Is All-American Grace Saving Grace?

More than 20 years ago, an elderly, foreign-born Catholic priest told me, "You can't imagine how different it was here when I first came here in the '60s. Catholics and Protestants didn't really talk to each other. It's so much better now."

He was talking about clerics, mostly, but it was still startling news to me. I was born in the late '60s, around the time this priest moved to town. Sure, we Protestants had our suspicions about what Catholics really believed, but to keep them at a social distance? People really did that once? It was about as bizarre to folks of my generation as the thought that blacks and whites were once segregated by law. A year after my conversation with the old priest, I joined a parish class of inquirers seeking conversion to Catholicism, but left angry and discouraged after three months of regular meetings. We'd had lots of guided meditation and feel-good talks, but no doctrine, no substance, nothing solid.