Beginnings of Faith

The call to be a priest began at a tender age, even though my parents did not go to church. Although they had me baptized as a baby at the Presbyterian church in Napa, CA, where I grew up, I never attended Sunday school or worship services. Their religion was golf. Despite this, I built an altar in my bedroom with a picture of Pope Pius XII and some other odds and ends — a Bible from my grandmother and a creche I had asked for at Christmas. It was a cheap plastic nativity scene, but it meant a lot to me.

Growing up in a very Catholic town in northern California, many of my friends went to Mass each Sunday with their families. Occasionally, I was invited to attend with them. The old Latin Mass enthralled me. For my friends it was boring, but for me it was beautiful. I didn’t dare to think that, one day, I might be the priest standing at the altar, but I longed to be an altar boy like my cousins.

After graduating from high school in 1963, I joined a group of 20 graduates on a study tour of Europe. The local Rabbi, Dr. Leo Trepp, was our leader. He was one of those I recalled during my ordination. I was anxious to learn as much as I could on the trip, and a highlight of the experience was that we happened to be in Rome for the coronation of Pope Paul VI. I gloried in the many churches we visited and decided that, when I got home in September, I would become Catholic. However, my father didn’t approve.

During a “what do you want to be when you grow up” conversation with him, I mentioned that I thought I wanted to be a priest. It didn’t go well. At the end of the argument, he said, “Why don’t you go to your own church?” I responded, “Which church is that?” He said, “Your grandmother is Episcopalian.” The next Sunday, I headed to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. It was “high church” and looked Catholic, so I signed on. After confirmation, I began serving at the altar. Receiving communion was the highlight of my life.

Episcopalian Seminary, Priesthood, and Tragedy

In my junior year of college, I met an Episcopal priest who was the chaplain at Sacramento State University. I spent the summer in Sacramento taking English classes and living at Canterbury House, a small residence for Episcopalian students. Fr. Al was young and a great preacher, and I became one of his disciples. Being close at hand, I blindly followed him — he was, after all, Jesus’ man, no? Sadly, he took advantage of me and abused me, though I was not underage. For me, it was a deeply confusing time. I thought I could get closer to Jesus by being close to Fr. Al, and he assured me it was not a sin.

Many other students would have jumped at the opportunity to be in a special relationship with Fr. Al, but I was conflicted and troubled. Was there something about me that invited this? What I needed from him was for him to be a holy priest, but he had misinterpreted my devotion to him as a come-on. I remembered that incident years later, when young people would look at me as if I were Jesus; I saw how easy it could be for me to take advantage of them.

College over, I applied for seminary; the bishop sent me to Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) in Berkeley. During that year, Fr. Al moved to the East Coast, and I never saw him again. Oddly, he was one of the people who came to mind at my Catholic ordination. Even though he hurt me, he was also a factor in my call. One of the faculty at CDSP mentioned in passing that Fr. Al had given me a negative recommendation — in the language of the day, he suggested I had a “hang-up.” The professor concluded that, regardless, I really was in the right place in seminary.

In my last year of seminary, I had another very powerful, though confusing, experience. A priest gave a lecture on the charismatic renewal, and that same evening, as I knelt on the floor of my dorm, I received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. The seminary education was designed to call everything into question; it was the era of “demythologization,” and Rudolf Bultmann was our guide. He taught that anything “supernatural” was added by the early Church, and he doubted that Jesus had even existed. After my powerful and emotional encounter with Christ, I was completely undone and even more confused and troubled.

I needed to sort through my education and square it with my personal experience of Christ, so I postponed ordination and spent the next few years reading and discerning the truth of Christ. I had never read C.S. Lewis, but he became my guide during those years and helped me to sort out my faith. I was eventually ordained in the Episcopal Church in November of 1972, and began serving a small congregation outside Sacramento. In a few years, the parish had grown dramatically, and when a leader in the congregation who was grievously ill was miraculously healed, the growth exploded. (By the way, this healed man also showed up in my mind at my ordination.) Suddenly, the charisms of the Holy Spirit were flooding into the ministries as Christ drew in ever more people.

The bishop had the reputation of being very negative toward the Charismatic Renewal, and with what was happening in the parish I needed to make an appointment and tell him. After my tale of the healed man and the movement of the Spirit, I waited anxiously for the bishop to fire me. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and said “Well, praise the Lord.”

My preaching was “confirmed… by the signs that attended it” (Mark 16:20) and my faith was strong, but the enemy counterattacked. I had gotten married a couple years before, and when Kathy, my wife, gave birth to our first, the child was stillborn. My world collapsed, and many of the old conflicts and troubles resurfaced. I blamed Kathy for the death of the child; it’s a long story, but in essence she had been raised in Christian Science and feared the medical establishment, so she decided to give birth at home. The death of David, our baby, divided us, and my coping mechanism was to throw myself totally into my work. Eventually, after years of counseling, we separated. I left the parish for another one in Berkeley, while also teaching part-time at the seminary. An affluent congregation gave funds to provide full-time ministry for three years, with the idea that the Good Shepherd mission there would grow and become self-sufficient. Early on, the plan seemed to be working, but my depression increased, and I felt like I was wandering in a wasteland. It was clear to me that I needed to do something else to make a living. There were several nurses in the congregation, and they said, “Go to nursing school.” (At the time there was a terrific shortage of nurses.) So, I continued half-time at the church and went to school.

The AIDS Epidemic and Our Lady

When I started working full-time at the hospital, I resigned from the parish, and when a position came open in the AIDS unit at Kaiser San Francisco, I jumped at it. I had a desire to care for the lepers of our time, and it seemed to me that I had found a new ministry. I worked in that unit for seven years during the height of the epidemic. Little we did made any difference to our patients, who died in vast numbers. (Oddly, some of those patients who had made an impression on me were also in my mind as I prostrated myself at the altar during my Catholic ordination.) The Archdiocese of San Francisco supplied a Catholic chaplain to our unit, Sister Mercedes, who came seven days a week to see her “muchachos,” as she called them.

One day, we were both in the break room, and I asked her, “Sister, how do you find the strength to do this ministry?” She said, “Have you heard of the Virgin of Guadalupe?” I had, but I knew nothing about the apparition. She explained that the Mother of Jesus had called her to do this work in His name. That didn’t mean much to me; I believed in the virgin birth of Jesus, but Mary had never been much of a focus for my faith. I watched Sister visit with the boys; many had been raised Catholic, but because of their lifestyle, they were angry and separated from God and their families. I watched her non-judgmental approach and saw the miracle of reconciliation occur as they approached death. I perceived that something truly holy and special was occurring through her ministry.

One Sunday, after working all night and having several patients die in our unit, I went to the Episcopal church where I was resident. Church of the Advent in San Francisco is a very “high” church, and near the altar, there was a shrine to the Blessed Virgin. After the service, I knelt before it to commend the souls of those who had died to God. I felt that her arms embraced me, and in her, the arms of Jesus were opening to me, calling me.

Not long thereafter, I caught pneumonia from one of our patients and ended up in the hospital for 10 days with horrible complications. I remember waking up one night, not knowing where I was, profoundly fearful, and calling out to the Lord. He showed Himself to my mind with His arms extended, saying, “Come to me.” I saw that, while I had not abandoned my faith, I had put everything else before God.

When I was well enough to go back to church, I ended up attending the local Catholic parish. The crucifix in the front of the church, always in the past a symbol to me of Christ’s atoning sacrifice and suffering, was transformed in my mind to the living Christ, who said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). As I wept my way through the Mass that Sunday, I knew that I had a clear call to “come home.”

Conversion and a New Priesthood

I spent the next few months talking to as many priests as I could to begin the process of finally becoming Catholic. I started RCIA at a parish south of the city and was confirmed at the Easter Vigil in 1995.

At first, the call seemed to be for me to put Christ and his Church ahead of everything else, and because I had experienced enough turmoil in the ministry of the Episcopal Church, I had no interest in ordination. But my pastor kept encouraging me, so I took a long weekend retreat at the Carmelite House of Prayer in Napa Valley, praying and seeking God’s face. After the retreat, I visited my dad, and he could tell something was happening. I explained to him that I wished to move toward ordination, and he gave me his blessing. Still, there were several obstacles I needed to deal with.

First, I needed an annulment to move forward, and Kathy, my ex-wife, was dead set against it. Oddly, when the annulment was granted, not only did it open the door to seminary for me, but Kathy met someone and married. We had been separated for 13 years, but it took the healing of the annulment process to open the door for her to a new marriage. Annulment does open up old wounds and fears, but also resolves them; it is truly a healing process. In 1998, I entered St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, CA. I didn’t need to complete the whole curriculum since I had several degrees, but the faculty required two years of residence in order to give a recommendation.

I worried that it would be a miserable time and feared I might be turned down for ordination, but I felt that I had to trust Jesus’ leading and give 100 percent. Those two years were actually wonderful; I had a library at my disposal, classes I found interesting, and fellow seminarians who accepted me and made me a part of that community. Having the opportunity to go to Mass daily kept me growing. That summer, I went to Mexico to do language immersion with 17 other seminarians. During that time, four of us went to Mexico City and the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I entered the shrine more or less a skeptic, but was encountered by “la Virgencita.” As I gazed upon the image on the tilma (reed cloak) of St. Juan Diego, her hands seemed to open, and her extraordinary presence in that place brought me face to face with Jesus, her Son. After the visit, I read everything I could on Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as the other apparitions and Church teaching on Mary. Another obstacle dissipated.

The big obstacle, though, was authority. From the outside, the Catholic Church appears as a big monolith that gives little freedom to the People of God, requiring them to have blind faith. I learned, however, that this is not the way the Church actually functions. At every step along the way, I had the opportunity to question and to engage the truth. The bishops have life and death authority over seminarians, and as a part of the process of ordination, we were required to give assent to the Magisterium of the Church — that is, to the Pope and the body of bishops. Much time was spent on understanding the dogmatic teaching of the Church (Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement) and to understanding teachings such as priestly celibacy and other elements of priestly life and ministry. I was never forced to accept anything to which I didn’t freely and openly give consent. In the ordination liturgy, we are asked to give respect and obedience to the bishop and his successors. In sum, I came to understand that being docile and open to the truth made my promise of obedience something that clarified the relationship between the priest and his bishop. Along the way, I read from cover to cover the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I found reasonable, and in short, true. The documents of the Second Vatican Council were also a great help for understanding why the Church teaches as she does. After being immersed in Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxy (correct practice) in the seminary, the pieces fell into place for me as I moved toward the goal of priestly ordination.

That is not to say that I did not struggle. When I arrived at St. Patrick’s Seminary midyear, I was placed with a class that would be ordained in 2000. My ordination was held back until 2001, in order to fulfill the faculty’s obligation of completing two full academic years for a recommendation. It was painful to watch my classmates being ordained while I was not. However, with patience and trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I was ordained a transitional deacon in January of 2001, and then shortly thereafter, on February 22nd, I was ordained a priest.

On the Job

After ordination, I was assigned to St. Joachim parish in Hayward, a large multicultural parish with an excellent school and many ministries. I jumped right in with my first pastor, Fr. Sergio; there were also three newly ordained deacons and an excellent staff.

It was during the “Long Lent” of 2001, when the sexual abuse crisis erupted. The Oakland diocese had been very proactive in protecting children, but with all the pain that resulted from the revelation of the abuses, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I was also delegated by my pastor to call on and spend time with families who had suffered at the hands of a particular notorious priest who had been assigned to St. Joachim some years before. The diocese had set aside funds to enable counseling for the abuse victims, but for the most part the families did not want to deal with it. As a result of the abuse of their children, most of them were no longer practicing their faith, but there were a couple of families who were still active in the parish. While it is all too human to sweep such pain under the rug, my own experience of abuse helped me to empower those who would take advantage of the resources we had made available. By the end of the year, I felt that we had made a difference.

St. Joachim parish also gave me my first opportunities to celebrate the Mass and preach in Spanish. The faithful who worshiped in Spanish were very kind and enabled me to get comfortable with the liturgy in a second language. Because they were so welcoming, I got good experience toward my second assignment, which was as pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Concord. St. Francis had been an entirely English-speaking community. Although they permitted Spanish Masses in the church, these Masses were celebrated by priests from an organization called Concord Hispanic Ministries; they had Masses in three parishes, as well as in school auditoriums.

The bishop decided to put the Spanish speaking Catholics back into the parishes and dissolve Concord Hispanic Ministries, so the day I arrived at St. Francis, 2,400 Spanish speaking families arrived as well. It was good for an overly entitled English speaking congregation to make room for others, although there were stresses and strains along the way. Sadly, the previous pastor had a serious drinking problem that ultimately took his life, and the pastor before him had active Alzheimer’s disease for several years, and some of the staff of both school and parish had taken advantage of the leadership void, getting paid for doing nothing. All that had to be cleaned up while I lived my first year at St. Francis of Assisi, a parish that one of my brother priests described as “notoriously cranky.” Human relations is the cross of being a parish leader, but with faith and perseverance, we got through the transition, and I settled in for an anticipated long ministry there. But that was not to be.

I gave my obedience to the bishop that ordained me, but he was replaced in 2002 by Bishop Allen Vigneron (now Archbishop Vigneron of Detroit). One of the parishes out in the Delta area of California, Immaculate Heart of Mary in Brentwood, needed a new pastor, and some dozen brother priests had turned it down. Too far away, too much Spanish, and too much debt were the usual reasons given. Finally, our new bishop called in desperation and asked if I would consider it; my answer, based on obedience, was an unqualified “yes.” The parish had been without a pastor for a couple of years, and a young priest, Fr. Ken, with whom I was very close, was their temporary administrator. I called Fr. Ken and drove out to Brentwood. He showed me the church, which had been built in 2004; it was now the end of 2006. In the course of our time together, I confided in him that the bishop had asked me to be pastor. I asked if he could give me some time to spend in the church to pray and seek the Lord’s will. The new church was beautiful, thoroughly from the post-Vatican II era, but with traditional elements that made it feel like a church. I had the sense that Jesus’ arms were opening to me in that place, that He was calling me to be there. I ended up being the pastor of that parish for 10 years, and it grew from some 1,700 families to over 6,000 during my time there. Demographics drove that growth, but the parish was also alive and bursting with ministries.

For me, it is the people who make up the parish, and I quickly fell in love with them. Fortunately, they seemed to respond to me as well. The enormous debt I had inherited was paid off within a couple of years, allowing us to borrow around four million dollars to build a hall, offices, and classrooms. This new debt was also retired before I left. I asked the bishop to allow me to retire in my 70th year, partly because I had experienced a brush with cancer, but also because the day-to-day pressure on a pastor is enormous, even though most people think we only work one day a week.

Retired but Still Working for the Lord

Jesus always calls us to himself and to ongoing conversion. After retiring, I immediately got involved in ministry in the diocese of Stockton, where I moved to be near family. I hadn’t expected to be busy, but I love being a priest and doing the things that priests do. In 2022, Bishop Myron Cotta of Stockton asked that I take on a parish in crisis: St. Anthony in Manteca. The previous pastor had resigned, and the circumstances greatly divided the community. It was my task to heal those wounds, or rather be the midwife that allowed Jesus to heal them. St. Anthony is a wonderful parish with a great school and many ministries, and I was graced to be present for the transition of the parish from the loss of their previous pastor into their preparation for a new one. Behind the church’s altar stands a life-size crucifix, with Jesus inviting the faithful in with outstretched arms. I mentioned previously the verse about the Son of Man being lifted up and drawing all to Him (John 12:32) — this, coupled with the sight of such a dramatic crucifix was, and remains, a powerful image and message, not only for me personally, but definitely for the people as they returned to Mass at the end of the pandemic. It is true that Jesus continues to love us and call us. I am grateful to the Lord, who has opened His arms to me, and through my ministry, to those who have come to love Him.

My personal experience, especially with abuse, caused me more than a little heartbreak, not to mention downright confusion as to what it said about me as a priest. Abuse is not the stigma of a single church, though; it is found everywhere. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we respond. Because God was always my loving Father, Mary my loving mother, and Jesus the source of all good, by the grace of God, I did not respond with anger and hatred toward the Church and the priesthood. Perhaps my experience was less drastic than others; still, my simple faith is that, when we are faithful to God, He can use every experience in our lives to bring good out of evil, life out of death.

The post I Will Draw All People To Myself appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Several circumstances, including the onset of COVID-19, caused him to reconsider the meaning of his vocation, and where he was truly called to be. For John and his wife, the intercession of Mary and the saints — especially St. Boniface — were the final thing that really convinced them they needed to become Catholic.

Read a written version of John’s testimony

The post John Bacon – Former Anglican Priest appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Seth’s latest book with his wife, Amber, is called The Deep Down Things.

The post Seth Haines – Former Evangelical Protestant appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Read a written version of Don’s testimony.

The post Don McLane – Former Presbyterian and Anglican appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God…”

So begins God’s Grandeur, one of the most famous poems from 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose works did not begin to gain wide notoriety until after his death. And while his work is regarded as highly influential in the history of the Western literary tradition, his conversion to Catholicism and his vocation to the priesthood as a member of the Society of Jesus are not as widely known.

Hopkins was born into a prominent Anglican family in 1844, and several of his relatives were involved in various artistic pursuits, from the visual arts to music and poetry, as well as the study of languages. All of these interests were instilled in Hopkins from a young age and led him to pursue an education at Oxford. While there, he developed a friendship with Robert Bridges, who would go on to later become Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. It was also during this time that he became more engaged with both ascetic practices and the pursuit of beauty. These questions began to lead him beyond his Anglican roots and deeper into the Catholic tradition.

This search for his true spiritual home finally came to a head when Hopkins decided to reach out to one of England’s most famous Catholic converts: St. John Henry Newman. Newman had entered the Catholic Church in 1845, a year after Hopkins was born, and was well known in England among Anglicans and Catholics alike by the time Hopkins was studying at Oxford. Hopkins was able to meet with Newman in person in 1866, and it was Newman himself who received Hopkins into the Church in October of that year.

Like many 19th century Anglican converts, the decision to become Catholic caused conflict and estrangement between Hopkins and his family, and also had an impact on his academic and professional trajectory. The employment question was initially resolved when Hopkins was offered a job at the Birmingham Oratory by Newman, and it was not long after taking that position that Gerard felt a strong call to religious life as a Jesuit. Having written poetry for years, he initially perceived there to be a conflict between his poetic interests and his religious vocation; in a moment of passion, he burned most of his poems, and didn’t write again for another seven years. This mix of artistic fervor, ascetic impulse, and melancholic swings would mark the trajectory of Hopkins’ entire adult life.

Over time, however, Hopkins began to see that there need be no conflict between his love of poetry and his priesthood, and he began to write poetry again. Only a few of these poems made it to print during his lifetime, as his innovative use of meter and imagery from nature were not always understood by editors and publishers. Unfortunately, by the time he had reached his 40’s, Hopkins found it more and more difficult to write, due to increasing difficulties with his health, and a nagging worry that pursuing publication of his poetry might lead to pride, which he constantly feared would be an impediment to his vocation as a Jesuit priest.

Hopkins died in 1889 at only 44 years of age, and it wasn’t until 1918 that his work received wider distribution and acclaim. His old friend Robert Bridges, who had been named Poet Laureate in 1913, decided to use his own influence to get some anthologies of Hopkins’ work published. In those years following World War I, the uniqueness of Hopkins’ style and the insights of his writing finally took hold with a wider audience, going on to influence such major 20th century poets as W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot.

Hopkins was a complex and interesting figure; his struggles with both physical and mental health, especially toward the end of his life, reveal swings between wonder at God’s creation, and melancholy over the state of the world and his own soul. But through all of his poetry, a distinct sacramental worldview shines through. God is the Father of all, by whose hand all things are made, and whatever causes wonder ultimately points to him. As Hopkins writes in the closing line of his poem “Pied Beauty”:

“He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.”

The post Gerard Manley Hopkins: Convert, Poet, Priest appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

*****

I wrote this essay over a decade ago when I was in a very different phase of life. I’d given up my position as the pastor of a lovely little church on Cape Cod and relocated with my wife and three children to St. Louis. Here, we were received into the Church, and I began the process of being ordained to the priesthood. Even then, I was still feeling my way into the Catholic Church. At the time this essay was published at the website Called To Communion, it garnered a number of responses, one of which was the question of how I might feel in the future about the words I had written. Would I still feel happy to be Catholic?

I have to say, I feel the exact same today. I still find myself, even if I’m older and wearier in some ways, standing in wonder and awe before Christ and his Church. If anything, the enchantment has only increased. I’ve fallen even more in love with Christ. The only explanation for this spiritual growth is that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has pried open a door in my heart. I peer through and the world beyond is timeless and wide, filled with the glory of God. In some way, even though I’m still lingering somewhere between, as it were, the porch and the altar; and even though none of us will be home until we finally meet God face to face, at the Mass, embraced by the communion of saints, I am somehow, nevertheless, home.

“Hear yet my paradox: Love, when all is given, To see Thee I must see Thee, to love, love;
I must o’ertake Thee at once and under heaven. If I shall overtake Thee at last above.
You have your wish; enter these walls, one said: He is with you in the breaking of the bread.”

– From The Half-Way House by Gerard Manley Hopkins

At Yale, there used to be an auxiliary library buried underneath the green in front of the Sterling Memorial Library. One fine fall day, I happened to find myself not out amongst the foliage but rather tucked away below the sunshine and the sod, reading a book. I suppose it was an odd choice. This was the ugliest space I know of on an otherwise beautiful campus. So ugly, in fact, that it was targeted for a remodel and is now gone. But there I was, and perhaps even more odd, I, a good Anglican- priest-in-training, was reading Cardinal Newman. Not the good parts that we Anglicans agreed with; the parts about the Oxford movement and the Church Fathers. No, I was reading the Apologia; the story of his conversion to the Catholic Church. I was particularly bothered by one specific bit. I was at the part where Newman makes his point that, fundamentally, there is no difference whatsoever between Arianism and Anglicanism. One is reviled and discredited, the other respectable and vital. But look closer, Newman argued, look underneath. What is there? Rebellion. There, buried beneath the sartorial splendor, the monarchy, the gorgeous liturgy, the incense, the polyphonic chant, and the prestige of Oxford was a group of Christians steeped in the bitter throes of willfulness. Yes, it is wrapped up in the respectable sounding doctrine of the Via Media, but of course, the Via Media is the last refuge of all theological scoundrels. Newman got to me that day, blinking in the fluorescent lights of a now disappeared world. My own world, comfortable as it had been, began to slip away as well.

Or perhaps it really slipped away the day I read the story of another convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is the Hopkins who I am convinced could convert the world through his poetry if only we gave him our attention. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” indeed. But for Hopkins, this only became the case through his own participation in the mystical life of the Church. His poetry before his conversion he came to consider vain; worthy only of being burned (yes, he actually did burn all of his poetry). While still at Oxford, Hopkins saw the beauty of the Catholic Church and became determined to convert. In the intervening period, as all his friends and sometime prospective employers tried to talk him out of it, he wrote in his journal that he felt “like an exile.” I read those words and the Holy Spirit did His work and I understood that until I converted, I too would feel the pain of exile.

It had taken me a good bit of time to work my way to this point. I grew up a free-church Pentecostal of sorts. I never thought of myself as anti-Catholic. But in retrospect, goodness, was I anti-Catholic! The problem with Catholics, everybody knew, was that they worshiped statues. Nothing could be more clear. As a child, I simply assumed this to be the case. There were statues in their churches, none in mine, prima facie idolatry.

Sadly, this manner of thinking is implicit in Protestantism. I suppose it is the blindness that comes with rebellion; like Adam hiding from God in the garden because he had lost sight of the true Good. It isn’t necessarily our place to blame our separated brethren. After all, most didn’t choose to be born Protestants and be indoctrinated in the habit of divisiveness; but it certainly is our place to be patient with them and to pray for them, and when the occasion calls for it, to attest steadfastly to the truth of the teachings of the ancient Church.

I bring all this up because this was the position in which I found myself as a young college student. Dissatisfied with my own brand of the Christian religion which denied it was a religion and my own inherited tradition which denied it was a tradition, I thought briefly about Catholicism. I even went to Mass a few times. It was fascinating. I was attracted to it. I felt something solid about it, comforting, and yet, I knew for a fact that these people worshiped statues! Okay, with age, my critique became a bit more subtle. But in the long run, aren’t all our arguments against the Church just as silly and vain? She outlasts us all. We can kick and scream and throw tantrums; legislate against her, slander her, outlaw her priests and persecute her children: the Church still prevails. She fears nothing. And because of this, she is able to be generous and patient.

The greatest novel of all time (no one argue with me on this) is Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. In it, Waugh describes a family who keep their country seat at Brideshead in the ancestral home. The family itself is a mixed lot—a father living abroad in sin, a domineering mother, a son who is a flamboyant dandy, a worldly daughter, and an overly-childlike daughter. Waugh describes the slow decline of Brideshead as the family disintegrates and scatters. This dissipation works itself out universally in the advent of the Great War, which finally swallows up all of England and turns Brideshead into quarters for Army command. In the end, though, we are left with a scene in the house’s private chapel, where the altar lamp is still lit and a lone priest says Mass for an old woman. I am a lot like that family. Many of us probably are.

You see, conversion is a gift. Mother Mary holds her Son for us, patiently suffering at the foot of the Cross. We can ignore her, go our own way, rebel—it doesn’t matter. Hanging on the Cross, Christ says to each and every one of us, “Behold your Mother.” She is here still. Waiting. We may be elsewhere, doing God knows what, but above the altar the candle still flickers. This is the light by which, in time, we find our way home.

As a young Pentecostal, I wasn’t yet ready for the Church, but She is patient. And so my story continues.

I became an Anglican. This was a place that seemed to have it all: dignity, beauty, wonderful music, good order, tradition, and of course, they didn’t worship statues. I don’t like the idea of tearing into the Anglican tradition as far as specifics go, so let’s be content with Newman’s fundamental insight. As nice as my sojourn in Anglicanism was, I began to feel a lack. It was like the Nothingness from Never-Ending Story (the scariest movie of all time, don’t fight me on this). It’s hard to explain; I just know that after a while my heart wasn’t in it. I was still wrestling every single, little belief I held. There was never any rest.

What was worse, having been taught that a good follower of Jesus always goes to His Holy Word for life-giving truth, I could not help but notice that the word of God speaks of something called “The Body of Christ.” This Body is identifiable; it consists of those who have been united with Christ through Baptism and have received the Holy Spirit for purposes of holiness and witness. It is ordered by the governance of Bishops, thus allowing orthodoxy to flourish and the ancient Gospel truth to be defended; as Paul advises Timothy, the Church is the “pillar and foundation of the faith.” (1Tim 3:15 NIV) The Body of Christ is the Church, visibly united, gathered around the crucified and risen Lord, and fed by Him in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This is the way in which Christ is present to His people. He is, of course, not confined to simply being present in the Communion feast but this is His chosen way, a marked moment, if you will, by which all other moments are defined. If Christ is potentially present in this world in any place, it is because He is first present in the Eucharist. This is why He says “unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you have no life in you.” He is our sustenance. He is our all. So, as Church, we are called to visibly gather around the Lord’s altar to give thanks and to be fed. This is not just a mysterious, ancient rite. It is the redemption of the world.

You can see the problem here, right? I was on the outside looking in.

In a real sense the Church has become fractured. We no longer gather around the table as the One Body. To me, this means much more than an organizational difficulty. This means that we have presented to the world a scandal. We have divided up the Body of Christ. We have protested against each other, separated ourselves, held our doing God knows own judgment up against that of the Spirit-inspired Church. A close reader of the Bible will come to the conclusion that what, but above Christ and his Church, the Head and the the altar the candle Body, are inseparable. And yet, in our practice, we pretend that this is not the case.

It is a big deal, a really big deal, for Christians to hold themselves apart from visible communion. We might all protest from our various theological kingdoms that we aren’t the ones who have gotten it wrong. We are not to blame. Perhaps not. Or perhaps all of us in every corner of Christendom are to blame. No one gets off easy with this one.

Ultimately, my goal is not to point the finger at others but to examine my own conscience. Had I held myself apart from visible communion with the Catholic Church because I thought I knew better? The answer is, yes, I had. My journey towards the Catholic faith has not, at its core, been a journey of personal enlightenment or one in which I have held up the Church to my own opinions and finally found it acceptable. This would be to make the Church too small, and as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, the Church is ever so much larger on the inside than it seems from the outside. Mine has been a journey towards faith. I have learned to believe first so that I might later begin to understand, rather than understand so that I might then believe. My intellect simply isn’t up to the challenge that the latter option presents. I trust that when Jesus breathed His Holy Spirit into His disciples He was anointing His Church to be, among other things, the guardian of the sacred and simple truth of the Gospel.

I have learned to rest in the truth that the Church teaches. I do not make my own salvation through knowledge or emotional experiences, through following this teacher or that. Whether I realize it or not, God is doing a great work in me. It was begun at the Cross, is sustained by the Holy Spirit, and will be completed at the final judgment.

I borrow this analogy from the English poet and convert John Dryden, but it fits me. In the Aeneid, Virgil writes about an encounter that Aeneas has in the forest outside of Carthage. He has wandered there after losing many of his men at sea during a storm. In the forest, a woman approaches him, falls into conversation with him, and comforts him in the midst of his troubles. It is only after she turns and walks away that he recognizes her. It is his mother. He recognizes her by the way that she walks.

I am sure that I could put up a good fight on all of the various theological and biblical reasons why I believe in the Catholic Church, but I would really prefer to say simply that the visible, undivided Church, the Church that Jesus prayed for in His last moments with His disciples, the Church that is the Mother of us all not on her own merits but because she holds Christ within her womb; this I have recognized by the way that she walks.

Even though I’m making a bit of an attempt, this is not the kind of thing that one explains between the soup and dessert course while at dinner. At least this is what Newman once said when asked “why become Catholic?” It is a deeply personal and intimate spiritual journey. It is the search for one’s mother. In this case, she has been here all along.

I can say this—in turning to the Catholic Church I do not turn to something foreign and alien to Anglicans or Evangelicals. I turned, rather, to the Catholic Church in order to become more fully what I already was. I have been raised to expect joyfully the activity of the Holy Spirit in my life; I expect Him all the more. I have come to understand the beauty of the English liturgy, the patterns that are formed through Common Prayer, the primacy of Scripture, and salvation through Christ alone apart from my own efforts; I believe in those all the more.

I have decided to give what I am to God, which means to take my place in his Body here on earth. My hope in Christ is that my gift given and carried along by the work of the Cross will be acceptable and pleasing to God, and that the promise to those who die to the old life is that they will have new life more abundantly.

I would like to quote from the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, also a convert to the Church, who spoke these words to his parishioners. I too spoke these words to my parishioners during a tearful farewell. I wish I had written them, but I will make these words mine: “To those of you with whom I have traveled in the past, know that we travel together still. In the mystery of Christ and His Church nothing is lost, and the broken will be mended. If, as I am persuaded, my communion with Christ’s Church is now the fuller, then it follows that my unity with all who are in Christ is now the stronger. We travel together still.”

This wouldn’t be a conversion narrative if I didn’t make note of the fact that on October 16th, 2011, my wife and I publicly professed our faith to be that of the Catholic Church and were given the sacrament of confirmation by the Most Rev. Robert Carlson, Archbishop of St. Louis. This was the best day of our lives .

*****

An earlier version of this story first appeared on the website Called to Communion on October 26, 2011. Reprinted with permission. 

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My passion for evangelization and mission had started in the summer of 2003, when as a seventh-grade boy, I traveled from Little Rock, Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee for a week-long mission trip. During that time, I had the opportunity to put on Vacation Bible School for children in inner city housing projects, pray with families in hospital waiting rooms, and feed the homeless. I was even volunteered to preach to two hundred homeless men! I was too nervous to remember any of what I said, but it ended with thunderous applause and the intoxicating feeling that I had been used by God to aid people in their belief that Jesus is able and willing to save them, no matter what they are going through.

I rode the van from Memphis back to Little Rock with my Bible across my lap, praying that God would allow me to serve him like that for the rest of my life. More than anything, I wanted to live a life of evangelical commitment — obeying and proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom. Never in my life had I experienced the sense of joy and purpose that I did while serving others in Jesus’ name. I desperately hoped that God would allow me to serve him for the rest of my life and that he would use me to bring others into communion with him.

As a college student, my adolescent dream to be an evangelist and missionary began to find fulfillment. Clayton and I discussed our shared studies in Bible, theology, and missions, as well as our similar experiences in the Andes. To my left in the van, I noticed a pretty blond girl, eyes beaming with excitement as she discussed her recent return from Niger in Africa, where she, too, had been a foreign missionary. In less than a year, that college senior, Lauren, would become my wife. We had a mutual passion for Jesus Christ, the Gospel, the Scriptures, and evangelism, so it was easy to fall in love, believing that God had a purpose and calling for our new life together. Excited to join in His mission, we had no idea that this desire would eventually draw us into the Catholic Church.

My ten-week missionary endeavors did not result in the expected church-plant. The experience was, nonetheless, invaluable for my own formation. My ambition for the salvation of the people there revealed gaps in my theological formation. I had been raised to bring people into the “Church,” yet I had very little theological clarity as to what the “Church” was. Secondly, what are the boundaries of theological belief that determine whether or not a body of believers is actually Christian? Third, I realized that, although my background had laid much emphasis on initial conversion, it had less emphasis on ongoing conversion. I had pastoral intentions, yet very little pastoral training for helping people follow Christ across the long journey of life.

Returning to college, I put myself in the shoes of the people that I had attempted to evangelize. They were frequently proselytized by Evangelicals, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they had cultural ties to Catholicism. If I were a villager in Peru, how would I adjudicate the competing claims to orthodoxy between these churches? My senior year, I took a course in American Christianity and was astounded by the proliferation, not only of varying denominations, but even cults in America. Having trained for foreign missions, I was deeply sensitive to religious syncretism. Indeed, even in the Old Testament, the people of God had attempted to blend Judaism with Canaanite practices (God was not impressed, as the prophets told them). I now looked at Christianity within my own cultural context and wondered if, as a foreign missionary, I was not a pot calling the kettle black. How much of Christianity in America was distinctly Christian and how much was just my own cultural values with a bit of Christianity sprinkled on top?

There were two axes that I could measure my own Christian upbringing against: history and universality. How did my understanding of the Bible and my own practice of the Christian life compare to that of Christians in other places and other times? Since Christianity proclaims the incarnation of God in time and space, it locates itself within history as an actual reality, accessible by faith. If the Church is the Body of Christ in time and space, then surely the Church as a recognizable, apostolic body did not vanish following the last chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.

From Newman to Early Church Fathers

At the time, I had no inkling that I was looking for “one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” (I had not at this time even encountered the ancient Nicene Creed), nor was I aware of the conclusion that I would eventually share with Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman: “And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this” (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,1). I had, however, decided, that if I discovered something that had been consistently true of Christianity in the past, then I would conform myself to that norm, rather than stubbornly clinging to my own familiar expectations. Setting out on a grand adventure for theological truth, my wife, Lauren, and I moved in 2013 from Arkadelphia, Arkansas to Birmingham, Alabama, where I would begin studies at Beeson Divinity School.

Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical Divinity School with a strong emphasis on the Protestant Reformation. I thoroughly enjoyed the academic rigor and ecumenical camaraderie of Beeson. There I was given the opportunity to learn from Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Lutherans and observe how their theological beliefs translated into pastoral praxis. I was introduced to the early Church Fathers, and my mind was blown. I was overwhelmed by the beauty, integrity, and profundity of the theology and devotion of the early Church.

Exposure to Justin Martyr, a second century Christian apologist, demonstrated to me that the Church had a common liturgy, centering on the Eucharist. While still at Ouachita Baptist University, it had struck me that, if the Scriptures were a grand, epic narrative of salvation, then our Sunday gathering should be some type of liturgical reenactment, rather than a mere assortment of songs. The rich symbolism and imagery of Scripture, especially the book of Revelation, had convinced me that the Church’s worship on earth should pattern itself off the heavenly liturgy of the angels and saints. Through Justin Martyr, I discovered that the early Church had such a liturgy, which was rooted in the Scriptures and centered in the Eucharist. Testifying to the Eucharistic liturgy that the Church observed on every “Lord’s Day” (Sunday), he writes:

We call this food Eucharist; and no one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and regeneration, and is thereby living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nourished, is both the flesh and blood of that incarnated Jesus. (First Apology, 66)

The early Church witnessed to a reality even greater than what I had hoped for. I longed for a liturgy that presented the redemptive work of God in Christ, according to the Scriptures. They offered a liturgy that presented the saving mystery of Christ because it actually participated in that mystery. The Eucharist was no mere symbol, but the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (see John 6:51–58; 1 Corinthians 10:16–17).

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a second century bishop, who was taught by St. Polycarp, who in turn was taught by the Apostle John, built upon what I discovered from St. Justin Martyr. If Justin Martyr introduced me to the early Church’s worship, then Irenaeus introduced me to the apostolic harmony between Church governance, worship, and faith, according to the Scriptures. He writes:

“The true knowledge is the doctrine of the Apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according to the succession of bishops, by which successions the bishops have handed down the Church which is found everywhere; and the very complete tradition of the Scriptures[.]” (Against Heresies, 4, 33, 8)

I was discovering a church whose witness, worship, and design were inherited from the Apostles, overflowing with beauty, and crowned with the glory of the martyrs. This Church could trace its origin to the Apostles themselves through this line of bishops. The Church that I discovered was intellectual yet devotional, speculative yet dogmatic, diverse yet unified, and organic yet organized.

Let the Little Children Come to Me

I was like a newborn child, filled with wonder and drinking deeply of the early Church’s young, deep faith. In the midst of this joy, my wife and I discovered another joy: her pregnancy with our first son, Ezekiel.

Space does not permit to share the full story of how and why Lauren and I knew before we met that we would have a son named Ezekiel. The fact that we did, and the meaning of the Hebrew prophet’s name — “God is my strength” — suggested to us that God had a special purpose for this boy. We wondered what future adversity called for such a strong name.

The imminent arrival of my firstborn son increased the urgency of the baptism question: should babies be baptized or not? My education in biblical theology taught me not to discount the many biblical depictions of water, Spirit, and rebirth (see Exodus 14, 2 Kings 5, Ezekiel 36:25–26, John 3, Romans 6, Titus 3:5). I began to see and understand the early Church’s belief that baptism is a sacrament, through which God grants us new life, incorporating us into Christ. As Christian parents, it was our joy and duty to present Ezekiel for baptism.

Being convinced that Baptism, the Eucharist, and Holy Orders were sacraments, Lauren and I joined the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). We fell in love with the Anglican patrimony and its liturgical celebrations of the Christian year. During our second year in the Anglican Church, tragedy struck when I received a phone call from my son’s pediatrician. I was informed that my son was being admitted to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital in Birmingham, and that we were needed there as soon as possible. Hospital staff hovered over my thirteen-month-old son, poking him with IVs in the attempt to prevent diabetic coma. Feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders, I felt a strong voice saying, “Don’t worry; that’s my son.” From that moment, the adoption that we receive in Baptism became a source of deep comfort to me.

In 2017, my wife and I left Birmingham, Alabama, with two healthy sons and a bright future. I had received my Master of Divinity degree from Beeson Divinity School and had been ordained a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. We drove south to Panama City Beach, Florida, where I would serve as a curate for church-planting. As a way to get to know and serve my community, I also became a police chaplain for the Panama City Beach Police Department. Church-planting brought everything we loved about evangelization and missions into a more historic form of Christianity. However, one of the darker chapters of my life was just beginning.

As a police chaplain, I rode along with police officers to provide spiritual accompaniment, pastoral care, and a listening ear. One fateful night, a man arrived at the police station, after hours, at the same moment that I arrived for a scheduled ride along. When the officer asked the troubled man what we could do for him, with haunted eyes and constricted voice, he explained that he was having difficulty breathing because of the demons that had just entered him through his and his uncle’s voodoo curses on each other.

The Battle Belongs to the Lord

Here I was, a Christian minister with increasingly Catholic beliefs, educated in a Protestant Divinity School. I had never had a class on exorcism. Yet in my classes, I saw very clearly that Jesus exorcized demons frequently. As a priest, I had the duty and honor of representing Christ in his compassion to deliver. Training or not, I had faith (and, so I thought, priestly authority)! With no explicit formula, I prayed with the man as best as I knew how and laid my hands on him. He improved, but I did not.

The police officers marveled at the demoniac man’s inexplicable transformation of psychological state. I, however, was plunged for months into paranormal activity that I did not understand. My senior pastor was concerned for my well-being and attempted to help me. My Anglican friends back in Birmingham were connected with the SSPI (Society for Special Pastoral Intervention) in the ACNA and said that I need to train with them in spiritual deliverance and exorcisms. I drove up to Birmingham, Alabama, for training in spiritual warfare.

I experienced much relief and am profoundly grateful for the care and compassion of the Anglican clergy who prayed with and for me. I was also deeply startled to hear from Anglican exorcists that demons were “triggered” by the Hail Mary and feared her intercession. This struck me as odd. Why were we Protestant Christians unsure of doing something that makes hell perpetually nervous? Just a year ago, I had received a beautiful Benedictine prayer book, but had shied away from praying the Hail Mary prayer in it. If, however, the demons actually feared the Virgin Mary, and if the blessing of her name was a perpetual reminder of that moment when the Word was made flesh in her womb, beginning the salvation of mankind, then maybe it was time to join St. Gabriel and proclaim the Virgin’s praises.

Part of my training at the SSPI was to study the spiritual gifts more and to discern what my personal spiritual gift might be. One of the discernment tools was a thought experiment: if I could have any three Christians of any time mentor me, who would they be? As an Anglican church-planter, I remembered the three British missionary bishops that I admired the most: St. Patrick of Ireland, St. Columba of Iona, and St. Boniface of Mainz. I prayed that God would show me which saint to study and emulate. Two weeks later, an experience convinced me that St. Boniface of Mainz was with me. I was so overwhelmed and confused that, while I did not address Boniface, I did ask God to please use that saint’s example to guide me. I then sensed God saying to me, “You feel comfortable here. Don’t get used to it.” Twenty-four hours later, I learned that Hurricane Michael was turning towards the Florida panhandle. In the dark of the night, my wife and I, with our three boys, fled back to Birmingham. Hours later, we learned that the hurricane had hit the part of Bay County in which we were planning to plant a church.

My diocesan bishop graciously released me from that assignment. Through a series of dramatic occurrences with clear messaging, my wife and I discerned a call to an Anglican church plant in western Montana. In 2019, we moved to Missoula. We loved Montana, yet ministry was difficult. My vision of pastoral ministry was different from that of my colleague. During this time, I asked St. Boniface of Mainz to pray for me. I learned that Boniface, like myself, had discovered a desire to be a foreign missionary at the age of twelve. Like me, he was shaped by Benedictine spirituality. Like me, he experienced disappointment and pain in his conflict with fellow missionaries, who claimed the Celtic missionary legacy, yet lacked sound discipline. Like me, Boniface’s first missionary effort was unsuccessful. Boniface’s solution? To unite more closely with Rome, so that his mission would be not of his own authority, but that of Christ’s vicar on earth — the Pope.

Schooled by Saints

I did what I could to ignore the striking difference between Saint Boniface and myself — unity with the Bishop of Rome. If Christ had actually set apart Peter as the prince of the apostles, then the apostolic succession in which I located my priestly authority was not what I thought. If the Catholic Church’s claims about the Petrine office were correct, then it would require me to pursue reconciliation with the chair of Peter, even at the expense of my ministerial office.

I connected with someone who I expected to be an ally against reunion with Rome, an Orthodox priest. As I spoke with Fr. Daniel Kirk, he and I both had the same anxieties. As pastors, we felt that our parishioners faced grave challenges, not only against chastity and sexual morality, but against human dignity itself, and that our respective traditions were powerless to provide sufficient solutions to people in the pews. Our churches had stopped “developing” doctrine since our respective communions broke with Rome. We had sixteenth and eleventh century answers for twenty-first century problems. Though not Catholic (yet), we were both looking to Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body for guidance to modern man’s most pressing questions about identity, love, and desire. The fact that we were looking to the papacy for answers made us think more deeply about the Catholic Church’s claims that the papacy is a divine institution of Christ, rather than a political invention of the medieval Church. We also discussed the famous work of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which he wrote during his own journey to the Catholic Church. Father Daniel, recognizing that I was asking the same questions he was, took a risk and invited me to a Catholic men’s group.

When I attended this group, I encountered men from a variety of trades and backgrounds, engaging at various levels with a discussion from St. Thomas Aquinas, praying the Divine Office of the Church, and singing beautiful Marian hymns. Here was a group where nothing had to be held back. Meanwhile, as I was planting an Anglican Church, I faced resistance from certain parishioners, who pitted my Catholic interpretation of Anglican theology against the Anglican Church’s own formularies of belief (the Thirty-Nine Articles).

My parishioners did not cause me to doubt my Catholic beliefs. They did, however, cause me to doubt the integrity or consistency of holding Catholic beliefs in the Anglican Church. As I became increasingly convinced of Catholic views on the Sacraments, of the Communion of Saints, and of the divine institution of the Papal office, I realized that two roads lay before me: I could either maintain my ordained office as an Anglican priest, all the while requesting my parishioners to trust my private judgment over their denomination’s teachings, or I could resign my position and submit to the teaching authority and institutional unity of the Catholic Church.

Joining the Catholic Church would be not only financially disastrous, but it would also be, in effect, burning to ashes my singular childhood dream: to be a preacher of the Gospel. After months of prayer, study, consultation, and discernment, I embraced the painful truth that I could either throw my vocation and livelihood at the feet of Christ or place my office above obedience to Christ’s call for unity — a call made possible by the unity of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I chose obedience, in the faith that God accepts our sacrifices and can raise life from ashes.

The choice was not easy. Lauren was understandably leery about throwing our expected future away for a belief that Jesus chose Peter as the head of the Apostles. However, our Catholic priest in town suggested that she ask St. Joseph for prayer. Lauren was not sure about this whole invocation-of-the-saints thing. But she knew that her husband was becoming a full-blown papist, so desperate times called for desperate measures. She asked Saint Joseph that very night to pray for our finances, given the gravity of the situation. The church-plant received a donation on our behalf for several thousand dollars the next day.

On April 3rd, 2021, my wife and I, along with our four sons, were received into the Catholic Church. Saint Boniface sponsored my entrance into the Church and St. Joseph sponsored my wife’s arrival. Surrendering my childhood dream of the pastorate was painful, but whatever plans God had for me were only attainable through obedience to revealed truth, not despite it. Lauren expresses gratitude on a weekly basis that we were brought into the Catholic Church. We both believe that we have finally come home.

Although I had stepped down from the priesthood, I did not step away from the mission field. On the contrary, I entered a “new evangelization.” Weeks after being confirmed, I was hired as the Director of Religious Education for Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church in Kalispell, Montana. I began my journey within the Church by teaching religion class to middle schoolers, boys and girls who are at that stage of life where I first discovered that my life could only find fulfillment through an adventure of obedience to Jesus Christ.

During my tenure at Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church, I was invited by Divine Mercy Academy in Belgrade, Montana, to become the head of the school. Divine Mercy Academy is both Catholic and classical and is deeply committed to Pope John Paul II’s vision of Christian humanism. Serving as the head of Divine Mercy Academy allows me to prepare young evangelists for a life-long vocation of witness in a modern world. Only God could weave together the various chapters of my family’s life into this integrated calling. The journey home to the Catholic Church has brought my entire family into a New Evangelization.

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Dr. Wehr’s most recent project is an annotated edition of Sayers’ masterwork, The Man Born to be King.

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