A couple of recent little incidents have set me thinking about “Christian ecumenism” again. I’m a convert (1984), and I’ve been asked occasionally why I chose to become Catholic. I can never answer that question directly because it’s a single question with two answers. “Conversion” means either a conversion to Christianity or a conversion within Christianity, and these are not the same question.

On EWTN’s “The Journey Home”, most of the conversion stories are those that happen within Christianity. Even when Marcus Grodi interviews someone who was a former atheist, these guests usually (always?) come into the Church after having first entered a protestant church, likely the one that provided the context for their conversion to belief in Christ. Later, they are exposed to Catholicism by some set of circumstances, and become Catholic. Occasionally, he interviews “re-verts”, or those who were born and raised in the Church, left, and then return. But even the reverts just about always come home after first going through a revitalization of their faith within a protestant church of some kind. Though their stories differ, the many converts from the Anglican priesthood are actually in this category. All these, then, are conversions within Christianity. Rarely, he interviews Jewish converts, but these too (at least those I’ve seen or read about) were first converted from a lapsed Jewish faith into a protestant church, and then into the Catholic Church. The single exception I know of is the conversion of Eugenio Zolli, the chief rabbi of Rome who converted from a lively Jewish faith directly into the Catholic Church, but it must be remembered that his exposure to Protestantism would have been very limited at best. And he was inspired by the saintliness of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi occupation of Rome. 

The fact is that the vast majority of Catholic converts are converts within Christianity, not to it. (I’m in the minority.) I think this means something about the Church’s understanding of itself in contemporary Christianity, but I’m hesitant to speculate because I’m not sure I completely like what I come up with. Let me put it this way: When someone has a religious experience in, say, an evangelical church, no one asks him why he joins that church. His “belief in Christ” is understood as cause enough. Yet, when someone, either Catholic or protestant, asks me why I became a Catholic, I answer, “Obviously, because I believe in Christ.” The inevitable response is, “But why did you become a Catholic?” Why isn’t the repetition of the question nonsensical? There can be only one reason: there is a conviction among both protestants and Catholics that belief in Christ is insufficient cause for becoming Catholic.