Instructing Converts
The difference between the convert of a few generations ago and the modern convert is that the latter has nothing to be converted from. He is without fixed allegiance, definite principles, or a clear-cut creed. This is one of the reasons why there is a decline of bigotry in the world and an increase of hate. Bigotry is dogmatic; hate is emotional.
When you bump into a bigot, you bump into a creed; when you meet hate, you are face to face with a spleen. The old bigot at least could give you fifty bad reasons for the faith that was in him; the modern soul could not give you one bad reason for his absence of faith. This means that the strictly rational approach to religion that was so popular years ago has less appeal today. It is no longer Protestantism from which we convert souls—it is confusionism.
Confusionism
The modern man is not going to God from nature. He is no longer impressed with our traditional arguments for the existence of God based on motion, order, contingency, efficient causes, and graded perfections. This in part is due to the fact that nature seems less friendly to man today than it did to our forefathers, who were prepared to accept the sacramental character of the universe.
The atomic bomb is a symbol to the modern soul of how nature can operate against man. This, of course, does not mean the invalidity of the approach from nature, but it does mean that today it has little appeal. In its place the modern man is going to God through himself—not his subjective self, but rather his disordered, frustrated, complicated, confused, bewildered self. Under the pressure of wars, insecurity, revolution, and chaos, people are coming back to a consciousness of guilt and sin. They may not see it as such, but they do see it as fear.
It is from this intolerable tension within their souls, such as was described by Ovid, who saw and approved the better things and followed those which are worse, that the soul seeks release. Modern theology confirms this as the principal burden of the contemporary spirit. Kierkegaard first pointed to it in the last century; then came Brunner and Barth in Germany, Joad in England, Niebuhr in America—each of whom pointed out the civil war that goes on inside the soul.
As Joad put it, none of the explanations given of evil at the present time, such as the economic or the psychological, explain the fact. "Evil is endemic in the heart of man." What is Marxism but the admission of conflict and tensions in the language of economics?
Contemporary psychology is wrestling with this problem too, describing the tension inside man as the conflict of self and environment, the conscious and subconscious, or the erotic urges and conventions, none of which are very profound. They are, however, closer to the true nature of man than were the liberal philosophers who denied guilt and believed in inevitable progress. In literature too there is an attempt to return man to Paradise after an obvious Fall. D. H. Lawrence would reintegrate man through sex, Hemingway through soil and blood and subscription to a totalitarian ideology, Huxley through an eclectic mysticism, Joyce through imposed literary forms. In general they are describing man in terms of the Old Testament without the New.
Stating all this in strong language, it is true to say the modern soul is coming to God through the devil. This should not surprise us, for there are two ways of knowing how good God is, one by remaining with him in innocence, the other by losing him. Mary Magdalene, the woman in sin, the young man of the Gerasenes, and countless others came to God the second way. That is the way many are coming back to divine love today. As a matter of fact, the very vacuity that some sins engender is a negative preparation for coming to the divine embrace. As Muir expresses the mood of the tension of good and evil in one of his poems:
Hell shoots his avalanche at our feet,
In heaven the souls go up and down
And we can see from this our seat
The heavenly and the hellish town,
The green cross growing in a wood
Close by old Eden's crumbling wall,
And God himself in full manhood
Riding against the Fall.
Original sin
This means that the most important tract in theology today, so far as the modern soul is concerned, is titled "Original Sin." There is a suggestion of this approach in Augustine, Aquinas, and Newman, but a more evident use of it needs to be made today. Modern theology, literature, psychology, and economics are all playing on the fringes of original sin. It is with the fact of tension or guilt that we best approach the soul in search of God.
In the older generation where society was good and evil the exception, we had to explain the problem of evil. Today the argument is the other way around. Evil is no longer an objection against religion, but a proof in favor of it. As Aquinas argues in Contra Gentiles, because there is evil in the world there is a God. This disorder in man has all the evidence of being due to abuse of free will; man cannot get out of it any more than he can lift himself by his own bootstraps. Only the intrusion into the historical order of the eternal and the divine can release man from this servitude.
The new apologetics with this starting point has not yet been written. A dim beginning was hinted in Rosalind Murray's The Good Pagan's Failure and Newman's Grammar of Assent. Practically all our textbooks on apologetics and our pamphlets are still battling Protestantism, as our philosophical textbooks are beating the dead dogs of Kant and Hume. Not until our schools and universities rise above a philosophical insight that thinks that a student is learning something when he writes on "The Criteriology of John Locke" or the "Theory of Knowledge of Hume" or the "Apologetic Method of Nicholas de Cusa" will they be ready to meet the contemporary world.
The modern man, like the boy in the mountains, is isolated from himself (his name is "Legion"), from his fellow man (he lives in the tombs), and from God ("Art thou come to destroy us?"). This triple divorce of the soul from itself is the fact with which we must start. In other words, our times are no longer concerned with the "Problem of Man," but with "Man as a Problem." That is why the 1-11 of the Summa of Aquinas is the key to the apologetics of the future. Therein St. Thomas begins a study of the tensions within man, then the mechanics of the tension, then its causes, and finally the remedy. But we will have to put that thirteenth-century truth in twentieth-century clothes.
Suggestions concerning method
Never mention any sect in the course of instructions nor make any reference to Protestantism unless an inquiry is made. If one presents the Church as the prolongation of the Incarnation, as the Mystical Christ living through the centuries, as Christ speaking his truth through his Body, as he once spoke it through his human nature, forgiving sins through his new Body as he forgave them through his human nature, then there is no need of refuting a sect that came into existence 1,500 years after the death of Christ.
Prepare instructions so as to be able to talk in an intensely interesting and inspired manner for thirty minutes without interruption. Then give the inquirer all the time he wants to ask questions on the particular subject and present his difficulties. Instructions from the catechism by going over each question are not apt to give him as coherent and integrated a picture of the faith as the one outlined. Make a notebook of instructions and from time to time add new developments to each subject and those best calculated to convince the inquirer.
Instructions are dull when there is a communication of a fire without heat or a truth without love. As Horace said, "If you would make me weep, you must weep first." Unless we cast a few sparks, how shall the convert catch fire?
The convert should be given considerable reading matter according to his intelligence, both books and pamphlets, and they should all be given free. The pamphlet rack in the back of a church should have the money box taken out of it, and all the pamphlets should be gratis. If you wanted to know something about communism, the communist headquarters would send you a subscription to the Daily Worker free and flood you with literature, but when a non-Catholic wants to find out about the Eucharist, he has to pay a dime.
No gratuity should ever be accepted from a convert, not even a stole fee at baptism. They will hear plenty of money sermons later on, and it would be a good idea to start them off with a memory of never having heard money from the priest who instructed them.
Taken from Winning Converts, edited by Rev. John O'Brien, available from Catholic Answers. © This Rock, Catholic Answers, P.O. Box 17490, San Diego, CA 92177, (619) 541-1131.
This item 1331 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
