Coming Home to the Catholic Church: The Story of Marcus Grodi

Marcus Grodi is the host of a program called The Journey Home, which features people who have either converted to Catholicism from a variety of different religious traditions, or are lapsed Catholics who have resumed practicing Catholicism. (Grodi calls the latter group reverts, for some strange reason.)

Grodi came from a nominally-Protestant home, and went through what he calls the conveyor belt of religion - the sacrament of Baptism and the rite of confirmation, presumably (he grew up Lutheran). There wasn't a whole lot of faith development that went on there, though. If he was anything like my wife says she was, he may or may not have had faith, but he probably blew off what he heard in Sunday school and confirmation class. (My wife reports that although she grew up as more than a nominal Christian, she was able to blow off a lot of the religious bigotry she'd heard by reminding herself that that was their opinions, and not necessarily the facts as they stood. Most of the time, however, what Grodi means is that people get either baptized or confirmed, or both, without necessarily being truly Christian. For many young men and women and their families, these are just rites of passage, roughly akin to African tribal coming-of-age rituals which seem strange to us in the West, and everyone involved really feels that these ceremonies are a bunch of bull manure. They don't have the level of faith the churches they belong to assume that they do.)

He spent his teenage years rebelling, then became a Christian at age 20 - he was already a nominal Lutheran, but he bought into the evangelical/fundamentalist notion that one must pray a given prayer in order to become truly Christian in their eyes. (Even if one is a devout Lutheran or Presbyterian who has always considered him- or herself Christian, that's not good enough in the eyes of this subculture. You're heathen until you pray that prayer, no matter how devout you might truly be.)