“I was brought up in a kind of Southern Baptist fundamentalism that taught me to despise and fear Roman Catholics. Catholic horror stories were a regular feature of home and church. But I never really caught on to the problem. Sure, they were baby-baptizing ritualists who drank beer and slavishly obeyed the pope, but the ones I knew were really good people. My buddy Joe’s family was a lot healthier than my messed up family, and they were as Catholic as you could get. Their graciousness to me made an impression that’s never left, and though my attempts to evangelize them at a Billy Graham movie were unsuccessful, it was hard to deny that these folks were as serious about their Christianity as my bunch was about Bible-thumping fundamentalism. It was different, but I couldn’t deny that it was real.” (>>)