So, my wife and I have been studying and praying about a possible conversion to Catholicism. The evidence is all over our house, from the TV tuned to EWTN, the radio tuned to Ave Maria, the books by Keating, Ray and Akin, and the weekly bulletins from our visits to SS Cyril & Methodius.
Throughout this time of study, my wife’s family have been quite supportive of our search for truth (although they’ve viewed it as a search for us to satisfy our preferences). However, this all changed a few nights ago. My wife called her parents for a casual chat, but her sister answered the phone instead. That’s when she launched into a diatribe about how we’re rushing into a decision without knowing all of the facts (last time I checked, 9 months of study and prayer wasn’t exactly a ‘rush’) and that we’re just doing this so we can think we’re ‘better’ than her. On that second point, she used the exclusion of non-Catholic Christians from the Eucharist (in comparison to her Anglican church, in which the so-called Eucharist is open to everyone). No amount of explaining the Catholic perspective on the Eucharist would satisfy her.
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I’m sorry that you’ve already experienced a variant of anti-Catholicism. It probably won’t be the last one, either. All of us have stories. My grandparents had a KKK cross burned in their yard in 1920s Indiana. My father couldn’t get a bank loan in the early '50s because the bank had a policy of no loans to Catholics and Jews. I was told that I could not ride the school bus in the early '60s because to allow that would give preferential treatment to the Pope (whom I really didn’t know all that well

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Ah, those were the “good old days” when anti-Catholicism was **really **anti-Catholic!!