Diane Moczar - Converts and Kingdoms- How the Church Converted the Pagan West and How We Can Do It Again

Diane Moczar

Converts and Kingdoms

How the Church Converted the Pagan West
and How We Can Do It Again

Catholic

Answers

Press

San Diego

2012

2012 Diane Moczar. All rights reserved. Except for quotations, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, uploading to the Internet, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Diane Moczar.

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Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-933919-67-6

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help I received from my editor, Todd Aglialoro, in writing this book. It was his skill in pruning (however painful to the author ...), suggesting new approaches to knotty questions, and helping to polish the whole thing that made it into the interesting and instructive read that I hope it now is.

To the memory of the late Dr. Warren Carroll,
whose many works on the history of Christendom,
the Russian Revolution, and other important

historical topics have fascinated and instructed
a whole generation of Catholic readers.

Contents

by Rev. C. John McCloskey

Foreword

Okay, I confess. My two favorite Church historians of this century and the last are the late Warren Carroll and Diane Moczar, the author of this book. Why? Simply because Carroll was and Moczar is a fully credentialed historian who clearly believes that the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ and who makes the history of the Church excitingly page-turning while not being fictional. They write from a faith perspective that recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the Church, from popes to laymen, who populate their pages, but they recognize that all will be well in the end. After all, we await the Parousia , which we all will experience either in this life or in the life above (we hope!).

This most recent volume by Professor Moczar deals with great conversions to Catholicism through the centuries and down to our own time, conversions that have had an outsized impact not only on the Church but also on the world we live in.

Some of the individual converts were kings who brought all their subjects along for the ride to salvation. Others, like St. Patrick and St. Juan Diego, experienced mystical encounters or inspirations, revelations, or apparitions that changed their lives and won whole nations and even continents to Catholicism.

Or think of St. Ignatius, founder of the Society of Jesus, who converted from a life of sin when he was deprived of the pulp fiction of his era and in desperation picked up some classics of spiritual reading while convalescing from battle wounds. Through his resolute yes to Christ the whole Orient was eventually opened to the work of the Holy Spirit.

Of course there are various roads to conversion. Most readers have probably experienced the most common one without any memory of it. This is the sacrament of baptism administered in infancy, thanks to loving parents and to the loving desire of God the Father to adopt newborn children as his own sons and daughters. From the time of the apostles, however, there has been another and often more dramatic experience of conversion, that of previously unbaptized adults. There are, for example, the spectacular conversions of the first centuries of Christianity and the gradual en masse conversion of the barbarian tribes and nations over the course of almost 900 yearsamong whom the ancestors of most of the readers of this book are included. These conversions produced what we call the West or Christendom.

Thanks to the heroic missionaries and to ongoing globalization, the Church continues to grow and win converts in Africa and the Far East. Yet the West, cradle of the Faith, is in serious peril due to scientism, consumerism, practical atheism, mass apostasy, and other ills. Who knows? Perhaps Africa and the Far East will re-evangelize us to return the favor. We have the assurance that the Church will always be here until the Lord comes to judge the living and the dead, but that could be any time from tomorrow to a billion years hence.

The Church started with twelve apostles, and in a little more than 2,000 years it has never had a down year; it is always growing, producing new saints and laying new foundations to face the challenges of the age. In his book The Nature and Mission of Theology, Pope Benedict XVI tells us: This is why in every age the path to faith can take its bearings by converts; it explains why they in particular can help us to recognize the reason for the hope that is in us (1 Pet. 3:15) and to bear witness to it. The connection between faith and theology is not therefore some sort of sentimental or pietistic twaddle but is a direct consequence of the logic of the thing and is corroborated by the whole of history.

Diane Moczar has written a marvelous book about great convertsmany of them saints, others notwho changed not just the Church but also the destiny of human civilization. But remember, we live in the present, not the past. In recent years, as many as a million Americans have converted to Catholicism. How did this happen?

It happened in many different ways, tailored to the needs, desires, strengths, and weaknesses of each soul. However, almost all converts testify to having one thing in common: the example of a friend, relative, or co-worker who at some point in their journey asked them, Have you ever thought of becoming a Catholic?

Now, how many times have you asked that question of others? For when you do, when accompanied by prayer and sacrifice and true friendship, you may find yourself an instrument of the Holy Spirit for the conversion of great Catholics who will change the world.

Rev. C. John McCloskey III is a Church historian and research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His website is www.frmccloskey.com.

Introduction

It is hard to imagine living in a world without Christianitynot just a world without the Church but a world without a culture and civilization that were formed by the Church and permeated with Christian principles. The secular states of the West today operate, at least to some extent, according to ideas of social justice and human dignity that go back many centuries to the time when those states were Catholic.

How did they become Catholic in the first place? We are familiar with the conversion stories of individuals such as St. Augustine and Bl. John Henry Newman, but what of the conversion of entire nations? Beginning with the spread of the Church within the Roman Empire soon after the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, the wave of conversion spread slowly outward until, by modern times, it had reached virtually all nations. How did that unlikely thing happen, when all those nations were pagan in the first place?

This is the tale we are going to tell in this book: the tale of the creation of the civilization known as Christendom.

For each conversion story discussed in the following chapters, there are three groups to be considered:

The Converted

Who were the people, both the individualsinsofar as we know themand the nations that entered the Church in the early ages of Christendom? What was their background and what attracted them to the Faith? Their characters, cultural levels, and reasons for conversion varied greatly, as did the rapidity of their entrance into the Church. Some seem to have been won over almost instantly upon coming to the knowledge of Christianity, whereas for others it took much longera lifetime in the case of some individuals, and generations for some nations. What was the process by which worshippers of Mithra or Baal were led to renounce their false gods?