Btw, my Catholic daughter goes to Bible study at a Baptist Church, because the Catholic campus center doesn't have one.
I apologize for my rude intrusion into this thread and thank you for your gentle response.
The Catholic Church was certainly missionary once, but having "converted the world" some seventeen hundred years ago has chosen to depend on sexual reproduction to keep going, as have all the ancient, ethnic churches. The American Catholic Church is an urban immigrant church with the same hostility to the Protestant heartland as other historical American minority groups. One of the ways this manifests itself is in hostility to missionary activity. American Catholic publications and spokesmen sound exactly like Jewish anti-missionaries: Protestant missionaries are ignorant bigots, the Bible was ours before it was theirs, they don't understand the Bible because they've rejected the Oral Tradition, etc., etc. etc. Then along comes a thread boasting about converting an Orthodox Jewish rabbi (and I note also that Jews don't seem to be as worked up about losing people to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy as they do to Fundamentalist Protestantism). Naturally this pushes my buttons. I regard it as the height of hypocrisy to attack the very idea of missionary activity (eg, by calling it "sheep stealing") by people whose church still exists today only because their own ancestors were proselytized at some time in the past.
I was Catholic for six years. If I am bitter (and I am), please believe me that this bitterness comes from personal experience. To join the Church I had to overcome a great many personal prejudices, only to have every one of those prejudices confirmed a thousand times over.
Here on FR Catholics bash Protestants and Protestantism but whine whenever Protestants criticize Catholicism, even going so far as to equate anti-Catholicism with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (and considering the role Catholics have played in spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that takes a great deal of gall). Just as with Blacks vs. whites, American Catholics seem to feel entitled to a one-way flow of criticism because of their role as a "historically oppressed minority" in America.
Another thing I object to is the caricature of America's native Protestant culture as a bunch of ignorant "snake handlers" by members of a Church the majority of whose members are illiterate peasants who practice a folk Catholicism unknown in America. I have read at least two Catholic posts referring to Protestants as "snake handlers." Do you know that at a village in Italy the peasants wrap snakes around a statue of the local saint? Have you ever heard of the "cargo" system of the Catholic Maya of Central America? Yet US Catholics puff out their chests and boast of their Catholic intellectuality vis a vis the ignorant, illiterate, buck-toothed, bigoted hillbilly Protestants (do you recall the sneering references to "Cletus" or "Billy Bob's Glory Barn?"). And this from a Church that claims to be the official ccustodian of conservatism! It still sounds like Al Sharpton to me.
I hope you will attempt to restrain your co-religionists from some of the hateful and hypocritical "reverse bigotry" they engage in on this forum.
I am sorry that you had such a bad experience. Every large organization has some bad apples, and unfortunately they tend to influence those around them. But please don't generalize to conclude that all (or even a majority) of Catholics engage in such behavior. Our parish is full of wonderful, gentle people led by a good shepherd (even if he is a somewhat pugnacious and blunt-spoken Irishman, he has as good a heart as anyone you will ever meet.) He doesn't sugar-coat the faith, but he is full of compassion for anybody in trouble, and since he leads by example most of his flock feel the same way.
In fact, just a couple of weeks ago he organized an Interfaith Prayer service and invited all the churches within about a ten mile radius. It was a very inspiring and friendly event - attended by clergy from the local Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches (the Episcopalian was invited but didn't show up.) Everybody prayed together and had good and friendly discussions afterwards. My husband's grandfather was a Methodist minister, and it turned out that one of the Methodist preachers knew him -- it was like Old Home Week.
Missionaries should always lead by example and be gentle, and in a perfect world they would all do that. But the Church (like everywhere else in the world) is full of sinners and stumblers and tactless well-meaning people, even as I . . .
( . . . and my family is exhibit "A" for the church not depending on reproduction . . . we were Anglican/Episcopalian for 6 generations before we converted. . . and our parish is full of converts!)
I know this thread is somewhat painful to you, but I don't see this conversion story as a boast or even a result of proselytizing. It seems that Israel Zolli came to the Church as a result of a lifelong pondering and questioning and his experiences in WWII . . . not buttonholing by zealous Catholics. How he arrived at that place is, as I said before, the story of his own life, not anybody else's.