…cause the Catholics are providing them with so many leaders.

Terrence Berres points to the new director of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee: convert from Catholicism

Which follows up on last week’s buzz about the new head of the Islamic Society of North America:

A short, trim woman with a quiet manner that belies her authority, Ms. Mattson grew up, by her own description, as a good, middle-class Roman Catholic school girl in Kitchener, Canada, a suburban community about 60 miles southwest of Toronto. She attended a Catholic girls high school and took piano lessons at the convent, spending hours in church praying or contemplating the art. It was a peaceful asylum removed from the raucous household where she was the sixth of seven children.

At 16, though, she stopped attending Mass. “I believe I made a very serious attempt to understand my faith,” she said, repeatedly sitting with her religion teacher to ask questions about Catholicism and spirituality. She found the answers wanting, she said, less and less relevant to her teenage life.

Ms. Mattson enrolled in the nearby University of Waterloo to study philosophy and fine arts, a determined agnostic. In 1986, while studying in Paris, she met her first Muslims, mostly West African students, and was struck by their warmth, dignity and generosity