I’m still working my way through Pope Benedict’s Dogma and Preaching and came across something that I can just about imagine myself using the next time we meet with people looking into becoming Catholic. It encapsulates the basis of conversion in a particularly Benedictine fashion:
First of all, it seems important to me that the Church does not regard becoming a Christian as the result of a course of instruction or even of a training process. She regards it as a sacrament. This means that no one becomes a Christian by his own unaided power. No one can make himself a Christian. It is not an’s business or within his competence to upgrade himself, as it were, into a great-souled person and finally into a Christian. On the contrary, the process of becoming a Christian begins only when a person sloughs off any illusion of autonomy and self-sufficiency; when he acknowledges that man does not create himself and cannot bring himself to fulfillment but must open himself and allow himmself to be led to his own true self.
