Drawn to the Church Made Visible

I quoted Hadley Arkes, one of the founding members of the magazine’s board, in The Lost Telos of Sexuality below. Readers interested in his recent entry into the Catholic Church will want to read an interview with him just out in the National Catholic Register . Among other things he says in From the Ark to the Barque is that his interest in the Catholic Church

came through my involvement over many years in the pro-life movement. I’ve been moving in this direction for a long while, perhaps more than 20 years. The process is often the reverse of what is told in the media. The media suggest that we’re pro-life because we’re religious, when in fact, many of us are won over by the force of the moral argument and the evidence of embryology. Then we’re drawn to the Church that defends that argument.

Over the years, I picked up many friends in the pro-life movement and people I collaborated with in writing. At every turn, I found I had a Catholic constituency of people who were supporting me. My friends genuinely came to represent, to me, the body of the Church. Each one had different things to teach me about the Catholic life, and they all showed in different ways what people come to look like when they’ve led a Catholic life.

I was drawn to the body of the Church — the Church made visible — the people around me who absorbed the life of the Church and lived the life of the Church.

Update: A related story, God and Woman at Harvard , in which Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Mary Anne Marks, who graduated from Harvard this spring and . . . is entering a convent to test her vocation. The interview begins with Lopez’s (tongue-in-cheek) question about giving up everything a Harvard education implies and Marks’ reply “Yes, if one doesn’t see becoming a well-educated, intellectually alive nun as one of the possibilities.”