Dave Brubeck, Catholic convert

Dave Brubeck (1920 - 2012 AD), the American jazz pianist and composer, best known for the jazz classic "Take Five," was a convert to Catholicism.  Although the horrors he witnessed during his service with Patton's Third Army in World War II jolted Brubeck into a spiritual awakening, he didn't actually convert until 1980.  However, Brubeck didn't think "conversion" described his case very well, since, as he said "I didn't convert to Catholicism, because I wasn't anything to convert from. I just joined the Catholic Church."  In 2006, the University of Notre Dame awarded Brubeck its Laetare Medal, its oldest and most prestigious honor.

Brubeck composed a jazz Mass, which is not my cup of tea, but you can listen to some of it here:

Converts - why do they do it?

Evelyn Waugh and family, circa 1949 AD
Parts of this family look happy

Philip Trower, English author and convert, has written an essay about his conversion in which he suggests that all converts become Catholic for the same reason:

"…they come to realise that the Church is what it claims to be: the sole authorised guardian and disseminator of the one true revelation of God to men through which they can know with certainty the purpose of their existence and their final destiny.”

The English poet Sally Read says something very similar:

“I realized that there was only one Church and the way to be closest to Christ was to be a Catholic, because it’s the Eucharist and taking Communion.”

Evelyn Waugh, a far more famous English author and convert, substantially concurs.  Waugh, who converted in 1930, once explained that he had concluded by the age of 16 that “Catholicism was Christianity,” but then ignored religion for the next decade.   Finding that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God,” Waugh converted.   For Waugh, his faith was not merely a source of comfort; it was, in his view,  “the essence.”

There have been many converts and we can never know all of their reasons for converting, but, at least amongst English writers, the reasons do appear remarkably alike.