Slow Dawning: From Unbelief to Belief

Slow Dawning

Some conversion stories begin with an inherited Christian faith and end with entrance into the Catholic Church. Wilmar H. Shiras began much farther away. When she first approached the priest she calls “Father Brown,” she could tell him plainly that she did not believe in the Church, the Bible, or Christ. She was nevertheless willing to listen, to read, and above all to find out whether what Catholics claimed was true.

She expected the matter to be settled in a few weeks or months. Instead, the process occupied nearly a decade.

Slow Dawning is the record of what happened during those years. Shiras does not write as someone who found Catholicism easy to accept. She brings to the Church the assumptions of a secular education, a strong interest in science, wide reading, skepticism toward revealed religion, and what she freely admits was a formidable measure of intellectual pride. Her questions are therefore not staged objections placed in the mouth of an imaginary skeptic. They were her own.

God and the human soul, the historical credibility of the New Testament, the Resurrection, original sin, the Trinity, confession, the Eucharist, marriage, prayer, the saints, moral law, authority, suffering, grace, and the claims of the Catholic Church all come under examination. Shiras describes not merely what she eventually came to believe, but how old assumptions were tested, resisted, reconsidered, and finally abandoned.

This gives the book its unusual character. Slow Dawning is neither a systematic catechism nor an abstract work of apologetics. It is the testimony of an intelligent skeptic thinking her way through Catholic doctrine one difficulty at a time. Shiras can be humorous, impatient, self-critical, argumentative, and remarkably candid. The result is a conversion account that retains something of the immediacy of discovery: Catholicism is still new enough to her that the reader can see familiar doctrines through the eyes of someone encountering their meaning for the first time.

Shiras herself explains that she wrote particularly for non-Catholics interested in the Church—especially those convinced that they could never join it. She hoped not to provide an exhaustive exposition of Catholic teaching, but to remove misunderstandings, answer difficulties, and encourage readers to examine more carefully things they may previously have dismissed.

The book is equally valuable for Catholics. What may appear obvious from inside the Church can look very different from outside it. Shiras remembers both worlds well enough to explain the distance between them. For priests and those engaged in teaching or evangelization, her account offers a particularly useful view of the intellectual barriers that may remain long after a person has begun sincerely seeking the truth—and of the patience sometimes required before those barriers fall.

First published in 1946 under the name Jane Howes, Slow Dawning was the first major work of Wilmar H. Shiras, later celebrated in science-fiction circles as the author of Children of the Atom. Yet this earlier and deeply personal book concerns another kind of discovery: the slow recognition of a world she once believed herself entirely outside, and the faith that ultimately changed what she called her “whole philosophy of life.”

About This Edition

Originally published in 1946, this Arouca Press edition is based on the 1948 edition published by B. Herder in London and St. Louis. The subtitle From Unbelief to Belief has been added to the present edition. It includes the original preface by the Most Rev. Robert E. Lucey, S.T.D., Archbishop of San Antonio, together with a new biographical note on Wilmar H. Shiras.

A book for those outside the Church, those newly within it,
and those who have forgotten what the Church can look like from the doorstep.