Catholic and Enjoying It!
A moving story of a very brave woman.
There are two basic ways Catholics can approach a story like this. One can treat this new convert, full of love and hope in Jesus Christ, as a half-breed Protestant rebel against Holy Church who has nothing in common with Real Catholics (as some representatives of Truly True Catholicism insist). If you take this approach, then you must deny her obvious faith in Christ, her desire to serve him to the best of her ability and according to the light she has, and her love for God and neighbor. Instead, you must continually emphasize her shocking ignorance of Catholic intramural squabbles about liturgy, liturgy, liturgy of which she, admittedly knows nothing. You must hammer away at saying things like “The notion that becoming Catholic is only a “fulfillment” or “completion” of what one was as a Protestant cannot be true: what of “justification by faith”? What of the primacy of the Pope? What of accepting Catholic Tradition in its totality versus the “Great Tradition” of evangelical Protestantism?” while not bothering to ask whether these doctrine are even believed or comprehended by this new convert. Treat her with contempt and suspicion and condescension. You might even lard on the notion that allowing such a one into the Catholic Church with gratitude on her lips for discovering much of the truth of Christ in Evangelicalism is a “scandal” and rail against the idea that she should be allowed to consider herself Christian at all unless she spits on and denounces her Evangelical background (meaning “her husband and all who shown her the love of Christ”) before passing on to the Catholic faith.
Or, instead of taking this ill-advised course for dealing with the imperfectly catechized, you could instead follow the example set by Priscilla and Aquila when they met a very imperfectly catechized young Christian named Apollos.
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