Is Dinesh D'Souza a "High Profile" Fallen-Away Catholic? (vs. Steve Hays)

 
Anti-Catholic Reformed Protestant polemicist Steve Hays thought that he scored a big zinger against Catholics. He wrote:

Catholics like to hype high-profile conversions or reversions to Rome. But someone traffic [sic] in the opposite direction doesn't get quite the same press.

(Turning from Rome, 7-29-11)

He then cited an article D'Souza wrote (dated 8-31-10), explaining that he was not a Catholic. The trouble is the definition of "high profile." I agree that D'Souza is a prominent conservative writer and general Christian apologist. But a "high profile conversion or reversion" is generally regarded as a person who was solidly in the Protestant or Catholic camp and then moved to another. If a person was never truly a zealous partisan of his or her former communion, I fail to see how this is a "high profile" deconversion, no matter how prominent the person may otherwise be, because the key factor is not the successes of their career or how great their occupational fame, but rather, the religious and theological factors in particular.

Thus, Hays' point is fundamentally flawed. Here I am writing about a person he thinks represents some hugely significant "victory" for evangelical Protestantism over against Catholicism (whereas he thinks Catholics don't and won't do so). He's wrong about that. Nor is this the first time I have (as an apologist and convert myself, and student of such things) treated deconversion. I wrote about Bill Cork (Adventist-to-Catholic-to Adventist) two times (one / two). I showed there that he hadn't really firmly grounded himself in Catholicism.

Our task as Catholic apologists is to show (in these instances) that inadequate reasoning was brought to bear in forsaking of the Catholic Church, or that there was no firm commitment to begin with. I think I did that in Cork's case, and shall do so in D'Souza's in a moment. I've also critiqued many stories of atheist deconversion out of Christianity in general, showing each time, I believe, that the reasons were inadequate or fallacious.

And I have responded to ridiculous attacks on Catholic converts (such as Francis Beckwith or former Anglican, Fr. Al Kimel), that try to run down the person involved and attack their integrity and/or their previous knowledge. I've been the recipient of many such attacks, myself (uniformly wrongheaded and usually weighed-down by the most ludicrous errors of simple fact, or absurd attempts at mind- and heart-reading).

But back to D'Souza. Why would I deny that he was a "high profile Catholic"? I do so based on his own report in the very article that Hays sent his readers to. He was never firmly in the Catholic camp to begin with (thus his departure is of no very large significance at all, in terms of an anti-Catholic or contra-Catholic apologetic or confirmation). No one need take my word for it. He says it plainly himself, after protesting that the very inquiries about his religious status constituted a "bizarre question" and a "strange business." Near the end of the article, he describes it as "largely a non-issue."

Well, I think devoted partisans of either side think it is a very important question and business and issue (as Francis Beckwith himself noted in a critique article of D'Souza). The fact that D'Souza does not, plausibly gives some indication, I think, of his less than total commitment to theological maters of great importance. Otherwise, why speak in those denigratory terms? He wasn't even "fully committed" to his newfound evangelicalism until after seven years attending church with his wife (suggesting that his prior Catholic commitment was not all that profound, either). Here are his words (my bolding):

. . . he quoted from a profile on me that Rosey Grier did in his book All-American Heroes: Multicultural Success Stories. Greer [sic] quoted me as saying that I was a Catholic but not a very good one. What the Chronicle writer failed to notice is that the Greer quotation was from the late 1980s—long before I became a born-again Christian.. . .

I was raised Catholic in India. That's because I come from Goa, where the Portuguese missionaries arrived starting in the sixteenth century. My ancestors converted to Catholicism. My family was conventionally Catholic, but not very devout. Later in his life, my father became a charismatic Catholic. I also attended Jesuit school in Mumbai and was exposed to the Catholic intellectual tradition. While I was lukewarm in my Catholic practice, I continued to draw on this tradition in my early career as a writer. The vast majority of my work, however, has been secular.

Why, then, would Hays, in his infinite wisdom, think that this case has any bearing on relative truth claims one way or the other? It is simply another example, out of millions, of a Catholic who neither fully practiced nor understood his faith, going somewhere else (from the looks of it, mainly due to his wife). D'Souza said it himself.

Moreover, on his own More About Dinesh D'Souza page (from Rosey Grier's book of 1992), he stated that he was a "believing Catholic but a poorly practicing one." That was three years before he started regularly attending evangelical churches. This is no exemplar of Catholic orthodoxy or practice.  Yet I am to believe that he is a "high profile" Catholic? He was not at all. I can't find any indication whatever (by his own report) that he was.

In a 2009 interview by Stan Guthrie (BreakPoint, November 12 and 19, 2009), D'Souza verifies yet again what is seen above (my bolding again):

I was raised Catholic in Bombay, India. The Portuguese missionaries came to India starting in the 16th century. Somewhere along the line, they seem to have located one of my ancestors and brought him to Christianity, possibly by whopping him over the head. It was the age of the Portuguese Inquisition. Hey, I'm glad it happened, although I'm not sure my hapless ancestor would agree. Even so I sometimes say I was raised with "crayon Christianity."

This is a simplified Christianity, and too many of us learn this from our parents and never outgrow it. We never develop a mature Christianity that can withstand the assaults of secular culture. I married an evangelical Christian in 1992, and after our daughter was born in 1995, we started attending a nondenominational church in the Washington D.C. area. But my faith remained lukewarm, wounded, you might say, by the influences of secular culture. Only when we moved to California did we start attending a Calvary Chapel church, and I found people who took their Christianity very seriously and whose faith shaped their whole life. This also began to happen with me. Basically I went from being a crayon Christian and a lukewarm Christian to being a mature and passionate Christian.

I rest my case. Now we can all be entertained by Hay's inevitable sophistical spin. Somehow under his magical abilities of obscurantism D'Souza shall be transformed into (formerly) a devout, fully observant Catholic, and one who should trouble us, as if his departure casts doubt on Catholic truth claims in any way, shape, or form.