I’ve had some thoughts bouncing around in my head for the last week or so that I think I really need to post, and a visit from some Mormon missionaries this afternoon prompted me to finally sit down and do it. I promise it’ll be a change of pace from my sardonic Teen Life post. Actually, I’ll give you the punchline in advance: it’s pretty awesome to be Catholic.

The missionary visit was fairly brief and perhaps just a bit sad for me. They were two boys, presumably nineteen or twenty years old. They gave me their line about how they had “an important message about Jesus Christ” and I explained right away that I was an apostate Mormon and already pretty familiar with the message. In the past that’s been known to drive people away pretty quickly, but not this pair; they gracefully downshifted into small talk and asked me a little about myself and my occupation. I went along by asking where they were from. After two or three minutes of this casual chit-chat, they asked if they could come back at some future time to “get to know me better.” At this point, I had to tell them that, though I didn’t wish to make them feel unwelcome, I didn’t think visiting me would be a good use of their time; being myself a convert to Roman Catholicism, there was really no chance at all of my returning to the Mormon church.They contented themselves with leaving me their card so I could call them “in case I needed anything.” I accepted this, but when they asked whether I knew anyone else who “needed a Gospel message” I had to point out, as gently as I could, that, being Catholic, I wouldn’t be likely to refer anybody else I knew to the Mormons. And on that note we wished each other a pleasant evening. They seemed like nice kids, thoroughly Mormon from top to toe. These sorts of brief encounters with Mormon culture, so alien and at the same time so familiar, always make me feel just a bit melancholy.

But last week I had a rather more extended encounter that left exactly the opposite impression. This was at the big annual conference of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. This is the sort of enormous conference where you run into all sorts of people, and for the second year running, I saw an old friend from my Notre Dame days. He was a graduate student in philosophy while I was an undergraduate in the same department, but I got to know him for quite another reason: he is a serious Mormon, and he and some of his friends made some efforts towards drawing me back to the Mormon fold during my junior and senior years of college.

I should say immediately for the record that this friend is really a great guy to know — gregarious and endlessly good-natured — and I am honestly quite grateful to him and his friends for doing their best to make Mormonism plausible to me. They inspired me to investigate and consider the Mormon religion more seriously and systematically than I had done in the past… and it was really that consideration that enabled me to reject it confidently and for good. Were it not for them, I might have drifted gradually away with at least a shadow of worry that I had never really given my native faith a “fair shake” — after all, lots of Catholics have bad Sunday School experiences, too. With their help, I developed a more confident conviction that Mormonism was not true. Never since that time have I been even slightly tempted to consider going back. I have never thanked this friend for doing me such a service (I expect he wouldn’t be especially pleased to hear about it) but I do regard him with a certain affection on account of it. And I must say to his credit that his friendly attitude and good manners were unfailing, even after my conversion, which is something that every apostate appreciates.

On this occasion, though, I fear I may have put him just a bit on edge because (for the first time since the old days) we got into a theological debate over lunch. I didn’t really mean for it to happen. We were talking about his career plans, which got us into a discussion of religious universities, and this in turn led him to explain some things about his vision for what he thinks a Mormon university should look like. In the course of this explanation, he said in passing that, “I really think that Mormonism has a greater intellectual heritage to draw from than any other religion.”

This was such an astonishing statement, made by someone with a PhD in philosophy no less, that I could not overcome my curiosity. I asked him which authors, in his reinvigorated Mormon university, he would particularly like scholars to read. He named quite a number, several of whom were Catholics, and none of whom were Mormons. Further discussion revealed that his view was something like this: having very few firm theological commitments of their own, Mormons are free to draw on virtually anything that had ever been said or written in their academic endeavors. No door is closed to them. He talked for awhile about the value of “theological flux” and the stifling effect of “300-page catechisms.” Fearing he might have offended me, he added quickly, “I don’t mean, of course, to say that Catholicism is all about 300-page catechisms…”

“Don’t apologize,” I replied. “I’m a hearty proponent of the 300-page catechism. But it strikes me that this is largely a question of authority. After all, it would be rather perverse to be opposed to a thick catechism if everything contained within it happened to be true.” We talked some more about authority, and he did seem to more or less agree that, in his view, the Mormon church should be working towards becoming, in some distant day, what the Catholic church claims to be right now. We went on to discuss some other issues — the Trinity, for example — but I couldn’t stop thinking about how grateful I was that I’d left all this craziness behind me.

Being back at my old school and talking to my old friend brought all the old memories cascading back into my mind with an almost shocking freshness. I remembered all the mental contortions I went through in trying to make myself into a good Mormon. I remembered all the guilt I felt from doubting the authorities I had been taught to trust, and the angst of wondering whether any authority could or should be deemed trustworthy. I remembered the alternate attraction and revulsion that I felt to Catholicism… it seemed so beautiful, but was this siren’s song luring me into the same trap I had been in before? What an amazing relief to be free of that baggage! What good fortune to have taken up residence in the same city with St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, St. Francis and St. Claire, St. Peter and St. Paul and so many other great-souled people whom I had long admired! What pleasure to go to Mass and speak the Credo with reverence and conviction! Walking across the campus where I had done so much of that soul-searching brought the contrast into focus with a particular clarity and sweetness.

On Sunday morning, we put a nice cap on the whole visit by assisting at the Traditional Latin Mass now offered weekly on the Notre Dame campus. This is quite a new thing, so we weren’t surprised to find that it was pretty bare-bones. It was a Low Mass, and the turnout was fairly small (perhaps 40 people) though I got the impression from the students’ talk after Mass that they usually got more. The priest needed to be prompted by his (obviously experienced) altar servers at times — though, on the plus side, his Latin was quite good, so he must have known the language before learning the rubrics of the Mass. It will improve with time, I don’t doubt.

Regardless of the splendor or lack of such, it was rather a special thing to hear a Traditional Latin Mass said in a place that has so much personal significance for me. I remembered the scores of Masses from my undergraduate days (Novus ones, of course) when I would slide into one of the back pews, and spend the hour praying for guidance, and that I should not falter or fall into error. Non confundar was the constant prayer of my undergraduate days, and at the time the prayer didn’t seem to be working very well. Night after night I’d repeat the prayer, and week after week I’d go to Mass and repeat these prayers again and emerge feeling as clouded as ever. I was trapped in Meno’s paradox — wanting to find something but not knowing what it was or how to identify it, or even what methodology I ought to be employing in searching for it.

I guess it couldn’t really have been that long that I did all this (college is only four years, after all), but it certainly seemed like a long time to a befuddled 20-year-old. And even though I kept praying, there was a large part of me that didn’t really believe that things would ever be any better. Truth there might be, but I would never find it — not, at any rate, in more than ephemeral glimpses such as I had gotten throughout my life. This seemed to be amply confirmed by the cloudy, dull feeling that I usually had coming out from Mass. Jesus said that some people have and others have not… I was apparently among the “have nots.”

These sorts of reflections stem, obviously, from deficiencies of faith and hope, and also in a more general sense from a lack of imagination. It is always difficult for human beings, when they’ve lived for some time under particular sorts of conditions, to fully believe that things could ever be otherwise. During that Mass at Notre Dame, just a few weeks ago, I was hit with the realization of God’s amazing generosity, to have taken what little good their was in those doleful, mostly-selfish undergraduate prayers, and answered them in such a magnificent way. Though still no doubt selfish and confused in many ways, I have infinitely more now than I did back then. I am a Catholic, a member of the Body of Christ, a child of God and a dog no longer. And it occurred to me now that those dry, pathetic prayers probably did help in the long run. Isn’t it wonderful how our prayers can sometimes be efficacious even when we ourselves have hardly any hope that they will be? Truly, God is merciful, in taking the best of us and graciously ignoring the rest.