Beyond all telling.

Who is of more value to the Church: the convert, or the "cradle" Catholic?

That's rather a jarring question to pose in our sensitive times, isn't it? But in an earlier and more robust age-1933, to be exact-as Joseph Pearce relates in his delightful book Literary Converts, two prominent Catholics had it out on this very topic.

The adversaries were Frank Sheed and Arnold Lunn. "It was decided," Pearce tells us, "that it would be more graceful if Lunn as a convert should state the case for the born Catholics and Sheed as a born Catholic should argue the case for the converts. Sheed remembered that he had 'dwelt especially on what converts had done for the Catholic Intellectual Revival' whereas Luna 'found it hard to think of anything at all to be said for born Catholics"' (p. 171).

As one of the latter, I was the teensiest bit nettled by this conclusion, and inclined to dismiss this episode as a sort of "guy thing." One might just as well try to rate the contributions of St. Augustine against those of St. Therese. Well, go on, just try.

O beauty every ancient, ever new

Still and all, the question is provocative. While born Catholics have doubtless held their own in apostolic zeal throughout the history of the Church, it's well known that the convert is often distinguished by an exceptional fervour.

Not only that, but his very arrival in the Church is a gift-testifying as it does, in the words of famous convert G. K. Chesterton-that the Catholic Church is ever "a new and dangerous thing" (The Catholic Church and Conversion).

Now we know that born Catholics go through a conversion of sorts-maybe even several in a lifetime. There comes the time when they must give assent in intellect and will to the faith they received before their reason developed. My mother, a born Catholic, described her own youthful disposition thus: "I knew that everything the Catholic Church taught was true; I just didn't believe it."

But what cradle Catholics experience "differs from conversion properly so called," wrote Hilaire Belloc, a Catholic from birth, and friend of Chesterton. In introducing The Catholic Church and Conversion, Belloc observed that converts are the "chief factors in the increasing vigour of the Catholic Church...The admiration which the born Catholic feels for their action is exactly consonant to that which the Church in its earlier days showed to the martyrs. For the word martyr means witness."

Via the Airport

Born Catholics are often fascinated by the conversion story. When a friend mentioned she'd met a Jewish woman who had been a Protestant and is now a Catholic, I wondered if here I could gain insight into the mystery of conversion. And like many other converts, Barbara Froese readily described her journey of faith.

"My life was my dark night," the 49-year-old says. The death of her father when she was 12, a mother with emotional difficulties, an unhappy marriage, chronic depression and fatigue: all these she endured.

In 1983, at the invitation of her babysitter, she and her husband attended the Pentecostal Church with their four children. It was there they accepted Christ.

In 1994, Froese felt the Lord was preparing her for something: "I wept for a whole year." Then in January 1995, Froese went to the Airport Vineyard Ministries and became hooked. "I felt that the heavens opened. He touched me; I haven't got words to describe it." The origin of the controversial Toronto Blessing (C.I., Nov. 1995), the Vineyard became notorious for such manifestations as people laughing hysterically or emitting strange noises during services.

Froese became increasingly dismayed in the Vineyard's ambience. "The Lord wanted to lead me out of the Airport Church." Her friend Mariana, a Catholic whom she met at the Vineyard, invited Froese to Mass. Although "all I'd ever heard were bad things about the Catholic Church", she felt drawn. From the beginning, "I felt the presence of Christ in the Eucharist."

"I was astounded by the holiness and the reverence," Froese says, "then I found out that they believe [in the Real Presence]. I heard it in the Mass". From that moment she knew she would become a Catholic.

Froese entered the Catholic Church on Easter Vigil of the Jubilee year: "It was like a wedding banquet in heaven." Her children, still Pentecostal, were not present, but her Jewish mother was.

It's no discredit to Froese's candour that at the end of her account, I was slightly dissatisfied. Somehow, the essence of her conversion had escaped me. How did she know? How did she really know? The answer can only be that there are places in the heart where we may not go, and the mystery of the unfolding of divine love within each person's soul is, at its deepest, beyond all telling.

We might, however, speculate about the fruit of that love, and ponder such questions as, who is of more value to the Church, converts or born Catholics?

But surely we are all of infinite value in His eyes.. .well, we'll let the men argue it out. (+)

Lianne Laurence is a freelance writer working on a biography of Manitoba pro-life champion, Joseph Borowski.