St. John Henry Newman on the duty of converts.

read­er passed along to me the fol­low­ing quo­ta­tion from St. John Hen­ry New­man; this was in the con­text of my pri­or arti­cle about Steve Ray’s dis­sat­is­fac­tion with Pope Fran­cis. New­man seemed to have peo­ple like Mr. Ray in mind when he wrote these words in A Gram­mar of Assent:

I will take one more instance. A man is con­vert­ed to the Catholic Church from his admi­ra­tion of its reli­gious sys­tem, and his dis­gust with Protes­tantism. That admi­ra­tion remains; but, after a time, he leaves his new faith, per­haps returns to his old.

I like that: “he leaves his faith, per­haps returns to the old.” New­man under­stood that leav­ing the faith and return­ing to the old are two sep­a­rate acts. You can leave the faith and still go Mass and not return to the old.

New­man con­tin­ues:

The rea­son, if we may con­jec­ture, may some­times be this: he has nev­er believed in the Church’s infal­li­bil­i­ty; in her doc­tri­nal truth he has believed, but in her infal­li­bil­i­ty, no. He was asked, before he was received, whether he held all that the Church taught, he replied he did; but he under­stood the ques­tion to mean, whether he held those par­tic­u­lar doc­trines “which at that time the Church in mat­ter of fact for­mal­ly taught,” where­as it real­ly meant “what­ev­er the Church then or at any future time should teach.”

That’s utter­ly impor­tant. Con­verts owe their reli­gious sub­mis­sion of mind and will not just to the cur­rent pope (Bene­dict XVI when I con­vert­ed) but to all future popes. That includes Pope Fran­cis, and it even includes Car­di­nal Burke in the unlike­ly event he becomes pope.

Thus, he nev­er had the indis­pens­able and ele­men­tary faith of a Catholic, and was sim­ply no sub­ject for recep­tion into the fold of the Church. This being the case, when the Immac­u­late Con­cep­tion is defined, he feels that it is some­thing more than he bar­gained for when he became a Catholic, and accord­ing­ly he gives up his reli­gious pro­fes­sion. The world will say that he has lost his cer­ti­tude of the divin­i­ty of the Catholic Faith, but he nev­er had it.

But he nev­er had it.

Indeed.