From my years in the Church I remember that they took great pride in never trying to convert anyone and routinely condemned silly Fundamentalists for engaging in such reactionary, irrational, and bigoted behavior.
Whichever parish you're from was wrong. W R O N G. The Church, east and west must spread the word and we MUST protect ALL Christians from the moon good cult
It is obvious that you are a good person and I am sorry if my bitterness at my Catholic experience wounded you. But please consider that I live in the rural Southeast and that in America at least Catholicism is an urban religion made up of nth generation Catholic ethnics and shephereded by intellectuals with PhD's--all very foreign to the American Heartland Protestant experience.
I am not the only one who has remarked on the anti-missionary attitude of American Catholicism (which is a sort of fortress of urban ethnics and intellectuals, as I mentioned earlier). In his book Chapter and Verse Mike Bryan (a leftwing agnostic who enrolled in Criswell College in Dallas to take a look at the Fundamentalist Protestant world) noted that "the clean young men on your doorstep will not be emissaries of Pope John Paul II" (quote approximate) as well as the strange double standard in which liberal intellectuals look with greater favor on Catholicism than on American Fundamentalist Protestantism.
In order to become Catholic I had to take the initiative myself (everyone else here tries to get you to join them except for the Catholic Church). I was told in practically all the tracts, books, and magazines made available to me that among the differences between Catholicism and Fundamentalism was that Catholics believe in evolution, accept higher criticism of the Bible, were not expecting the "second coming," and believe other people are fine just as they are. The anti-missionary attitude was not just limited to defenses against "Bible-thumpers" but actually questioned why anyone would have the need to convert another person to his religion (there was in one such pamphlet the charge of "gnosticism" in this attitude). In trying to find something familiar in the Church that I could lay hold I found nothing. In fact, the Catholic apologetical material I found seemed to assume that all Catholics were "cradle Catholics" (there was discouragement from searching outside "the church in which you were born" for religious fulfillment). The Fundamentalists were "the enemy." The idea that a Fundamentalist just might come to them for absolute universal truth never seems to have crossed their minds. They were only trying to save their own native members from converting to Fundamentalism.
At the same time I was vainly trying to find something familiar I could hold on to to keep from drowning in doubt and darkness (and finding only hostile condemnations of the culture of the rural American Heartland), I was inundated with articles on the "glorious heritage" of Irish, Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, Byzantine, Arab, Armenian, African-American, etc. Catholics. Everyone belonged but me! I could not help but wonder if every one of the peasants in those "glorious" churches were as intellectual, as liberal, and as anti-apocalyptic as their leaders were. Either they were, or they were allowed to get by with supernaturalism in a way I was not going to be allowed to.
And in case you think this was one little parish, think again. This was in magazines, books, tracts, etc., published for the use of all American Catholics. In fact, the official diocesan newspaper of my diocese actually ran an article claiming that from now on the Catholic Church would limit its appeal to "intellectuals" and allow people with more simple and supernaturalistic beliefs to go into the "Fundamentalist" churches (they also ran an article calling for the teaching of the documentary hypothesis in public schools, btw). Can you imagine how I, a simple, supernaturalistic, Fundamentalist who had been attracted to Catholicism by its claims of being absolute universal truth, felt at encountering all this? I could not but wonder where all those conservative Catholics so prominent in the media and culture were. They surely weren't in the same church as I was, were they???
What really infuriated me was that I tried to get the priests to "proselytize" my beloved mother so that the two of us would be united in faith, but they refused to do so on the grounds that everyone is beautiful just as they are (plus they probably dismissed my mother, a product of the Depression-era South with a sixth grade education, as someone who could never appreciate the profound intellectuality of the Catholic Church). I had had to come to the Church on my own volition (as the young seminarian told me the first day I showed up asking questions, "we don't go knocking on Protestants' doors), and either she would do the same or no dice. I never forgave them for their attitude towards my mother and I never will. What did my mother lack that all those Mexican, Irish, Filipino, Polish, and Ukrainian peasant women had???
At any rate, eventually I left, and I'm glad. I now have peace of mind, and besides, no church that doesn't consider my mother good enough for them is good enough for me!
PS: Please don't claim that Catholic leaders are only like this in the USA. The officials in the Vatican and in all other countries never seem to offer an alternative to this disgusting liberal intellectualism. If any of them think differently and aren't saying anything, then they are all the more guilty!
Meanwhile, while traditional missionary activity was being attacked as "proselytism" and "sheep stealing," there were many references to the Pope and the heads of other ancient liturgical churches getting together to sign documents and hoping for the day when all their members would one day wake up as members of the same unified church because of such a treaty. I never understood why two men changing millions of other people's religion in this way was more acceptable than "proselytising," but then, I'm just a dumb "redneck."