My Conversion to Catholicism

2009-12-22T11:09:00-05:00

Several people have asked how and why I became Catholic. Sometimes I try to tell them in under five minutes, and other times I've tried to tell the story over coffee. I've never been able to tell it quite right either way. The one time that I came close to telling it well, and by that I mean exploring the different themes and reasons for my conversion, I told it in article form on onerock.com. That attempt is lost to the depths of the internet, and I have lost my electronic copy of it along the way. Since some have asked and because I am still sorting out many of the details of the last decade of my life, I am going to give it another shot.

The first problem that I ran into in the telling of my conversion story is that it is seemingly a story without a beginning. When did the first influences arrive? How did they take hold? Where were the earliest seeds planted, and when did they start to show fruit. Anyone that can track down each of those threads has an amazing memory and possibly quite a bit of creative personal history. I can't claim the amazing memory, but sometimes my history gets pretty creative.

Catholicism played almost no part in my early life and formation of my faith. I wasn't anti-catholic, I as acatholic. It wasn't in my sphere. I was raised in a Mennonite Family in a Mennonite community and when my family left that community, due to economic circumstances, we attended Plymouth Brethren Churches. It was insulated, and it was a particularly happy way to spend my youngest years. How many people can say that they lived in a town of 200 people where no one locked doors and everyone knew not only their neighbors, but also the rest of the town too? At almost thirty years old, very few of my generation can make that claim, and fewer still in the generations that come after.

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My Conversion to Catholicism