Religion: Converts by Mail

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FREE CORRESPONDENCE COURSE IN THE

CATHOLIC RELIGION, said the top line of the ad in the Lubbock (Texas) Avalanche-Journal (circ. 23,000) one day in 1946. The ad continued:

"Almost half of the people living in the United States are affiliated with no Church or Religious Society . . . Enrich yourself spiritually with the glorious and immortal teachings of the God-man Jesus Christ as those teachings have come through the centuries straight as an arrow to you. Sit back and relax and study the teachings of the Saviour in the quiet and privacy of your home. How? By enrolling today in the free Correspondence Course on the Catholic Religion. No obligation of any kind . . . Your only expense in this interesting and God-given Course is the three-cent stamp on your original letter. Write today!"

The ad was the beginning of an experiment by the Paulist Fathers of Lubbock, to see whether potential converts who are too shy or lazy to ring the rectory doorbell could be led there by correspondence. In the American Ecclesiastical Review, Paulist Father Maurice Fitzgerald tells how the experiment developed.

The Lubbock advertising produced good results, especially when a framed picture of the Last Supper was offered as a "diploma." A series of twelve ads brought 168 requests for the course, resulted in 17 known conversions in about a year. In 1948, the Paulists tried the experiment on a larger scale in Boston.

During a two-year period, 30 three-column, ten-inch ads drew 6,726 requests for the course. Of these, says Father Fitzgerald, 248 people either joined the Roman Catholic Church or began personal instruction with a priest. The cost to the Paulists: slightly less than $40 a convert, which, compared with the "colossal" cost of operating a parochial school, "brings out very well the reasonableness of educating . . . people in the Catholic religion through the Correspondence Home Study Course." Indeed, writes Father Fitzgerald, the combination of newspaper ads and home study has proved itself "perhaps the chief means today of recruiting non-Catholics to study the Catholic religion."