“Enthusiastic” Converts and Conspiracies

I’m not a convert to the Catholic faith, but I have known lots of converts. You get to know lots of converts if you’ve worked in Catholic apologetics for, oh, 47 years.

Most converts settle into the Church quite comfortably, and in a year or two you can’t tell, at first meeting, whether or not they’re converts. They act and think just like other Catholics (with all the ups and downs implied by that).

But some converts turn out to be what Msgr. Ronald Knox, in his 1950 magnus opus Enthusiasm, called “enthusiasts.” That term wasn’t meant as a compliment. It didn’t mean people who simply were “enthusiastic” or “overjoyed” or, as Hubert Humphrey might have put it, “pleased as punch” to be Catholics.

It meant people of a certain (and sometimes intellectually fatal) mindset.

At first, everything seems all right with them, but in transitioning from A to B, they don’t know when to stop, and they pass right through C and D and eventually run out of letters. Some of them “convert” right out of the Church, and others end up adopting positions (often in politics or culture) that seem sensible to them but harebrained to nearly everyone else.

I’ve known—and even have worked with—converts who couldn’t stop converting and who ended up leaving the Church.

Gerry Matatics is one example. That name may not register with younger readers of this post, but in the late 1980s he was best buddy with Scott Hahn and entered the Church, from conservative Presbyterianism, at about the same time as Hahn.

Matatics worked at Catholic Answers for seven months in 1990 and 1991, then left to start his own apostolate. After a while, he announced that he had “converted” (his term) to Catholic Traditionalism, but he couldn’t stop converting.

He decided that the former English-language consecratory formula for the wine (“for all” instead of “for many”) was so defective that the entire Novus Ordo Mass was invalid. After that, he reasoned that Vatican II had to be invalid, and that there hadn’t been any valid popes since at least Pius XII (died 1958).

Then Matatics decided that all then-living bishops had been consecrated invalidly, except for a few centenarians who had been consecrated by Pius XII. A few years later, he concluded that there were no valid priests because they had been ordained after Vatican II. The result was that Matatics became a Church of One, even while still claiming to be Catholic.

His is an extreme example, but I’ve known of other converts who either went in his direction in terms of religion, though not as far, or who seem to have remained steady religiously but who hopped onto “enthusiastic” political or social causes.

What seems common to all these people is a conspiratorial mindset. By that, I mean that their first instinct is to imagine that the true explanation of an event or condition is to be found in an underlying conspiracy. No straightforward answer will suffice. (That Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk can’t be true, because that idea is too simple to be true.)

There is a kind of innocence in their thinking. They seem unable to imagine how something could have occurred by otherwise normal, fallen people doing normal, sinful things. No unhappy event is the result of a single person’s actions. It’s always a committee effort, and most members of the committee belong to The Secret Power Structure, or something like that.

A common denominator is that people with this mindset may develop or accept convoluted theories, but almost never are they able to name the supposed culprits. They know a committee (as I call it) is behind the thing, but they can’t name any members of the committee.

I have noticed this in recent months and particularly in recent days. There are converts with not-insignificant Facebook (or elsewhere) presences who have signed up as believers in one or more political or social conspiracies.

Among their newly touted positions is the notion that what people take to be extraterrestrials (UFOs) actually are demons pretending to be flying saucers (or at least UFOs). Another is a sudden interest in, and promotion of, conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination.

I have tried to engage in discussion with several such converts. I ask them to name names or to cite new facts that have come to light, but they never do so. They hem and haw, or they tell me to do my own research or to watch a particular video (which invariably adds nothing to what was known decades ago).

This is par for Catholic “enthusiasts.” They have glommed onto something new (at least new to them). Like the ancient Gnostics, they think they have discovered something that was in plain sight all along but had been overlooked or misunderstood by nearly everyone else.

They are happy in their secret knowledge, which they willingly share with others—but, again, not to the extent of naming names or citing new facts. Whatever may be in their minds about an incident, they leave their readers with nothing more than suspicions—and no proof of the veracity of those suspicions.

Yes, there have been and are conspiracies: religious, political, social, whatever. But nearly every incident that occurs can be explained without resorting to a conspiracy theory, if one has a solid understanding of the vagaries of human nature (and some insight into the workings of ecclesiastical and political institutions).

What will happen to the Catholic converts I have in mind? Will they stop at promoting one or two conspiracies? Will their penchant for conspiracies end up distorting their religious beliefs, to the point that they too some day will be outside the Church even though they will think themselves still in it?

I’m not a prognosticator. I can’t predict where these people will end up. All I can affirm, from decades in apologetics and from wide reading in other fields, is that “enthusiasts” all too often end up where they originally had no intention to go.

(Editor’s note: This essay was first published on the author’s Facebook page, in slightly different form, and is posted here with kind permission.)