05/18/2026
Matthew David Wiseman, writing on Facebook on April 1, 2024:
« I am seeing many, many posts from people being received or baptized into the Catholic Church at the Paschal Vigil this year, and to celebrate I wanted to tell y'all about an observation Carrie and I have made:
There is a certain kind of convert to the Catholic Church who talk about their conversion in the same way that Protestants talk about why they left one denomination for another one. When they talk about their moment of decision, they describe it subjectively, "That's when I decided to become Catholic." These converts rarely stay, unless they have a change of heart later on. They are not yet converted to the Catholic Mind. They cannot rest in the bosom of the Mother Church yet, and they almost inevitably go on to some smaller group which conforms more to their own opinions, ideas, and preferences. They become Orthodox, they become Episcopalian, they often even continue on and become atheist or agnostic, or Muslim.
But there is a different story, the story of those who stay. And they all, independently of one another, describe their moment of decision in the same way. Carrie and I both independently described it the same way, and since then we have heard it on Catholic podcasts and on the Coming Home Network. The phrase reappears over and over without any apparent connection between the people who say it. I know I had never heard it before I said it, and yet once I said it I cannot stop hearing it. This is how we describe the moment of decision: "That is when I realized I had to become Catholic."
It isn't that we decided that the Catholic Church best suited us, or fitted neatly into our ideological categories. It was not a decision to join because we were already convinced of all of her doctrines. It was a sudden recognition of authority. An imposition of grace from without, a submission to an external standard which revealed itself to have a claim over us.
Flannery O'Connor famously described her work thusly, "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal." And that is what conversion to the Catholic Mind often looks like. We often do not go willingly. We are compelled. I did not become Catholic because I reasoned my way there. I rather witnessed the limitations of my reason, its inability to attain Divine Truth alone, my own desperate need for an external, absolute Standard. It was not what I wanted, it was what I could not live without. Often against our own wills, we do not decide to become Catholic, we realize that we have to be Catholic. And that is grace. »
Source, where you can read the thread under the post: https://bit.ly/4upJBqD.
Image: 'La disputa del sacramento' (1509-1510) ('Disputation of the Sacrament'), a fresco by Raphael at the Vatican Museums.
C: Iván Noel.
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