Giving up on conversion?

[secretman]

Why I Gave Up Trying to Convert to the Catholic Faith

Please take a look  

God Bless U All!

[Seeker]

What a sad story.  You can sense the despair in the author's tone.  I'd like to point out a couple things that struck me:

[1]The author blames the problems he sees in the Church on the Norvus Ordo.
[2]He is scanadlized by the lax morals, liturgical abuses, and lack of faith of those he sees in the Church.
[3]Logistics has contributed to the difficulty of obtaining training for conversion.
[4]He has allowed these things to lead him to lose hope of ever joining the Church.[/li]

I invite commentary on what I've said here.  Maybe I missed the point of what "THE RECUSANT" was trying to say.

In my humble opinion, we have to take responsibility for our own faith.  What I mean is this.  We can't allow those who claim to be Catholics yet do not follow the teachings of the Church to dictate our relationship with Christ and His Church.  In the end, we will be the ones who have to answer to God.  The truth is, there will always be Church hierarchy, teachers, and lay people that fall. There have been periods of Church history that are absolutely scandalous.  I wonder what I would have done as a laymen in those times.  I hope that in a similar situation I would have seen beyond the sinners of the Church and seen Christ.  The abuses the author points out are not due to the people he's seen following the teachings of the Church. On the contrary, these people are disobeying.  I don't think we can or should put the blame on the Norvus Ordo.

Abuses regarding the Eucharist are especially tragic.  Read Pope John Paul's encyclical letter on the Eucharist, ECCLESIA DE EUCHARISTIA, if you have any doubts whether the Church has changed it's teachings on the Eucharist. Here's a link to the condensed version.  Here's an excellent commentary on the letter at Catholic Answers.

The Eucharist truly is the soul of the Church and should be the center of our lives!

[DavidFilmer]

The really sad thing is, a lot of this guy's complaints have real merit. I almost could have written this myself. I was a reluctant convert from high-church Anglicanism. If you've never seen a high Anglican Mass (from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer or earlier) - well, it would blow you away. It is full of majesty and solemn dignity. If you've never been a part of this, you can't really understand where this guy's coming from. When a high-Anglican walks into a Novus Ordo Mass, he feels as a modern Catholic might feel walking into a screaming-banjo-Holy-Roller service. No kidding.

And laypeople distribute the Eucharist, and the faithful recieve in the hand while standing. And, in many parishes, the Faithful don't even participate in an actual Catholic Mass, because the priest and/or "liturgical committee" have taken it upon themselves to change it around ("inclusive language," etc) to suit their own whims (so it's not even authentic Novus Ordo, but somebody's personal idea of what Novus Ordo ought to be).

Novus Ordo is truly dreadful. The Anglican is right about that. I believe Novus Ordo has fostered a lax attitude to worship and the Eucharist that is scandelous. The state of RCIA and religious education across our land is frightening.

Yet, for all the beauty, grandeur, and dignity of the Anglican Mass, it's all window dressing. For me, the choice came down to truth or beauty. And I chose truth, because the Catholic Church is, indeed, the Ark - the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ.

But the choice would have been a LOT easier to make half a century ago, because the Ark is pretty smelly these days. I'd rather be on a smelly Ark than drowning in the sea, but it would be nice if we could clean out the, um, smelly bits.