Conversion of Dr. David Allen White

Professor of literature
At the U.S. Naval Academy

     Dr. White converted to the Catholic Faith in 1979. He has won some 35 convertsat the U.S. Naval Academy to the Catholic Faith. Here is his story:   

 

     Since I am a professor of Literature I'll tell a story.I converted to the Catholic Church at the age of thirty-one, some years ago. Iwas raised liberal Protestant. That adjective is extremely important becausethere are Protestants who know their Bible, who know something of Christiandoctrine. They're the fundamentalists-hard-core conservative ones. I was raisedliberal Protestant which means I had an upbringing in terms of church-going, ofchurch suppers, and there were some lovely people. I was lucky to be raised ina very good home with good parents but I never received any real religioustraining. I memorized a few scripture verses. Occasionally I would go and sitthrough a Sunday morning worship ceremony in the bare church, not pay attentionto the sermon, sing a few hymns and then go home. That was about it. This meansthat when I was seventeen and was free and went off to university, I just gavethe whole thing up. I say in sorrow, by the way, that this is what I now see myCatholic students doing. Very often, when the young people leave home, as soonas they get away, they stop going to Church. I know that. That's what I did. Itis a mark of Protestantism, because there is nothing there to hold on to andthey know it. As a result they leave. So I went into the university, a modernuniversity, where they taught me the three things that I think you get at amodern university: hate your family, hate your country, hate God (Who "doesn'texist," but hate Him anyway). That's what my head was filled with. So that whenI graduated and went on to graduate school, my head was filled with absolutenonsense. I still knew nothing about religion, although I would talk about itat length, mainly to try to debunk it. As far as I was concerned, there wasonly nature.

 

     Nature was all we needed. Everything was material.There was really only one "Commandment", that was, "We should be nice to eachother even though life has no meaning" - which is a very peculiar thought. WhenI began teaching, that's the sort of nonsense I was teaching. Absolutenonsense, because I knew nothing. I had no business being in front of a classteaching anything because I didn't know anything.      

 

     But I was a modern teacher with a head full of feathersand sawdust that I spewed out around the room. Then one day, when I wasteaching at Temple University in Philadelphia, I had a student in the back ofthe class, who raised his hand and challenged me. He began debating me in theclassroom. In no time at all, I became aware of a situation that most teacherslive in terror of: I had a student in my class who knew a hundred times morethan what I knew. I was an absolute ignoramus and this student was reallysmart. Now the only thing I can say to my credit is that I began coming intoclass - I am not making this up, this is not an exaggeration - I would comeinto class with a note book, stand at the podium, ask the young man a questionand then take notes of the answers he gave. This is one of many illustrationsthat the modern world, in every detail, is a place of inversion. The symbol ofthe devil is a man turned upside down. If you look at anything in the modernworld, it's inverted. My classroom was inverted. I was being paid to teach andI was standing at the podium taking notes from a student who knew something.Now fortunately, I was lucky enough to get a quick education. The rest of thestudents really didn't care. Most of them slept through it, which is whatthey'd been doing during most of my lectures anyway. Well the long and theshort of it was, we debated, we talked for hours, for days, for weeks. And hewon every debate, every single debate. God be praised that I had a logical headso that I could follow an argument and know when I'd lost one. I lost everydebate we had. Now if you pursue questions of truth; that is, is there truth,how can we know it? If there is truth, what do we do about it? Where do we findit? You're going to end up at Christ. It's going to happen. So at that point, Irealized that Christ and His message is not only important and serious, but itis true. Having realized this, it was clear that I had to get involved withsome church. There were two choices: the fundamentalist Protestants, becausethey seem to know their Bible, and they do believe in something; or theCatholic Church. As a student of literature and as a professor of literature, Iknew something about the past. Now, the great writer Evelyn Waugh, whoconverted to Catholicism, said of the Catholic Church that "in considering it,any man has to know that it is true because it presents a coherentphilosophical system that makes intransigent historical claims." If you look atthe philosophy of the Catholic Church, it is air tight, it is reasonable andcomplete. If you look at the history of the Church over two thousand years, ithas given us everything that is good. Hence, how could it not be true?Therefore when the time came I chose the Catholic Church. Now my student whohad challenged me in class had converted about six months before I did. He hadnot been a Catholic either; he was simply an honest mind seeking the truth. Hehad walked into a Catholic Church and said to the priest, "I want to become aCatholic." It wasn't long before this young man was battling with the priestwho was supposed to be giving instruction, because the priest was presenting awhole series of new ideas in a new way. This brilliant young man was rightlychallenging these new ideas, saying to the priest, "No, Father, the Churchteaches this...". So you now had a convert instructing the priest in the Faith.My friend did not want me to go through that experience. He went all around thePhiladelphia area until he found an elderly Irish Monsignor, out in one of thesuburbs, who had the Faith. So once a week, I would take the train to go outthere and receive real instruction from a priest who had the Catholic Faith. Itwas a great blessing. I would also go out to his Mass, the Novus Ordo, which hesaid very reverently. So at the beginning of my conversion, I wasn't quiteaware of what had happened regarding the liturgy. But after I was received intothe Church, I decided to attend Mass in center city Philadelphia, where I wasliving at the time.

 

     Suddenly, I walked into something that looked just likethe empty Protestant service I had left when I was seventeen. I'd been there,I'd seen it, I knew it. I thought, what is this? This can't be what I'vejoined, this can't be what it's about. Two thousand years can't have come tothis! I've already rejected this. Nonetheless, I still went to this new Massfor a while. Then I began doing the same thing again; I would sleep in onSunday mornings because there didn't seem to be a reason to go. Then one summerI was home visiting in Wisconsin where I am originally from. I decided tofulfill my duty and go to Mass. I got in the car to drive to Church "A". It wasmy intention to drive to Church "A", St. Patrick's. I knew where it was. Ibacked out of the driveway, I headed for St. Patrick's and somehow, I arrivedat Church "B", on the other side of town. It was one of those oddities. I wasthinking about other things, I was not paying attention. I wound up not just atthe wrong church, but at a church miles away from the one I intended to go to.I was at Sacred Heart Parish and I didn't know how I got there. I looked in.They had a Mass starting. I was just baffled. What am I doing here? But Ithought, I don't have time to get over to St. Patrick's. I'll go to Mass here.I walked inside and heard "Introibo ad altare Dei", and my goodness, there itwas. I heard this strange language. There was the priest with his back to us. Ihad no idea what was happening. I then realized that this was that "Old Mass"I'd heard about. About half way through it, I said to myself, this is Catholic!And I was home at a place that I had never known before. The old Mass, for me,at that moment, was entirely new. It was not "old". It was home! At thatinstant I knew that this is what the Catholic Faith is all about. I knew thatthis is how I would worship God in the future. I mentioned earlier that allgood things have come out of that Old Latin Mass, the Mass of all time. I'llgive you examples. I teach literature; I have a special love for music and forart. It is the Mass that gave us western music. The oldest western music wehave written is Gregorian Chant. If you take a music history course, you'llbegin with Chant, continue through Church music, and you won't find musicsecularized until much later. But even when music becomes secularized, you'restill going to have Mozart writing Masses and Haydn writing Masses. You'll evenhave someone like Beethoven who wrestled with God his whole life, still writingthe great "Missa solemnis" and seeing the priest on his death bed. That is thetraditional music. If you go to Western art, it is Catholic. It grows out ofthe Church. That's where it comes from. Western art as we know it comes fromthe Church. Go to an art gallery. Go back to the beginning of art and, (asidefrom Greece and Rome - still the beginning of art as we know it) the greatRenaissance works - their subject matter is Catholic. Go to literature, and youhave Dante, you have Shakespeare. The writers have been Catholic. All of thatcame out the Mass. The Novus Ordo Mass, in the thirty years its been around,has given us lousy music, lousy literature, putrid liturgical dancing. In fact,it has only given us one thing that has actually caught on and becomeculturally significant. And when I heard this, I nearly fell off my chair, butit's true. The New Mass gave us one thing that the culture knows, and that isBeavis and Butthead - that ghastly, ghastly cartoon series that all yourchildren know from MTV. I heard the creator of it speaking on television. Hewas asked how he came up with the idea. He answered, "Well I was sitting atMass in my Catholic high school, and I wasn't really paying attention, and thepriest said 'this is the body of Christ' and this guy behind me went 'heh hehheh heh heh heh heh,' and suddenly I got the whole thing in my mind and starteddrawing Beavis and Butthead." There you have the one cultural fruit of theNovus Ordo Mass. If you expect anything other than that from that ceremony, Iwould say, you're not going to get it. The best you can hope for is the kind ofbarrenness that Protestant worship has given to the world. Protestant worshiphas not produced great art, great music. It's given us a few good hymns, but ithas produced very little and now it's fading away. There is nothing more toproduce. The same will be true with the new Mass. It's time for those in theChurch to come home to the true Mass. The Mass is our heritage, even for thoseof us who were not born into it. It is our heritage. I thank God every day thatI found it. When I get up on Sunday mornings and make the hour drive to theTridentine Mass, it's nothing compared to the great glory and beauty of themajestic Sacrifice that awaits me there on the altar when I arrive.