcard for me. One of the pastor's sons made a lot of the equipment and he is very gifted with his hands.

I've mentioned this before, but we were talking in his office when the pastor remarked he thought I'd become Catholic and added a bit more. I argued back saying that it seemed to me that my father had taken me out of the Catholic Church (due to his own unbelief, my Presbyterian baptism - long story - and his cruel behaviour).

The pastor replied "I think God might want you to go back there..."

So I don't have ill feeling towards the origional church. Mind you there is one, and one only, Presbyterian pastor I've got no time for, but that's another story.

I play the guitar in church. But I first picked up the instrument when I was in the Presbyterian Church. Up to that time i had a hangup about my music ability and I'm still not a singer.

In addition I"m hard of hearing so music is a challenge. Now if I'd been in the Catholic Church in similar circumstances and tried to learn the guitar, I'm quite sure I would not have received the same encouragement to participate I received in the Presbyterian Church. I don't think I'd have started. The expectations would have been too high.

It was after I left that church I started to become disillusioned with the Protestant position as a whole. Having said that though, there's a lot of good people in those churches.