I suspect the reason why this thread, begun in 2008, is still running three years later (!) is that the issues remain important.

Just came across this thread again, and I am very glad to see it is still alive. Looking back at my post, I am surprised at myself for (a) not seeing the triumphalism it could suggest and (b) giving the slightest hint that I think there is any such thing as a completed Christian on this earth. My experience coming into full communion with the Catholic Church a few years after conversion *to Christ*, having experienced vibrant faith in a nominally non- or inter-denominational evangelical community, and sharing that faith with converts *to Christ* within many other denominations, was frustrated by just those sorts of attitudes in our RCIA program (among other issues).

I think that realistically no short label for any of us will ever convey the meaning and substance of our journeys through faith, and that only conversation can. Thanks for adding to it.

Maybe there shouldn’t be a single term, and it ought always to be a description. Maybe we need to guard against wearing our faith history like a football jersey, to say which team we’re on. But I continue to muse about this because so often people do reach for a word that corresponds to their experience, one that is different for better or worse from that of “cradle Catholics” who absorbed the Catholic ethos from their earliest memories.

By the way, I think the term “cradle Catholics” for those baptized in infancy is charming, whereas “born Catholic” drives me up the wall. No one is “born Catholic” or indeed born by nature as any type of Christian — we enter the communion of faith “by water and the Spirit.” In this sense, Christianity has always been different from both Judaism and Islam. But that’s another discussion.

Thanks for offering another example. It’s great that Deacon Jones has found fulfillment of his Pentecostalism in the Catholic Church. But I wouldn’t recommend the expression “completed” for general use. Although it’s intention is to affirm the background of the person who became Catholic, it could come across as quite the opposite: a put-down. “I’m complete, you’re not.” When we talk about these things we should, as much as possible, put ourselves in the shoes of the person we are talking to. How will that person hear what we are saying? Will we seem to be puffed up with pride? I like to talk about the ongoing journey of faith because it suggests that none of us is complete yet!