The Convert’s Ignorance

Or, as the article is actually titled, The Convert’s Unnecessary Worries. Writing on the Catholic Pulse website, I try to explain why so many convert’s fret about the Church when their cradle Catholic brethren move through life so serenely.

The problem, it seems to me from observation and experience, is that we converts have trouble seeing the Church as a living body, one that grows and does what it’s supposed to even though it’s imperfect. . . . [W] don’t have enough experience of living in a living body to really understand how it works. . . .

The Church as a living body is one of those things we don’t really get for a while, if ever. The ecclesiology we have down. We can rattle off the wheat-and-tares arguments against Evangelicals who go on about this or that Catholic scandal. Many of us have what is usually a slightly romantic love of the idea of the Church as “here comes everybody.” (The phrase is ascribed to James Joyce, but I’m told he didn’t say it.)

But what in practice it actually means is we don’t really know, and we’re not at all comfortable with what we do know about it. . . .

 In the rest of the article I describe how this works out in practice. While I’m at it, let me mention my first two columns for Aleteia, Single and Catholic and Promiscuity Pays.