There are so many various accounts of Conversions to the true Faith and it seems that an additional voice is almost pointless, if not even a little arrogant. However, in the midst of hundreds of voices crying out for every sort of madness, from divorce now wholly acceptable to abortion acceptable to only to those who wish to loose their humanity, perhaps there is a place for a reality check.
As a whole conversion to the Faith, for me in any case, was not so much a terrible intellectual struggle as it was a massive learning curve. It was once observed, by Chesterton I think, that the Faith is often charged with stopping people from thinking. What is amusing about it is that it actually teaches one how to think. Fulton Sheen once observed that a non-Catholic will know a great deal about his own little idea and will jealously defend it but will know very little about his opponents ideas; whereas a Catholic will always go out of his way to know exactly what his opponent thinks so that he may fairly access it. It is an amusing irony that the man who best described ecclesial Modernism was in fact the arch-antimodernist Pope St. Pius X. It was again observed by Chesterton that people often attack the Church on what it is not, rather that what it is. He defended the Church against any sort of prejudicial attack, e.g. that the Church ignores the Bible, because it was complete nonsense. He found that his objections lay not in what was commonly found in the no-popery camp, but what the Church actually taught, which might actually be true. His worries were not about 'the errors of Rome' but about the Truths of Rome. In any case if conversion has done anything for me it certainly has given me the capacity to think.
I suppose that in this day it is not so much a contest between whether this or that provincial Protestant sect is correct or the Church of Rome is correct, but rather a matter of whether God actually exists and if he does whether he would actually interfere in any special way in human affairs, answering prayers etc. I must confess that I find the atheist or antitheist debate not terribly interesting, I only really pay attention when they start talking about evil, at which point they actually have a real point. Apart from that to say, 'The that than which nothing greater can be conceived doesn't exist' is a statement of pure nonsense, for if it doesn't exist it is not the 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived'. To say 'God doesn't exist' is in fact a negative statement of His actual existence, for know God is to know He exists. To say 'God probably doesn't exist' is a very human statement, a psychological condition owing to our rather experiential dominated minds.
As I said the problem of evil is valid and real point because in it we see an apparent contradiction, God the highest conceivable and actual Good, creates 'things' and seemingly must create evil, since nothing exists that does not come from God. Yet God is Good, so how can there be evil? It is a good point that can be simply answered, although not wholly satisfactorily in such short space, by saying that evil is a deprivation of Good; in other words it is a choice not to possess Good.
The argument about God is an interesting one but it was not one that interested me as a non-Catholic. My position before conversion was one of mild agnostic, read ignorant quasi-Christian. I had a nominal Christian upbringing, I went to church if I felt like it (and if I got up on a Sunday morning) but I was not terribly concerned about religion or God or anything like that. In actual fact I was completely ignorant of Rome. When I say this I do not mean that I knew something about Her, that She was run by the Bishop of Rome, that She had sacraments and Rosaries and all that, I mean that I did not know anything about Catholicism. I would have said at most that She was a denomination of Christianity, perhaps the national Church of Italy, but apart from that I knew nothing of Her history, Her doctrines, Her current controversies, Her organisation, and likewise (and hence my agnosticism) I knew very little about Protestantism. I was mildly attracted to the High Church CoE, I was appalled at evangelicalism, with its particular emphasis on using Hell as a tool for conversion. (I mean using fear rather than Love/Charity as a basis for being a Christian).
I left 6th form with an interest in politics/economics and history and some vague interest in finding out what Christianity actually was. Upon arriving at University I was put into a position of having a lot of spare time (a lot more than at home at least) and being able to spend many hours reading. It was in fact the study of history that was my first proper encounter with Christianity, and Catholicism.
To Be Continued...
As a whole conversion to the Faith, for me in any case, was not so much a terrible intellectual struggle as it was a massive learning curve. It was once observed, by Chesterton I think, that the Faith is often charged with stopping people from thinking. What is amusing about it is that it actually teaches one how to think. Fulton Sheen once observed that a non-Catholic will know a great deal about his own little idea and will jealously defend it but will know very little about his opponents ideas; whereas a Catholic will always go out of his way to know exactly what his opponent thinks so that he may fairly access it. It is an amusing irony that the man who best described ecclesial Modernism was in fact the arch-antimodernist Pope St. Pius X. It was again observed by Chesterton that people often attack the Church on what it is not, rather that what it is. He defended the Church against any sort of prejudicial attack, e.g. that the Church ignores the Bible, because it was complete nonsense. He found that his objections lay not in what was commonly found in the no-popery camp, but what the Church actually taught, which might actually be true. His worries were not about 'the errors of Rome' but about the Truths of Rome. In any case if conversion has done anything for me it certainly has given me the capacity to think.
I suppose that in this day it is not so much a contest between whether this or that provincial Protestant sect is correct or the Church of Rome is correct, but rather a matter of whether God actually exists and if he does whether he would actually interfere in any special way in human affairs, answering prayers etc. I must confess that I find the atheist or antitheist debate not terribly interesting, I only really pay attention when they start talking about evil, at which point they actually have a real point. Apart from that to say, 'The that than which nothing greater can be conceived doesn't exist' is a statement of pure nonsense, for if it doesn't exist it is not the 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived'. To say 'God doesn't exist' is in fact a negative statement of His actual existence, for know God is to know He exists. To say 'God probably doesn't exist' is a very human statement, a psychological condition owing to our rather experiential dominated minds.
As I said the problem of evil is valid and real point because in it we see an apparent contradiction, God the highest conceivable and actual Good, creates 'things' and seemingly must create evil, since nothing exists that does not come from God. Yet God is Good, so how can there be evil? It is a good point that can be simply answered, although not wholly satisfactorily in such short space, by saying that evil is a deprivation of Good; in other words it is a choice not to possess Good.
The argument about God is an interesting one but it was not one that interested me as a non-Catholic. My position before conversion was one of mild agnostic, read ignorant quasi-Christian. I had a nominal Christian upbringing, I went to church if I felt like it (and if I got up on a Sunday morning) but I was not terribly concerned about religion or God or anything like that. In actual fact I was completely ignorant of Rome. When I say this I do not mean that I knew something about Her, that She was run by the Bishop of Rome, that She had sacraments and Rosaries and all that, I mean that I did not know anything about Catholicism. I would have said at most that She was a denomination of Christianity, perhaps the national Church of Italy, but apart from that I knew nothing of Her history, Her doctrines, Her current controversies, Her organisation, and likewise (and hence my agnosticism) I knew very little about Protestantism. I was mildly attracted to the High Church CoE, I was appalled at evangelicalism, with its particular emphasis on using Hell as a tool for conversion. (I mean using fear rather than Love/Charity as a basis for being a Christian).
I left 6th form with an interest in politics/economics and history and some vague interest in finding out what Christianity actually was. Upon arriving at University I was put into a position of having a lot of spare time (a lot more than at home at least) and being able to spend many hours reading. It was in fact the study of history that was my first proper encounter with Christianity, and Catholicism.
To Be Continued...
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