I owe Paul McCusker a huge debt

The guy helped raise our kids by writing fifty bazillion Adventures in Odyssey episodes, not to mention playing the slimy Phillip Glossman, who you just want to slap. So I was particularly pleased to hear he’d become a Catholic a few years ago. And at last report, he lives out in Colorado Springs, where Sherry Weddell’s Catherine of Siena Institute Mothership is located. So I have this hope that one of these days, we’ll be visiting Sherry and I’ll be able to shake his hand and thank him for all the fun yarns he spun for us.

Anyway, till then, I recommend checking out his conversion story which, like so many conversion stories from Protestantism, is in part an expression of gratitude for his heritage and an account of the way grace builds on nature in becoming Catholic.

Which reminds me, Catholic converts nearly always have lovely things to say about where they came from. “Recovering Catholics” pretty much never have anything good whatsoever to say about where they came from.

Conversely, Catholic converts, while maintaining generally friendly relationships with their past, don’t typically feel an obsessive need to hang around their old church, proclaiming their liberation from it and throwing rocks through the windows of the place and spray-painting the walls and nattering on endlessly about what was wrong with it in super-granular detail again and again and again for years. They move on with life. “Recovering Catholics”, in contrast, often spend their lives Not. Being. Catholic. (Have they mentioned they aren’t Catholic anymore? I mean, so Not Catholic you wouldn’t believe it. Free. From the Catholic Church, I mean. That they are totally free from and aren’t obsessed with or anything). They also tend to have reams of advice for changing the Church they no longer care anything about.