“How Could a Man This Smart Be a Catholic?”

Paul McCusker writes of anti-Catholic bigotry... his own:

I shudder to think of it now. There I was at a CS Lewis conference and the esteemed teacher Peter Kreeft had been talking about ten things to learn from JRR Tolkien about evil. A brilliant talk. And, at the break, I had a chance to corner Kreeft to ask him a few questions. In the course of that short conversation, he mentioned to me how he had become a Catholic while attending Calvin College.

Everyone else probably knew it, but I didn’t. And I was surprised. But here’s the thing that surprised me and makes me shudder to think of it now: my immediate thought was, “How could a man this smart be a Catholic?”

By the grace of God, I didn’t actually say that to him. I sometimes wonder how he would have reacted if I had. But I didn’t.

And, by the grace of God, my reaction didn’t stop there. I moved on to a pivotal question: “What does he see that I don’t see?”

It was a pivotal question because I then realized my own bigotry and ignorance about Catholicism. All I knew about it was what I had been told by well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) Protestants – or what I had seen in the lives of a few Catholics. I’d read the Chick Tracts. I’d seen The Godfather. What else did I need to know?

I had concocted a lot of answers without ever asking the right questions. I had already rejected something I knew nothing about. And a very short conversation made me realize it.

...

I couldn’t imagine myself ever becoming a Catholic, but it was a decent compromise to explore the Ancient Church, believing it was neither Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox.  That was a safe bet. I could be objective and without prejudice. And so I made the effort. As John Henry Newman has pointed out, to go back into history is to find oneself in staunch Catholic territory. Beware!

Beware indeed.

Read the whole thing.

Learn something.  Something pivotally important.