Its author, Austen Invereigh, has since apologised for his opinion piece which he says he intended as a lighthearted "silly season" filler.

His article, which was published in Crux, names several prominent Catholic writers who have converted to Catholicism that Invereigh said were suffering from "convert neurosis".

His opinion piece went on to say he believed what Francis's critics disliked in other Churches may have conditioned their perception of the papacy.

This would predispose them "to see natural organic developments as ruptures or compromises with relativism and modernity," Invereigh said.

His controversial article then went on to praise Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter for saying that he's sick of converts "telling us that the Pope isn't Catholic."

Retired Texas bishop Renee Henry Gracida is one of those challenging Invereigh. He says in his experience converts hold their Catholic faith more dear than anything else.

"It has been my experience, and the experience of all of the bishops and priests that I have known that practically all of the converts to the faith that we have known are exemplars of the two characters in the two parables of Our Lord Jesus Christ: The Buried Treasure and The Pearl of Great Price," he says.

Source

• Lifesite
• Lifesite
• Crux
• irishcatholic.ie

More than 100 converts signed an open letter to the synod fathers and the Pope.

The signatories include such prominent converts as Scott and Kimberley Hahn, Mark Regnerus and John Finnis.

The signers explain that the Church's teaching on marriage and sexuality helped draw them to the Church, especially as she held to these truths when society began to reject them.

Continue reading

It happened in the attic of the guest house at Ealing Abbey. There was just me, a friend and a monk, and the operation took about an hour.

Afterwards we went for cocktails. I started things as I meant to go on.

I guess the two big questions to ask a convert are: why did you do it and are you happy? Answering the first point is hard.

It's like asking a man why he married a woman. There's a temptation to invent a narrative - to say, "this happened, that happened and before we knew it we were where we are today".

But the simpler, yet more complex, answer is this: I fell in love.

I was lucky to grow up in a household open to religious belief. My grandparents were Christian spiritualists; Grandma advertised as a clairvoyant.

Mum and Dad became Baptists in the 1990s. I remember the pastor one Sunday telling us that evolution was gobbledygook. The teenager in me came to regard the faithful as fools, but I was wrong. I couldn't see that they were literate, inquisitive, musically gifted and the kindest people you'd ever meet.

But I went my own way and embraced Marxism.

By the time I arrived at Cambridge University I was a hard-left Labour activist and a militant atheist. I saw life as a struggle. Salvation could only come through class revolution. The life of the individual was unimportant.

Mine was unhappy. Very unhappy. I disliked myself and, as is so common, projected that on to a dislike of others. I'm ashamed now to think of how rude and mean I was. Perhaps I was ashamed then, too, because I had fantasies of obliterating myself from history. Continue reading

• Tim Stanley is a historian and writer for the Daily Telegraph.

He has been funny longer than he has been a Catholic. But being a Catholic doesn't stop him from being funny.

"I can't go more than two lines without getting a laugh," Leopold told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview from New York.

Leopold has spent the better part of his adult life writing sitcoms, including episodes of "Cheers," "Seinfeld" and "Will and Grace." He recently came back from England, where he did what he called some "punching up" of a batch of scripts for new episodes of "The Muppet Show." He has written for such diverse comic talents as Bob Hope and Chevy Chase, and written with some of the most inventive minds in comedy, including Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer.

But Leopold joined the Catholic church only last year. It took a family crisis to set him on a path toward Catholicism.

"My daughter had this very serious, life-threatening eating disorder," Leopold said. She was in treatment in Arizona, where the hospital would not release her until Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, he recalled that he and his wife went to bed.

"We're trying not to let the other one know how sad we were," he said.

But for Leopold, "that's the first time I prayed." However, since he had, by his own count, "one day of religious training" in his life, he said he prayed "like they prayed on (the old TV western) 'Wagon Train': 'Lord, I'm not a prayin' man, but if you'll just see us through Comanche territory.' "

Early Christmas morning outside his hotel, Leopold said he encountered "this 75-year-old ex-Marine (who) pulls up on this homemade motorcycle with deer antlers for handlebars. He tells me his name is Shepherd. He introduces his wife to me and tells me that she brought him to Jesus at 33 — and Jesus died at 33. And the sun's rising behind his head like a halo. And I haven't said a word.

"I thought it was the Ambien kicking in."

The cyclist's last words before he roared off into the desert, according to Leopold, were "God is watching you."

"This is the first of many shocking kinds of coincidences that made it impossible for me not to come to the church," Leopold told CNS.

But why Catholicism? "I prayed, and Jesus was the first to show up. What else am I going to do?" he replied. Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Da Mihi Animas

But it is also true that conversions to Catholicism are more numerous than one might think. Departing from the most diverse shores, even the most distant and hostile.

Four years after a first series of interviews collected in the volume "Nuovi cristiani d'Europa. Dieci storie di conversione tra fede e ragione," Lorenzo Fazzini - a journalist and the dynamic director of EMI, Editrice Missionaria Italiana - has returned to explore eight more stories of great converts.

The last interview in this new series was released on Sunday, September 1 in the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, "Avvenire." And it is with a convert from Islam to Christianity, born and raised in Turkey and today living in Germany.

His name is Timo Aytaç Güzelmansur. He was born in 1977 in Antakya, ancient Antioch, where - according to the Acts of the Apostles - the followers of Jesus of Nazareth were called Christians for the first time.

After his conversion and baptism, he studied theology from 2000 to 2005 in Germany, in Augsburg, and then in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He received a doctorate from the Hochschule Sankt Georgen of Frankfurt, the same faculty of theology where the young Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio intended to complete his studies.

His "mentor" was another Jesuit, Christoph Tröll, a great expert on Islam, highly appreciated for this expertise by the German episcopal conference and by Joseph Ratzinger himself, who in 2005, soon after he was elected pope, called him to introduce at Castel Gandolfo the annual session of studies with his former theology students.

The interview is reproduced further below. In it Timo Aytaç Güzelmansur does not deny the "danger" of conversion in a country like Turkey and therefore all the more so in even more intolerant Muslim countries.

But he emphasizes how conversions are not lacking, including for a reason very similar to his own: the discovery that "Jesus has loved us to the point of giving himself for us on the cross."

It is a reason that has also motivated other converts interviewed by Fazzini, as demonstrated by the conversations published by "Avvenire" beginning last July 15.

In order:

1. PETER HITCHENS - Brother of the more famous Christopher - who with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett makes up the triad of the "new atheism" - he also comes from a radical aversion to all religious faith. He was a Trotskyite and afterward an ardent supporter of communism of the strict Soviet observance. He converted to Christianity as an adult, prompted by a reflection on a painting by Rogier van der Weyden that depicts the universal judgment.

2. PATRICK KÉCHICHIAN - From the Paris of Jacques Lacan and the psychoanalysis of Christ of Péguy and Claudel. Passing through the pages of "Le Monde," the French newspaper of "laicité." The conversion of Patrick Kéchichian, a literary critic and writer, found in the love of the Nazarene - through the pages of Kierkegaard - the answers to the questions that were troubling him inside.

3. TATIANA GORITCHEVA - A Russian theologian and activist, she chose the Gospel, accepting prison and exile in order to reject the "diabolical ideology" of Marxism that wanted to change man by refusing all openness to heaven. Today she lives in Paris, where she warns the hedonist West against another golden calf, the unbridled consumerism that annihilates the spiritual yearning of the person. Continue reading

Sources

• Vassallomalta
• Image: A Catholic Mom in Hawaii

"Often sincere people who leave our Church do not do so as a result of what non-Catholic groups believe, but fundamentally as a result of their own lived experience; for reasons not of doctrine but of life; not for strictly dogmatic, but for pastoral reasons; not due to theological problems, but to methodological problems of our Church," he told a delegation of Colombian bishops on June 21.

"What is important, then, is to become better believers, more pious, affable and welcoming in our parishes and communities, so that no-one feels distant or excluded," he said.

The Pope was referring particularly to Latin America, where the "increasingly active presence" of Pentecostal and Evangelical communities "cannot be ignored or underestimated".

Offering some practical advice, the Pope called for better catechesis — particularly to the young — as well as carefully prepared homilies at Mass and the promotion of Catholic doctrine in schools and universities.

Following this path, he said, would help awaken in Catholics "the aspiration to share with others the joy of following Christ and become members of his mystical body".

He said bishops should also try to facilitate "serene and open" dialogue with other Christian communities — "without losing one's own identity" — so as to improve relations and "overcome distrust and unnecessary confrontations".

Sources

• CNA
• News.va
• Image: Laloking97