Robert P. George - Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome

E very Catholic is a convert.

While useful, the distinction often made between cradle Catholics and converts is not quite true. After all, one is baptized a Catholic, not born as such. However brief the time between birth and baptismperhaps mere days or hoursit is through baptism and not birth that we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission, in the words of the Catechism. During those hours or days between cradle and font, the cradle Catholic is not yet a new creature; that is, not yet a Catholic.

Every Catholic is a convert, too, in that each suffers from a frail and weak human nature, and baptism does not abolish the inclination to sin. We are invited, thus, as the Catechism states, to the struggle of conversion directed toward holiness and eternal life to which the Lord never ceases to call us. We convert many times, perhaps daily, as we repent, confess, and do penance for our sins, whether raised in the Catholic faith or not.

Nonetheless, many cradle Catholics have a tender fascination for those who have converted later in life, tellingly captured in the winsome phrase welcome home. Home, where one is always welcome simply because one belongs. From the perspective of the adult convert, cradle Catholics enjoy the remarkable good fortune of having always belonged, knowing they were part of the family, even if a sometimes rambunctious and squabbling one. Many converts struggled and resisted and protested on their way home, even as they longed for it, a struggle sometimes foreign to the experience of the cradle Catholic for whom the Church is part of the constant fabric of reality. One doesnt really pay much attention to the furnishings and arrangements of ones home, since its inconspicuous, just the way it is and has always been as long as one can remember. When a guest visits and remarks on the sofa or the end table, for instance, it can serve as an almost startling reminder of what had become so familiar as to be unremarkable.

And converts seem to find it all remarkable, dont they? Theyre eager to learn this practice, to read that textto familiarize themselves with all the furnishings of homeand they often want to share just how remarkable it is with everyone, even (or perhaps especially) with those who already know it well.

For many, although certainly not all, converts entering the Catholic Church as adults, whether from another Christian community, another religion, or no faith at all, the Catholic intellectual tradition was experienced as part of the struggle to come home. Some turned to the Patristics for guidance, others to the Scholastics, yet others to the mystical or spiritual authors. For some, no one period or figure stands out as much as the entire symphony of truth found in the Catholic traditions of music, poetry, art, theology, literature, and moral philosophy.

Often, other converts smooth the way, offering companionship on the sometimes-difficult path to Rome. Intellectuals whove converted help other intellectuals find their way home. This was certainly true of the figures comprising what some term the Catholic Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. During that time, a great crowd of highly influential English-speaking intellectuals converted to Catholicism, including John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Orestes Brownson, Ronald Knox, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Robert Hugh Benson, and many others. To these English-speaking figures, one could add Edith Stein, the Maritains, Paul Claudel, Lon Bloy, Charles Pguy, Gabriel Marcel, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. Of them all, one could say, citing Patrick Allitt, that when the church began to reassert herself in the nineteenth century, it used converts as its principal advocates. Many of their contemporaries regarded the ideas of a Catholic intellectual as a contradiction in terms, believing that the repressive Roman church prohibited freedom of thought. The converts were eager to prove otherwise; their work in history, science, literature, and philosophy was designed to substantiate their belief that Catholicism was intellectually liberating rather than restrictive, despite the churchs dogmatic style and hierarchical structure.

The great wave of the Catholic Renaissance helped fuel the apologists of the last several decades, including Thomas Howard, Peter Kreeft, Karl Keating, Dwight Longenecker, and Scott Hahn, to name a few, each a convert playing a well-known role in the conversion of others. And from them there have been in just the past few years a flurry of books from a third wave of younger intellectuals writing on their conversions. Each wave enriches the witness of the Church, and such conversion stories provide encouragement and signs of hope. All too frequently were told that science makes faith irrelevant, and then we learn of an astrophysicist or a philosopher converting. We hear of the rise of the nones, young people without any religious commitment, but then we read of a young journalist or accomplished novelist who finds in the Church a source of stability, truth, and wisdom. Were informed the Church must update its moral teachings to stay relevant, but then discover that a good many converts enter the Church precisely because her moral theology offers sanity, humanity, and a path to human flourishing.

In this text, a cradle Catholic (Robert P. George) and an adult convert (R. J. Snell), offer the stories of sixteen converts, each a public intellectual or leading voice in their respective fields, and each making a significant contribution to the life of the Church. To do so, weve asked an array of other intellectuals, many who are themselves converts, to conduct interviews to learn more about the journey to Rome.