2012The Converts to Catholicism You Didn't Know About
[Update: I've published a follow-up post, More Converts You Didn't Know
About]
Yes, people do choose to join the Catholic Church.
Both my wife and I joined the Catholic Church as adults (see My Faith
Story). The website Why I'm Catholic has a great (and growing) collection of
stories of people who joined the Church. There are so many great stories.
Obviously, there's the stories of people like Paul, Augustine, Ambrose, Emperor
Constantine, John Cardinal Newman, Dorothy Day, Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein,
and G.E.M. Anscombe, Francis Beckwith (who was president of the Evangelical
Theological Society when he converted), Scott Hahn, and Richard Neuhaus.
There's also the bisexual atheist blogger who just became Catholic this
last summer, the former evangelical/emergent church co-author of the book Jesus
for President who found his way back to the Church via Catholic Social Teaching,
the pro-life leaders Lila Rose, Abby Johnson, Bernard Nathanson, and Bryan
Kemper, the Wheaton College Bible professor who crossed the Tiber a year and a
half ago (just a few years after a philosophy professor there did the same
thing), and the steady stream of disaffected Anglicans joining the Catholic
Church. Even former speaker of the house and recent presidential candidate Newt
Gingrich (who produced a great documentary on John Paul II) and former prime
minister of the U.K. Tony Blair have jumped aboard.
Oscar Wilde
Below are four stories of people who joined the Catholic Church as adults
who I think many people probably don't know about (at least I was surprised to
learn about their stories!). One was a convicted homosexual playwright who
converted on his death-bed, another was an ex-Marxist who authored the
"eco-Bible", the third was a drafter of the U.N's Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and the last one was the founder of a whole new academic
discipline.
Death-bed conversion of a homosexual playwright: Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900)
A contributor to the aestheticism movement and best known for his play The
Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde is also a well-known example of a famous
person convicted under laws in the 19th century that punished homosexual acts.
What is not as well-known, however, is that he joined the Catholic Church
literally on his death-bed. Though born into an Anglican family, his interest in
the Church started as a young man. A meeting with Pope Pius IX left a big impact
on him, and he read the writings the Cardinal Newman, another great convert to
the faith. At the age of twenty four, he actually was set join the Catholic
Church, but decided against it at the last minute.
A quarter of a century later, after serving his prison sentence, he
unsuccessfully tried to go on a six-month Jesuit retreat. He later developed
cerebral meningitis. With his health deteriorating, a friend called for a
priest. The priest conditionally baptized him (Wilde had a vague memory of being
baptized as a child) and gave him Last Rites. He died the next day.
E. F. Schumacher
The liberal environmentalist nobody knew was Catholic: E. F. Schumacher
(1911-1977)
Schumacher was a prot?g? of John Maynard Keynes as a young man and had an
accomplished career as an economist. For much of his adult life, he was an
avowed Marxist atheist. But a visit to Burma in the early 1950s and seeing how
Buddhism shaped the economic life of the country got him to start rethinking his
atheism. Upon returning to England, he decided to look into the Christian
tradition and read the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, St Teresa of Avila, and St
John of the Cross, and the lives of other saints. He also read modern Catholic
thinkers Rene Guenon, Etienne Gilson, G. K. Chesterton (another convert), and
Jacques Maritain (another convert, see below). A friend eventually persuaded him
to read the papal social teaching encyclicals. A friend of his relates how he
responded:
He replied, 'No, no, I'm sure that the Popes are very holy men living in
their ivory tower in the Vatican but they don't know a thing about the conduct
of practical affairs... But this friend... insisted that he should read the
social encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno above all... He did so
and was absolutely staggered. He said, 'here were these celibates living in an
ivory tower... why can they talk a great deal of sense when everyone else talks
nonsense'... (source)
Pope Paul VI's encyclical reaffirming the Church's stance against the use
of contraception Humanae Vitae came out as he was getting closer to wanting to
join the Church. Though many criticized the teaching, Schumacher was in full
support: "If the Pope had written anything else, I would have lost all faith in
the papacy." (source) For his wife and daughter, who had also been considering
Catholicism, Humanae Vitae was the final assurance that the Catholic Church was
the right place to be. After years of being intellectually convinced of
Catholicism, he was eventually received into the Church.
Jacques Maritain
Two years later, he published the book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if
people mattered. Touted by TIME magazine as the "eco-Bible", the best-seller
simply explained in non-theological language the ideas of Catholic social
teaching. When he died four years later a celebrity among liberal
environmentalists, most still didn't know he was Catholic. His daughter has
related that, as word got out, many were "astounded" and "thought it was a real
let-down, a betrayal." (Read more about his conversion here.)
The suicidal scientist who found hope in the Church and went on to help
draft the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Jacques Maritain
(1882-1973)
As a young man, he went to the University of Paris to study the natural
sciences. There, he met his future wife, Ra?ssa, a Russian Jewish immigrant.
Before marrying, however, he and Ra?ssa became convinced that scientism could
not answer existential questions about life. In 1901, in light of this
disillusionment, they made a pact to commit suicide together if they could not
discover some deeper meaning to life within a year. Fortunately, a friend
recommended they attend the lectures of Henri Bergson. Bergson's critique of
scientism convinced them of the reality of objective absolutes. Through the
influence of L?on Bloy, they converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1906.
Maritain became an famous Catholic philosopher, who's natural law arguments were
influential in his participation in the drafting of the U.N.'s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
Marshall McLuhan
The Virgin Mary told him the Medium is the Message: Marshall McLuhan
(1911-1980)
If you haven't heard of Marshall McLuhan, you may have heard his great
one-liner, "the medium is the message". He was a prolific writer and is
considered a founding father of the new discipline media ecology (the Media
Ecology Association's annual conference last year celebrated what would have
been his 100th birthday). Research for his doctoral dissertation at Oxford led
him to the Church Fathers, whom he read to study their kinds of argumentation.
The writings of G.K. Chesterton were influential, and he eventually joined the
Catholic Church.
He was a daily Mass goer, and apparently claimed that the Blessed Virgin
Mary somehow provided him direct intellectual guidance. A collection of his
writings on religion has been posthumously published as The Medium and the Light
(fascinating read), in which he argues, among other things, that the microphone
is what killed the Latin Mass. Apparently, many in the field still don't know
that he was Catholic and aren't aware of his writings on religion. A friend of
mine presented a paper on McLuhan's religious beliefs at a conference recently
and told me that the first thing the moderator said following his presentation
was: "...I knew he was religious...but I...didn't know it was that bad."
Posted by Brantly Millegan
