I‘ve noticed a pattern over the years of Catholic converts using the term ‘Home’ to describe their conversion experience. They’ve “come home,” as so many of them proclaim. Yet, even when they’ve not reverts, and have converted from the non-Catholic denomination in which they were raised, they claim they are now home. Even Scott and Kimberly Hahn, lifelong Presbyterians before converting, wrote a book entitled ‘Rome Sweet Home,” EWTN has a show called The Journey Home about converts to Catholicism telling their stories, and an ex-Protestant began ‘The Coming Home Network’ for Catholic converts. Former Protestant Peter Kreeft has used the term home, as has John Bergsma and other former Protestants. Most recently, Candace Owens described her decision to become Catholic as coming home.
Why would so many people who had never been Catholic before call their conversion to Catholicism as ‘coming home’? I think there may be a deep-seated intuitive knowledge at play here. Let’s go beneath the surface.
On the natural level, each of us subconsciously longs for Eden. We’ve never been there, but there’s a collective ‘knowledge’, perhaps hidden in our DNA, that feels out-of-sorts in this world and longs for a paradise lost. It’s like wandering in the desert with a lingering preconscious sense of being homesick. Likewise, on the supernatural level, those who were raised in the partial truth of a non-Catholic denomination subconsciously sense a lack of being home. By virtue of the various schisms in Church history, sometime deep in their ancestral past someone has left home. Be that as it may, when the Spirit leads their open hearts to the house of God that Christ established upon Peter and the apostles, and to the Eucharistic dinner table to which they rightly belong as Christians, and to the authentic spiritual shower of Confession that Christ established to forgive our sins – when they finally tap into the fullness of their inheritance as spiritual heirs of Christ – they want to come home. And no one is more surprised than they are.
On the other hand, when a Catholic unceremoniously leaves home or runs away, it’s usually for reasons similar to most typical adolescents on the natural level: they’re not getting what they want, the rules are too hard, the human element of authority is too imperfect, or, as is very popular today, they want to live a life of sexual sin without feeling guilty. Even those who leave home because they’re not being fed enough biblically and socially still eventually feel the tug to return home. You never hear a Protestant reverting back to his particular denomination after a having stint as a Catholic with the reason that he needs to come home.
Although the Catholic Church is the fulfillment of Israel as closest we can get to Eden in this fallen world, we know it’s still not the fullness of home. Even Eden was meant to be a preliminary to the ultimate bliss in Heaven. Nonetheless, it is beautiful to behold so many people this side of the beatific vision discovering their earthly home, the Noah’s Ark of the New Covenant, to assist them through the deluge of troubles in this life onto the everlasting happiness of the next.