Catholic Converts and “Buyer’s Remorse”: Permitting “Pitifully Low Standards” to Overcome It

The Real Roman Catholic Hierarchy

In response to this thread, “Jason Stellman Defending the Faith”, Nomosian asked:

Are Catholics really that desperate to enlist among their ranks of apologists converts that have been enlightened a mere one year? That's rather telling in my opinion. By their measure, he's been teaching and preaching heresy for the last 20 years, but now, in the last year he's some how finally gotten it right and is qualified to lead others? Those are some pitifully low standards.

He really answered his own question. I responded: “My thought is that the whole ‘Catholic Convert’ schema has been set up to allay the buyer’s remorse that many of them have upon finding out what they've really gotten themselves into.”

Another Called to Communion writer has portrayed that feeling as “a marriage, in which romance does not reduce to sentimentalism, nor prescind from difficulty and pain, but rather flows from the realities of a life shared together, come what may”.

In other words, the newness comes off, and the Roman Catholic convert who falls in love with “The Church” wakes up one day and finds that the purported “Bride of Christ” really does have warts.