I
think there must have been a point somewhere in the history of my conversion to Catholicism when I realized that I'd never so completely misunderstood something as I had the Catholic Church. Over the course of ten years, I went from thinking of the Church as one of the worst institutions to have ever existed, to loving Her as a grateful son loves his mother. This is an extraordinary thing, and is itself one of the efficient causes of my conversion.
There are two layers to the kind of misunderstanding under which I was laboring. One of them was basically factual -- I was raised in a country informed by lingering Protestant mythology, and even though I considered myself anti-Christian in general, the distortions, exaggerations, and outright lies about the Catholic Church still made it through to me. Shedding these one by one, I came to realize that the stories about the Church were truly informed by prejudice -- they were targeted misinterpretations; for some reason the Catholic Church did not receive the benefit of the doubt that so many other historical institutions did, and wasn't far enough away to treat as "exotic". Therefore, everything the Church did had to be corrupt, somehow.
The second layer of misunderstanding is harder to describe. But basically, I had no concept of the Church as a theological instrument. When I was younger, I was profoundly uninterested in theology. I confidently threw out anything that smelled even a little theological, certain that it was nothing but a sack of nonsense. But, even beyond closing me off from a great deal of incredible thought, this closed off from me even the possibility that something like the Church could have a purpose. I refused to take the Church at Her word about what she was trying to do; I wouldn't even hear her word. I easily determined that the Church existed purely to reinforce existing power structures, and that was that.
Note this: to me, as an angry young atheist, the Church was only the bishops and kings, the ones with thrones and capes and crowns, the ones who knew it was all a lie and kept everyone else in the dark. Completely invisible to me were the priests, the monks, the nuns, the millions of ordinary Catholics in all corners of the globe over two millennia, the thousands of saints transformed by an unutterable love. I could not see them, and therefore, really, I couldn't see the Church. Like a magic act, a cloak was pulled away and I found that I was in a completely new place, many thousands of miles from where I had been only moments before. The hidden was made manifest, and the meaning of the God-man Jesus, the Christ, was there for me to grasp, if I wanted to. Opportunities like this don't come every day.