Thoughts on the Death of Catholic Convert Robert Novak

Some initial links and thoughts on the death of Robert Novak via NRO. See here and here

From the more liberal part of the spectrum over at the New Republic see Michelle Cottle on Robert Novak

The Deacon Bench has Robert Novak, Catholic convert, dies. In that post Deacon excerpts something regarding Novak's Conversion to the Catholic Faith:

Meantime, Novak wrote about his conversion in that same memoir:
Novak was born Jewish and attended Christian services sporadically until the mid-1960s, after which he stopped going to religious services for nearly 30 years. But Novak said the Holy Spirit began to intervene in his life.A friend gave Novak Catholic literature after he came close to dying from spinal meningitis in the early 1980s. About a decade later, the columnist's wife, Geraldine, also not a Catholic, persuaded him to join her at Mass at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Washington.

The celebrant was a former source of Novak's.Father Peter Vaghi, now Msgr. Vaghi and pastor of the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda, Md., was a former Republican lawyer and adviser to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. He had been a source for the Evans and Novak column that Novak wrote with Rowland Evans.Novak started to go to Mass regularly, but it wasn't until a few years later that he decided to convert to Catholicism. The turning point, as he recounts in his book, happened when he went to Syracuse University in New York to give a lecture. Before he spoke, he was seated at a dinner table near a young woman who was wearing a necklace with a cross. Novak asked her if she was Catholic, and she posed the same question to him.Novak replied that he had been going to Mass each Sunday for the last four years, but that he had not converted.Her response – "Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever" – motivated him to start the process of becoming a Catholic through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.

He was baptized at St. Patrick's Church in 1998. His wife was also baptized a Catholic.Novak said he believed the Holy Spirit led him to Catholicism. He told an audience at the Heritage Foundation in Washington Aug. 2 that when he was interviewed by The New York Times about his book the interviewer scoffed at his story about his source turned priest.But Novak said he told her he believed the Holy Spirit was behind the coincidences."I consider this the only one true faith, so I believe the Holy Spirit led me to it," Novak said. "Then the next day Pope Benedict (XVI) said the same thing."