Posted on 08/05/2010 12:36:10 PM PDT by NYer
Is there a growing trend of Evangelicals converting to Catholicism? Many think so, including this recent article:
[There is a large] community of young believers whose frustration with the lack of authority, structure, and intellectualism in many evangelical churches is leading them in great numbers to the Roman Catholic Church. This trend of “Crossing the Tiber” (a phrase that also served as the title of Stephen K. Ray’s 1997 book on the phenomenon), has been growing steadily for decades, but with the help of a solid foundation of literature, exemplar converts from previous generations, burgeoning traditional and new media outlets, and the coming of age of Millennial evangelicals, it is seeing its pace quicken dramatically. [source]
The article gives the example of many such notable Evangelical converts from our generation, such as Scott Hahn, Marcus Grodi, Thomas Howard, Francis Beckwith and others. (It also mentions Patrick Madrid, but he is actually not a convert, from what I understand.)
The common threads that seem to be drawing many of these Evangelicals into the Catholic Church are its history, the Liturgy and its tradition of intellectualism.
So is this trend significant? Or is it dwarfed by what seems to be many more Catholics who seem to lose their faith or become complacent with it?
According to a 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, four people leave the Catholic Church for every one person that joins it. Keep in mind that this stat doesn’t count those born into Catholicism as “joining” it. However, it’s still a sad statistic. But we shouldn’t be misled by it.
There are also studies that show Catholicism has a higher rate of retention than all other religious groups. In other words, when people convert to Catholicism, they don’t do so because they didn’t like where they were and just wanted to try something new. Their conversion is deliberate and intentional and they generally stick with it. On the other hand, when people leave the Church, they generally drift around a bit from one denomination to another. This says a lot. The Catholic convert is actually experiencing real, lasting conversion. Those leaving the Church seem to be lost and searching souls that most likely had no idea what they were leaving in the first place.
I’ve long noticed, as have many others, a kind of trend as well. It’s not so much from “Evangelicals” converting to Catholicism necessarily. It’s that of intellectuals converting to Catholicism. And that’s not to say these intellectuals were strictly intellectual. But I mean it to say that they took their reasons for believing very seriously. We only have to look back a few generations to find Chesterton, Merton, Newman, etc. as part of the same trend.
In my own experience, I’ve seen that more people who convert to Catholicism do so on account of their reason. Whereas those that leave the Church do so based on some emotion or negative experience associated with the Church.
When I ask an evangelical why they left the Church. The answer is almost always an emotion. Something made them feel a certain way. Or they just didn’t like the way something was done in Catholicism. Or it didn’t suit their lifestyle. Or some other experience made them feel nice.
There is a long list of protestant (and other) leaders and scholars who have converted to Catholicism. The list for those going the other direction is devastatingly short.
This is why I think we are seeing, and will continue to see even more, protestant thinkers converting to Catholicism. Protestantism is running its course. All the protest is getting tired. And they are running out of places to find answers that don’t lead them deep into Church history, back to the ancient liturgy, and into the intellectual tradition that ultimately leads to one place: Rome.
Protestantism has drifted far enough away from orthodox Christianity that it can now look back at the trees and recognize the forest. And if you’re not entirely in the Catholic Church, that just might be the next best place to be…
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.
The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. ” - G. K. Chesterton (Everlasting Man)
Ah, the key word being “practicing”.
Yea, here in Las Vegas, they can’t build the churches fast enough.
I don't know anything about LV but here in NE PA, Rome is closing churches right and left while the only ones building are Evangelicals. In 2008, the Bishop in Allentown ordered approx 50 of the 150 churches closed. A simular thing happened in Scranton.
My only question is "Who got all them statues?" I noticed that they have all been uprooted. At least one of the former churches of Rome is now (dare I say it?) a Baptist Church.
I’m a little bit confused by your reference to “fallen away brethren”, seeming to refer to Evangelicals and other Protestants. I thought the Catholic church considered us to be “separated brethren”. Which is it?
Baptists are good Christian people, I have no problem with that.
The fact is that within cities all over the world, the drop has been across the board away from “organized religion”. In some cases, there is poaching by other religions who prey on those who are lonely or uneducated in Catholicism.
The Church will exist regardless of the current crop of secularists. It is growing in places where there is much despair. Where the residents are fat and happy, they tend to
eschew religion.
Nothing new under the sun. Just read your Bible, it’s all there.
At my RC church it is standing room only for several of the 8 masses held between Saturday night and Sunday. My (convert) wife’s Byzantine Catholic church is looking for a new building because they are overcrowding the church and getting hit for fire code violations for the number of people coming to Sunday divine liturgy.
If you met some of the people, the families and the priests in those churches you wouldn’t be so vulgar as to suggest that they are not Christians (saved in you parlance). They know exactly what the candles, icons, vestments, vessels, incense and ritual means and are glad to offer it to Christ as a small and humble response to gift He purchased for us at great price.
I would like to think that it is because Catholicism has stuck to it’s core values and beliefs where most other churches seems to have left their’s. Members of the Catholic Church may not have always done right by others in the Church but that is rather inspite of it’s teachings rather than because of them. The truth does not change and with many Protestant Churches being blown about by every whid and change of doctrine people need a safe harbor!
Mel
The truth does not change and with many Protestant Churches being blown about by every whid and change of doctrine people need a safe harbor!
Your words immediately brought me back to the Pro-Eligendo homily given by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who presided over the Mass before the Cardinals entered the conclave. In his homily, he said:
How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.
Full Text
How many people have replaced Church with television, a pastor with a reporter, sacraments with sports?! What a great gift we have been given by Christ!
So a sacrament was not valid in spite of the fact there was sacramental grace given? In the eyes of the catholic church all marriages are conditional ... but that is not what God says..He says 'LET NO MAN put asunder what God has joined together" there is no "unless " there
The truth is the catholic church wants to look like it is upholding the command of God, but then provided a loophole big enough to drive a 40 year marriage through .... God will not be mocked...
The "mysteries" are only an excuse to pray to mary nothing more
Well in our area 1/2 the churches have been closed .. maybe they all moved down to you
I would really like to see you explain and defend that.
Interesting to see you have move beyond flogging that same flawed Pew Report to flogging a story about the flawed Pew Report in a news paper owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. I thought you were an OPCer, not a Moonie.
The fact is that within cities all over the world, the drop has been across the board away from “organized religion”. In some cases, there is poaching by other religions who prey on those who are lonely or uneducated in Catholicism.
Nothing new under the sun. Just read your Bible, it’s all there.
Jvette, I'm Baptist so I don't really need to be told to read the Bible. I find humerous that Catholics think protestants who share their faith with them are "poaching" as you call it. May I ask, do you know what Catholics call themselves when they try to recrute protestants into the ranks of Rome?
Baptists are not out in the street going door to door.
A lot of movement between Christian religions is done so through marriage because of a desire to raise the children in a home where both parents practice the same faith.
A Catholic who has a true and real faith, not one just handed down will not leave the church.
The “poaching” is especially prevalent in the poorest of countries in Latin America.
My point about the Bible is that every human condition and everything one wants to know about human nature is in there. Nothing new, not a thing.
If the Catholic church is THE church, it will survive, just as Jesus promised, so these things don’t worry me.
No excuse needed. The Rosary is what it is, a meditation on the life of Jesus. One doesn’t have to pray it, it is encouraged as a means of meditation and prayer since it is well known that those who remain close to God will not stray as badly as those who neglect their relationship with Him.
Good to hear that 16th century Latin America was chock full of intellectuals, as was the late Roman Empire, and Ireland at the time of St. Partrick, among other times. Also good to hear that my mother is an intellectual.
It may be more a local thing in the U.S. that the remaining strains of protestantism that have some vigor left are not particularly intellectual, and so tend to hold and attract the believing non-intellectual and lose the intellectual. And for the non-believing well-dressed intellectual, there remains the Anglicans.
The initial conversions of now Catholic peoples was by force and population-wide. Of course the Catholic Church doesn't do this any more. It places adds for K of C courses and expects the potential convert to take the initiative. Good thing this isn't how Constantine and Pizarro did it.
My mother isn't an intellectual either. And when I was Catholic I couldn't get anyone to talk to her.
It may be more a local thing in the U.S. that the remaining strains of protestantism that have some vigor left are not particularly intellectual, and so tend to hold and attract the believing non-intellectual and lose the intellectual. And for the non-believing well-dressed intellectual, there remains the Anglicans.
Very true!
However, the fact remains that Roman Catholicism is a bizarre amalgamation of hyper-rationalist intellectuals and illiterate peasants who are Catholic because their ancestors once converted. Contemporary Catholicism is not only not missionary, it is anti-missionary.
The initial conversions of now Catholic peoples was by force and population-wide. Of course the Catholic Church doesn’t do this any more. It places adds for K of C courses and expects the potential convert to take the initiative. Good thing this isn’t how Constantine and Pizarro did it.
St. Patrick is an even more concrete example that force was not the motive in at least many of the mass conversions. St. Augustine of Canterbury among the English and St. Boniface among the Germans are other instances that come to mind that clearly did not involve force.
As to being anti-missionary, and having no one between the intellectuals and the illiterates, this is certainly not my experience of Catholicism unless you are to define intellectual so broadly as to render the term meaningless.
There are a ton of Catholic movements that fall between these extremes that are missionary.
Here is one. http://netministries.org/
You know those "sects" that get on everyone's nerves by sending people out to knock on doors? Yes, it's annoying. But it's also flattering. Even though I'm not interested, I know they actually want me and I would make their day just by showing up.
Catholics think they're doing the right thing by not proselytizing and letting prospective converts make all the moves themselves. And true, no Catholic every annoys me. But I know they could care less if I ever showed up.
Catholicism is basically an ethnic religion. It survives by the fact that the Irish (and other Catholic ethnic groups) reproduce.
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