The thing you learned in RCIA...

 I moderate a Facebook group for Catholic Converts. Someone posed a question today for the ground that I thought was very good. "What was the one thing you learned in RCIA that made such an impact on you, that you knew you had made the right decision in becoming Catholic?"

The following was my answer...

I don't know if it was so much actually in RCIA but in my personal conversion process as I was doing serious research on what the Catholic Church actually taught. My spiritual director at the time had given me a copy of the Catechism and told me to read it through and see if there were any "deal breakers" and go from there. 

 

There was one series of sections about Catholic social justice in the middle that honestly scared me. Coming from the Episcopal church as clergy where terms like "social justice" were code words for extreme political agenda that were used to bludgeon opponents, I very much feared that that would be the deal breaker. Basically all I knew about Catholic social teaching were fragments from the news about Nuns on a Bus or other really radical religious orders who were constantly getting arrested outside the School for the Americas or Oak Ridge nuclear laboratory. So, I intentionally avoided those sections until I had read everything else in the catechism in detail. 

 

Seeing no major issues there, I finally sat down in the chair in my office and started reading those sections. I remember sitting in my chair in my Anglican vicar office and taking a deep breathe and quoting from Star Wars: "This is how democracy ends...in thunderous applause." I fully expected to find in it the radical stuff I was beat over the head with in the Anglican world. If that was how it was going to be, I would just stay in the Episcopal Church where I would certainly make more money.

To my utter amazement, I discovered an entirely new world of moral theology and political theory that I had somehow never really encountered before. This was quite a buried treasure, as I had bachelors in history and political science, an advanced degree in theology, and a year in law school. Somehow other than Augustine's City of God and some Natural Law theory of Aquinas (and to an extent some of that which had leaked into High Church Anglicanism via the Oxford Movement-I had never really encountered real Catholic social teaching or understanding about subsidiarity and solidarity and all that.

Looking at the footnotes, I went and read Rerum Novarum from the late 1800s, the first modern Papal encyclical that took Catholic Social teaching to a whole other level of philosophy and moral ethics in its critiques of laissez faire capitalism and communism. I was utterly astounded at how deep and rich that field of Catholicism was. Compared to Anglicanism which had been founded for political reasons, many of which were of dubious moral character. 

 

That was the point where I finding stepped out of my snug little hobbit hole and followed Gandalf's words, "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to..."