‘I Know This Is Where I Should Be’ (Former VMI Superintendent conversion story)

National Catholic Register ^ | 4/23/2011 | Josiah Bunting III

[markomalley]

I write in the full consciousness that each person’s route to reception into the Catholic Church is singular, a pathway he must follow alone, however conscious (and grateful) he may be for the solicitude and friendship of those who lead and guide him.

I was raised in a conventional Protestant household; “went to church” with my parents in a small New England village — a Congregational church, one of whose ministers was Richard Niebuhr (whose piety and earnestness I well remember, and with gratitude). My boarding school obliged us to “attend chapel” daily, the rituals and hymns being more or less standard Episcopalian observances; the music of some of the great old hymns made a far more powerful impression on me than the sermons we heard and “responsive readings” we recited.

In college in the United States, and at the University of Oxford, and in significant ways through my reading of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his early spiritual mentor, Cardinal John Henry Newman, I began to recognize what I might call a spiritual hunger for something which the church of which I remained a nominal member was unable to assuage. I began also, through Newman, but also through much reading (not very purposive or well-organized), to be drawn to the very early Church (Paul in particular), to the Church Fathers, to the sacrifices of its first Christians, and to what I was coming to believe was the Christian communion that had sustained their creeds, their faith, their consciousness of Christ’s glory.

This must be the holy Catholic Church. Its creeds were dogma — immanent, unchanging, beyond cavil — and I embraced them with an overwhelming consciousness that I was called to embrace them. I had to.

[Natural Law]

"If that is indeed what the man said, then he was a world class moron."

No, it is apparent that God uses the Religion Forum to reveal the world class morons to us.

[narses]

+

Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:

Add me / Remove me

Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.

[sayuncledave]

RFEngineer,
you hit the nail on the head. The most important part here is that he was Called. And he went. And he’s happy, and shared the Good News. I say welcome not only because I am Catholic. I say it because there is nothing more dear than when He calls you. And you listen.