Conversions Gone Bad

Published on by D. G. Hart

News about Magdi Cristiano Allam, an Egyptian-born Muslim whom Pope Benedict publicly baptised at Easter five years ago in St Peter’s Basilica, leaving the Roman Catholic Church was the top story for a while yesterday at New Advent.

“My conversion to Catholicism, which came at the hands of Benedict XVI during the Easter Vigil on 22 March 2008, I now consider finished in combination with the end of his pontificate,” Mr Allam wrote on Monday in the right-wing Milan daily, Il Giornale.

The 61-year-old journalist and right-wing politician has long been an Italian citizen. He said he had pondered his decision to leave the Church for some time. However, he affirmed that the “last straw” was the election of Pope Francis, which he said was proof that the Church is “troppo buonista” – excessively tolerant.

“The ‘papolatry’ that has inflamed the euphoria for Francis I and has quickly archived Benedict XVI was the last straw in an overall framework of uncertainty and doubts about the Church,” he wrote.

Edward Peters responds to Allam’s announcement:

Maybe it’s just me, but this modern proclivity to parade one’s spiritual angst in the blogosphere is wearing pretty thin. Besides, as Chesterton remarked, there are a thousand reasons to leave the Church and only one reason to stay: It’s true. So, Magdi cited two or three reasons to leave the Church, and not reasons especially high up on the “Top 1000 Reasons To Leave the Catholic Church” list at that. Whatever.

If it wears thin when someone rejects the Roman Catholic Church, isn’t it a tad grating to have a blog dedicated to parading one’s new found epistemic certainty?

31 thoughts on “Conversions Gone Bad”

  1. From Peters:

    “In particular, because of the indelible character conferred by Baptism (c. 845, and I’m presuming Confirmation, as Allam was baptized as an adult, c. 866), Allam will, for all eternity, be marked as a baptized and confirmed Christian. Now, one’s canonical identity is not easily turned on or off and nothing in the reports I’ve seen so far suffice for, say, schism or even formal defection. All I glean so far is one man expressing contempt for his obligation to conduct himself in accord with the requirements of communion (c. 209). But that does not make one a non-Catholic, that just makes one a bad Catholic.

    Ultimately, Allam’s sacramental seal will either be a source of greater joy to him in Heaven (as, hopefully, he will repent of his deed) or of greater suffering for him in Hell (if his act is sufficiently imputable to him, as only God would know), but either way, Allam is, on these facts, still Catholic and should be regarded as a Catholic whose need for prayers is just a little more obvious than is ours.”

    It appears that Protestants aren’t the only ones that contemplate the notion of Catholics in hell.

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  5. From the article: “God has no grandchildren.” Am i correct that the aphorism is 20th cent Evangelical?

    I’m more amazed at that, that a canon lawyer would take his theology from EVs than that he would disapprove of angst on parade.

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  6. Jeff, that’s a Grahamism, I believe meant as a shot against paedobaptism. But for all the claim that Reformed and evangelical are variations on an autonomous theme, the parade tends to buttress how the conversion variation is more Caller-evangelical. The Callers may have shed their Protestantism but have they shaken off all the eeeevangelicalism?

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  7. Zrim, I’m with you on the evanjellyfish. I never saw, knew or heard of these guys as a cradle. They remind me most of the Calvary Chapel, earnest evangelical. But now, thanks to reformed Protestantism they got propositional.

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  9. Brian, maybe there’s a point being made by not giving proofs for self-evident truths. Look at that. I going all Kanye, ……..’can these _ _ _ _ _ s be that much better than me’

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  10. Philip Cary: We need to see that conversion happens many times in life, I think, if we are to
    understand exactly what Luther means by justification. As he puts it in the famous 1519 sermon
    on the two kinds of righteousness, the alien righteousness by which we are justified before God
    is “whenever they are truly repentant.” So justification occurs many times, as often as you repent. That’s Luther’s doctrine of conversion, as I understand it— “conversion” just being Latin for turning. We are converted whenever the Holy Spirit turns our hearts away from our selves and our sins and teaches us to take hold of Christ himself in his Word, rejoicing at the preaching of the Gospel.
    We are justified and converted many, many times in life. This is a point Luther has in common with Roman Catholic teaching, for instance with Thomas Aquinas, who identifies the justification of the ungodly with the remission of sins,So here too Luther is not quite Protestant—not buying into the Protestant doctrine of a once-in-a-lifetime conversion and justification, but sharing the medieval Catholic teaching of frequent, repeated events of justification, repentance and conversion.

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  11. Philip Cary: Who is this unregenerate man who needs to be converted? Have the authors of the Formula of Concord forgotten that everyone involved has been baptized, nearly all as infants, and thus that none of them were, at any point in their adult lives, simply unregenerate? why are they talking as if conversion rather than baptism is how we become regenerate? True enough, in a
    missionary situation conversion should properly come before baptism, but an essential result of
    the conversion will be the intention to seek baptism (that’s why the phrase “and is baptized” is
    an essential part of the promise, “Whoever believes and is baptized is saved,” in Mark 16:16).

    So this talk of conversion, as if it marked the one decisive turning point in a person’s
    life, does not seem to me very much like Luther. Indeed, if I may say so, it doesn’t even seem to me very much like Lutheranism. Doesn’t Lutheran piety, as a matter of fact, operate without much of a concept of conversion? To see what I mean, listen to this little poem, originally in German, which I found on the baptismal certificate of a little girl born to a Lutheran family in 18th-century Pennsylvania. Doesn’t it reflect the way Lutherans teach their children to believe?

    I have been baptized–even if I die
    How can the cold grave do me harm?
    I know my homeland and my inheritance
    Which I have with God in heaven.
    After I die, there is prepared for me
    The joy of heaven and robes of glory.
    I have been baptized–I stand in covenant
    through my baptism with my God,
    So say I always with glad lips
    In crosses, tribulation, trouble and need:
    I have been baptized, and I rejoice in that–
    The joy remains forever.

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  12. Sean, epistemic and ecclesial certitude marries experiential testimonialism. Talk about Evangelicals and Catholics Together.

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  13. Darryl, I’ll tell you what’s more incredulous never mind grating; going from reformed pastor to RC apologist at a speed that makes one wonder what happened to the virtues of prudence, wisdom and discretion. But, if your extra-canonical tradition trumps your canonical one, well then, it’s just a matter of development. But then why the big deal about scriptural paradigms? You have the church, right?

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  14. Sean, you sorto have the church. I’d be hard pressed to find a post 1960 pope who would affirm Unigenitas (1713) without having his fingers crossed.

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  15. Darryl, you’re just a protestant. You seem to lack the faith to embrace the hermenuetic of continuity when it comes to extra-canonical documents. Of course, so did Ratzinger before the university uprisings.

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  21. What doesn’t work in NCR’s editorial are; 1) Kung invited Ratzinger to Tubingen and 2) Trying to possibly imply that Ratzinger’s input to the german bishops was hope for a return to the church’s orthodox roots. What because Vat I wasn’t adequate? Come on. Unless you want to argue Ratzinger was in the vein of Butler, maybe that kind of return was on the table.

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  23. Sean, truly fascinating. The more I explore Roman Catholicism, the more I am in awe over the way in which a thoroughly medieval, monarchical, and feudal institution has tried to adjust to the modern world. It’s one thing to go from Geneva in 1550 to Philadelphia in 1780 to Hillsdale in 2010. But to go from Rome in 1300 to Rome and Philadelphia in 1790 to Rome and Detroit in 2010 is simply breathtaking. It’s almost as sweeping a set of circumstances as what happened to Istabul between 1700 and 1950. And yet, in that process the Caliphate lost and Ataturk won. In Rome, the regalia and hoopla of monarchical popes are still the order of the day (and we haven’t even begun to talk about the dodgy relationship between the Papacy and Italy.

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  24. Well, it takes a lot of ‘faith’ a lot of room and a lot of crossed fingers. Sounds like a good book though.

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  26. Reforming Rome is a lot like reforming China. It’s nearly impossible due to the amount of power that would need to be surrendered.

    As Bernadette Peters put it, “It’s not giving up all the money. It’s giving up all the stuff.”

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  28. McMark,

    Problem is Vat II bears papal authority. So he helps craft it a certain way, meaning the paradigmatic interpretation anticipated by ‘aggiornamento’ but then ‘holy hell’ breaks loose, as far as his german blood was concerned, and he decides his gonna be a papal continuity kinda guy. ‘Kung’ goes; “hey where’d my friend go?” And Ratzinger goes; “what friend?!” “Did you see what those kids did!” “How did I ever let you talk me into this?! BTW(he actually said BTdub) “You’re out”.

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  29. Revelation 1:5 and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn out from among the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood

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  30. You might be interested in Paolo Prodi’s The Papal Prince (alliteration entirely unintentional). It’s a small point in your post, but he shows that the Papal States modernized (?) in the sense of pushing against so-called feudal structures before most Italian principalities.

    This is one reason why I’m not sure that the way you are framing this issue (medieval, feudal, and so on) is very helpful.Harold Berman’s work on the Gregorian Revolution also points to the fact that, for good or for ill, it is difficult to separate the papacy from a great many features of “modernity.”

    I think that the narrative you were once pushing against Brad Gregory–“you can’t blame the Reformation for the ills of the world without blaming the medieval popes”–was much more fruitful. Just my two cents.

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  31. Matt, point taken. But the dynamics of contemporary Roman Catholicism and press coverage are not about look at how the papacy brought the modern world. It is instead that the papacy represents the old and the Church still needs to modernize, the papacy being the speed bump in the road of modernity. In other words, the hard work of history shows continuity between medieval and modern. But I suspect you would agree that the papacy itself has not understood itself as an agent of modernization — Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XII, not to mention the Syllabus of Errors, and condemnations of Americanism and Modernism.

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