When I have read those ex-Catholic conversion stories, I have pounded the pages to read from former nuns and priests the utter distortions of the Catholic faith from which their conversion has “freed” them. Poppycock and balderdash unbounded.
Snort!
Don’t write stuff like that so early in the morning. My coffee is all over my keyboard!Our church has probably close to 1,000 converts! How many stories would you like?
Yeah well blessed are the meek!
In the stories I’ve heard and read, I see a theme.
I remember hearing somewhere (probably from Bishop Sheen when he had his broadcasts back in the 1950s) that an Anglican clergyman told him once “I just wish, when you pull up the weeds from your garden, that you wouldn’t throw them into our yard”…
This is only partly true. In the aftermath of the “intellectual” conviction that I had to convert, I experienced one full year of PROFOUND consolation – the gift of tears, daily, every time I picked up the Scriptures. It was a time absolutely saturated with emotional conviction and affirmation, of supernatural peace. The peace is still there.
there’s an evangelical church down the street from my house, “iglesia del nazareno”. because it’s an all-hispanic congregation, i would imagine most if not all of the churchgoers there are ex-catholics.
At the moment, there’s an obvious wave of conversions from Protestantism to the Catholic faith that began in the late '80s. Back in the '70s, during the Jesus Movement, there was a similar wave of conversions in the other direction, particularly by Catholic priests who were disappointed or disillusioned with the practical results of the Second Vatican Council. The book I mentioned above, Far From Rome, Near to God, contains the testimonies of fifty Catholic priests who converted to some form of Protestantism, many of them during the 1970s rise of conservative Protestantism in America (the Moral Majority, Jimmy Carter announcing he was “born again,” etc.). So the pendulum tends to swing in both directions and, at the moment, it’s tending to swing in the direction of Rome. As Catholics, it seems prudent that we take advantage of this move of God’s grace, and reach as many as we can with the true doctrines of Christ’s Church (Mt. 16:18-19).
My Catholic parish boasts a large number of converts from Evangelical Protestantism as well, myself among them. Of course, the real question is whether one has followed the truth of Christ in one’s conversion, or has simply been led away from it.