“The more real the English Church has been to you, and all your past experience in it, the more terrible the wrench.” — Fr. Basil Maturin I am thankful to
All Stories
My journey of faith began in the Cub Scouts at the age of eleven, working towards my religious medal. While the priest was explaining the Episcopalian theory of the Eucharist,
During Christmas vacation in December of 1997, my wife and I were spending the holidays with her family. At one of my sister-in-law’s homes I found a book sitting on the coffee table called Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic about a fundamentalist/evangelical Christian who had become Catholic. I thought it was a joke book. I had never heard of anyone who became Catholic. In fact, all the Catholics I knew were now Protestants. While there had been times when I was younger that I would have described myself as anti-Catholic, I had long since gotten over that. I no longer saw the Catholic Church as evil, only irrelevant.
Kevin’s questions about his Seventh-day Adventist faith lead him to trace Christianity back to its roots.
As a musician, Mark Lindeblad, always appreciated being “lifted up to the greatness of the Lord” through beauty and ritual during church services. Although his evangelical culture focused on “Jesus and me” spirituality, Mark felt the Lord moving him to a deeper relationship in the beauty and universality of the Catholic liturgy.
A study of the faith of America’s Founding Fathers led Christy Kellner on a quest to find the true, original Church that Christ established.
What finally pushed me over the threshold to Catholicism, and into the Church at the Vigil of 2011, was not any theological argument, but a longing for the grace found in the Eucharist.
I was baptized and confirmed in a nominally Catholic home. My dad’s 30-year career in the U.S. military and the diplomatic service led us overseas among many moves as our 6-child family grew up, spending years in Panama, Cuba, and Colombia. Despite a Jesuit education into high school, by the time we returned to Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s, I was a high school student growing rapidly disillusioned with my faith and with the Catholic Church.
I chose to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church when it became apparent to me that I no longer could confess the Creed, in which I made the claim to believe in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church and not be in communion with the Bishop of Rome, the Successor of St. Peter, and Pastor of the universal Church.
After bad experiences with Pentecostal “revivals” and living a young adulthood of drugs, violence, and suffering, Lisa Campbell sought refuge in an Assembly of God church. Lisa was introduced to Catholicism after she married a cradle-Catholic.
As a cradle Catholic who followed his wife into the Episcopal Church, Francis Jacobs realized he was “a Roman Catholic who happened to attend an Episcopal church.”
I have to begin my conversion story by relating something of my family life. My father worked for the government as an air traffic controller. They transferred him wherever they wished even though he had a family. So, we moved from state to state when I was a little girl. My youngest brother and I were born in Minnesota, our home state. I was born in 1948 in Minnesota and baptized October 31 that same year in Selma, Alabama, which tells how often we moved. My other brother and sister were each born in a different Southern state. Because of our constant moving, establishing a stable spiritual home was quite difficult for us.