Born Catholics, Converts, and Contemplation
While studying scholastic theology when I was preparing for the priesthood, St. John Henry Newman inspired me to examine early apostolic Catholic spirituality. Then, over 35 years ago now, I sought out a life of semi-solitude to intensify this search and practice contemplation, and I rediscovered the sublime spirituality that we have so recently lost.
By we, I mean more specifically born Catholics, for whom the faith has become little more than a philosophy of life since the heretical Quietism of the 17th century nearly succeeded in removing contemplative prayer from Catholic spirituality, leaving us with dry moralism.
After a very long life teaching, preaching, and writing about early apostolic spirituality that was, incidentally, first lived and practiced by converts to Christianity, I have seen that it is not new converts, but born Catholics who have let our side down. And their failure has dangerous consequences for converts.
When genuine new converts join the Church, it is only to have their first enthusiasm boiled down to nominalism, externalism, moralism, and relativism, rather than having it raised to the contemplative heights that galvanised the first Catholic converts in apostolic times. I can point to certain modern converts wreaking some havoc in the Church, but this would not, could not have happened if those born Catholics who received them had embodied fully and deeply the new faith to which the converts felt drawn by God.
After nearly 10 years as a weekly columnist, I resigned from a national Catholic newspaper because a recent clerical convert, bristling with Protestant qualifications, was leading the readers astray, and my orthodoxy was an embarrassment to him.
Another convert put me through the third degree to test my orthodoxy before I was allowed to use his website, yet his own, self-taught and deficient spiritual theology has been misdirecting serious seekers for years; his “half knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
Even though my book The Primacy of Loving was originally accepted by a major American Catholic publisher, I spent more than three months trying and failing to convince a senior editor—again a convert who was received into the Church without adequate preparation—that what I had written was true Catholic orthodoxy. His ignorance has been depriving Catholic readers for years of the deeper dimensions of Catholic spirituality, of which he is quite ignorant. In the end I chose to withdraw my book.
Such things could only happen because the born Catholics who welcomed these converts into the faith were even more ignorant than they about the mystical theology that, although it has been largely cast aside, should permeate our faith and certainly was its bulwark for the great saints who came before us.
Once I heard a talk given by a convert on the conversion of St. Paul. Unfortunately it focused exclusively on St. Paul’s brilliant mind; there was no mention of the fact that after his conversion St. Paul went into the desert for three years, nor that he spent double that time in semi-solitude near his own home of Tarsus, to complete what the great historian Monsignor Philip Hughes called his “novitiate.” If St. Barnabas had not insisted that it was time for his apostolate to the Gentiles to begin, he would have spent longer.
At the end of St. Paul’s “novitiate,” he had profound mystical experiences; like the novitiate itself, these also were not mentioned by the speaker. Yet these experiences are clear evidence that St. Paul passed through a prolonged purification, similar to that described by St. John of the Cross. If so, he received in abundance the fruits of contemplation, namely all the infused theological, cardinal and moral virtues. This then—not his brilliant mind—was the source of the divine wisdom that suffused and brought his human wisdom to perfection just as it did for the other apostles, who completed their “novitiate” in Jerusalem.
In early Christianity a minimum of two years of ascetical and spiritual training was necessary before reception into the Church. Then new Christians had to learn how to be further purified in a second “baptism of fire” after the baptism of water. But now that Catholicism is seen as a philosophy of life rather than a call to ongoing spiritual transformation, a simple intellectual reorientation seems to suffice as initiation for new members. Even the preparatory courses for new converts, primarily intellectual in content, are easily bypassed if you are a highflying academic.
When I was a young man a convert had to wait two years before he was admitted to train for the priesthood or religious life. Then it would be six or more years before he could begin, as a junior and supervised member of the hierarchy, to preach to the faithful.
To be clear, in my experience the vast majority of converts come home to the Catholic Church for the right reasons. But many then find the sublime spirituality they had every right to expect in the Catholic Faith has long since been lost to sight, misunderstood, or squandered by born Catholics.
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