Going Catholic, or not

I AM GRATEFUL to Jason Byassee for his thoughtful and fair-minded article on six Protestant theologians who have recently become Roman Catholic, among whom he included me ("Going Catholic," Aug. 22).

On one important point I do think that Byassee has the logic of the matter backwards. He writes of me and the others as people who caught a catholic vision of the church somewhere along the line, and then tried to figure out where it is "realized"--all of us eventually deciding that the Roman Catholic Church is that place. It's a basically Hegelian picture in which would-be converts cast about for some more or less adequate historical embodiment of the catholic Idea. Looked at in this way, in the end it will always seem arbitrary that a Protestant decides to be Roman Catholic rather than joining one of the Orthodox churches (Chalcedonian or not), becoming an Anglican of the traditionalist obedience, or just staying put and living out the Idea in one's Protestant communion.

There have no doubt been converts who approached the matter in this way. But as for myself, I wasn't drawn to the Catholic Church because I had a catholic vision; I had a catholic vision because I was drawn to the Catholic Church. A catholic vision of things is the work of the Catholic Church, built up and borne by it over time in aid of its own witness and self-understanding. This is a product of the Catholic Church "scrutinizing her own mystery," as Vatican II says in another connection. Such a vision depends upon the reality of the Catholic Church, without which it would not be attractive or credible.

As Byassee suggests, one doesn't have to be Roman Catholic in order to have a more or less catholic vision of things, and all Christians can probably be said to share such a vision at least in some degree (it's a gift of the Catholic Church to every Christian, as Luther says of the gospel itself). But it is the dependence of this vision on the reality of the Catholic Church that makes it, wherever found, one of the "forces impelling toward Catholic unity" (in the phrase of the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium), rather than a free-floating idea that can be realized according to the best (private) judgment of each individual.

Bruce Marshall

Dallas

Throughout his essay, Byassee supposes that the framework for these conversion stories is an interplay of dissatisfaction (with our Protestant origins) and attraction (to the Roman Catholic Church). I don't want to deny this dynamic of weighing options as a persistent and tempting pyschological reality, but I do want to emphasize its irrelevance, at least in my case.

I didn't so much choose to become Catholic as collapse into Catholicism out of a spiritual exhaustion that was as much a result of my own sinfulness and intellectualized perversity of heart as any defect or failure of the Episcopal Church. The sheer fact of the Catholic Church, its place as the prime substance of Christianity in the West, did not attract me. It was simply there, and it stopped me from falling into unbelief--or worse, into a loveless simulacrum of belief that derives its life and energy from imagined roles of crusader-for-orthodoxy and defender-of-faith--something my own acknowledged attraction to Newman's polemical passages indicates was a real danger.

I grant that one can theorize and theologize about the givenness of the Catholic Church and its role as source of Western Christianity (just as one can theologize about its betrayals of that role). But at least for me, the fact of the church worked upon me rather than any ideas or theories I might have had about "catholicity."

Rusty Reno

Omaha, Neb.

Byassee overlooks one commonality among the six converts to Catholicism that may have played a significant role in their conversion: all of them are academics. Within their institutions, they apparently have the freedom to convert without its affecting their employment or status. This diminishes, in my opinion, the significance of their conversion for the average mainline Protestant, especially the average Protestant pastor.

Although I sympathize in many ways with these theologians and their desire to be in full communion with Rome, I cannot see their conversions as anything other than a diminishment of the very ecclesiological insight they hope to support through their conversion. Rather than understanding themselves as committed to and part of a communion, they seem to have joined not so much the Roman Catholic Church as the church of themselves, the invented church of the evangelical catholic.

Clint Schnekloth

East Koshkonong Lutheran Church, Cambridge, Wis.

One problem with Byassee's "Going Catholic" is its anecdotal quality. My hunch is that six departures from Protestant churches are not statistically significant and that the article merely sensationalizes the actions of a few.

Furthermore, often the surface problem is not the real problem. A woman left my nondenominational church for a progressive Roman Catholic church near a university. She said she valued the liturgy there. This in spite of the fact that she is a feminist, advocates for female priests, is proabortion, is repelled by patriarchal hierarchy, is concerned about predatory clergy, has Pentecostal origins, and just plain does not have anything in common with Rome. As it turns out, her new church has an enclave of likeminded individuals, and the real issue was homogeneity.