The Trouble with Converts (And Everyone Else!)

“Brother in Christ.” Whenever I visit a certain parish nearby, that is how I am always greeted by several people. If I can be perfectly honest, they probably don’t even know my name. They don’t know what I do for a living. They just know I often am in the back area of the Church corralling my children. Yet to them, I am a “brother”, and I’m comforted by that.

How can I be a brother when they barely know me? I think part of that problem comes from our culture that equates “brother” strictly with a male child in an immediate family setting. In that case, I have no brothers. I have one sister, and that’s it for siblings. Yet from a Biblical standpoint, brother can have a far greater connotation. Cousins are brothers. Sometimes even uncles and nephews are brothers. Even those outside the immediate family can be viewed as brothers, so long as there is some name that unites them. St. Paul speaks of brotherhood in that sense, as we have been adopted into Christ. (Eph 1:5) Looked at from this perspective, the Christians at this Church are telling me that they view me as family. I might belong to a very extended wing of the family, but when I walk through those doors, their parish is my home, my concerns are their concerns, my joys their joys.

I thought about this when I read Austen Ivereigh’s by now infamous screed against “convert neurosis” and what he referred to as “the convert problem” in the Catholic Church. As a result of this article, Crux’s editorial policy has undergone revision, and their editor John Allen Jr. has written a formal apology to his readers. For his part, Ivereigh apologized, but felt the problem was only the tone, not the substance of his remarks.

While one should be thankful for that apology, and glad Crux will be doing its part to detox the pool of venom going forward, one wonders if they really understand what the problem is. The problem wasn’t just some really juvenile and childish insults by a well known journalist. The problem isn’t even so much that we need to disagree better. Ivereigh’s behavior is indicative of a far more serious problem in the Church today: we are not brothers and sisters, though we are called to be.

When we think of unity in the Church, we often think of a doctrinal unity (all believing the same thing in our profession of faith), or ecclesial unity (all under the authority of the Bishop of Rome). While these are required for being Catholics, there actually are three additional points of unity that precede the other two. We don’t talk about this sense of unity as much, and instead attempt to substitute it with additional types of unity more to our liking.

The first, cliche as it may seem, is that every individual on this planet is united by the bonds of sin. We are all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23.) That meaning is a lot deeper than we first realize. In the eyes of Romans 3, there is no Jew or Gentile, or yes, natural born Christian or convert. We all come from the same starting point, which is sin. No matter where we like to think we came from beforehand, we all have the same tendencies and proclivities towards falling short of God.

While the existence of sin would seem like a point of division, it is made into a point of unity by the Gospel. Since we are all sinners, all have need of a savior. No matter how good we are (or we think we are), we require God’s grace for salvation. Even Mary, though she committed no sin during her time on this earth, relied upon a special grace of God to live in that state, so she could be the vessel of Earth’s redeemer. Every one of us is a sinner, and every one of us requires salvation. God gives that gift freely to us. (Romans 3:24)

The third point of unity comes from the fact that our sanctification is a process. We are sinners called, we are sinners saved, and then we are sinners glorified. By glorified I mean we are, slowly but surely, conformed to the image of the Son. We are made to be like Christ. That’s a process that happens throughout our time on this earth. Some progress along this path more than others, but provided one is in a state of grace, the work that is done will be completed by God. During that time one will have imperfections and sins they struggle with. The proper response of the Christian is not to shun them during this time, but to help put the person into a state where God can accomplish his work.

There’s no room in Ivereigh’s theology for these sources of unity. Instead of accepting all Catholics as part of the same family, he invents the imaginary distinction between convert and cradle Catholic. This distinction is great for selling books about conversion stories, but the sins of cradle Catholics have are awfully similar to the sins converts have. They just manifest themselves in different ways. He does this for the purpose of marginalizing and smearing those he disagrees with. He makes those he disagree with “something else”, and that something else is then demonized, diagnosed with a condition, and then marginalized, in addition to their decency and good faith being automatically suspect.

Even granting Ivereigh’s faulty premise about converts, where is the forbearance Scripture counsels in bearing the burdens of our brothers? The popular themes of contemporary Catholicism are encountering people who are flawed sinners, and accompanying them as they work through those flaws, always being loving and accepting of them as they are. This is a noble goal, and is consistent with the call to sanctification I mentioned above. Who are we to demean those we do not like, since they are along the same path to holiness as we are? Mr. Ivereigh? Anyone?

Instead of these sources of unity, today’s Catholicism is a far more tribal affair. Unity in sin is replaced with unity in outlook. So long as you look upon the world in mostly the same way, nothing else matters. Anything can be forgiven, as long as you’ve got the same goal in mind. (Seldom is that goal the salvation of souls!) It replaces salvation through Jesus Christ with salvation through adherence to a dogma. That dogma might be the awesomeness and best-everness of Pope Francis. It might be, a la Massimo Fagioli, believing that the period after the Second Vatican Council is a “golden age” of the Church. On differing sides of the ideological spectrum, it might be a prerequisite belief that the ideal Church was this or that golden era. During the age of Fulton Sheen, people believed the dogma of dialectical materialism and made that the foundation of their belief system.

So long as we have this rigid adherence to tribal dogma, we can forget about doctrinal unity and ecclesial unity. If Mr. Ivereigh and those like him want to disagree better, they can start by remembering these truths about unity.