By Joe Pisani
Christine Paine still remembers the Easter Vigil Mass more than 25 years ago, when her life changed forever. For the first time, she received the Body and Blood of Christ and was accepted into full communion with the Catholic Church…after years of searching.
“I was so touched by all the people in the pews behind me with radiant smiles. They were just as excited as I was,” she recalled. “During the service, I felt like I was surrendering myself. I was scared, but God is so kind — he made it almost impossible to turn away from him. I wanted this path. After becoming Catholic, I was elated because I had become part of a true faith community.” Today, she is a parishioner at Precious Blood Parish in Milford.
If your faith is lukewarm. If you have doubts or complaints or suffer from any of the spiritual maladies that can afflict cradle Catholics, it’s time to see what being a Catholic means to people who weren’t born into the Church but found it after much searching.
I’ve known atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Baptists, Episcopalians and others whose lives took a monumental spiritual step forward at the Easter Vigil Mass when they became Roman Catholics. They can teach us a lot. And many of them eventually brought others into the Church because their love for Christ was so contagious.
This year at the Easter Vigil Mass all across the Archdiocese, in parishes large and small, women and men will become Roman Catholics, leaving behind their former lives and taking on a new one. In some ways, it is like the early Church, when Christians were persecuted and shunned for what they believed in, but despite those trials and challenges, they accepted Jesus’ invitation when they heard him say, “Come, follow me.”
Joshua Garcia came from a long line of clergy in the evangelical Wesleyan Church. His father and his uncle were pastors, his grandmother and his grandfather were missionaries in Africa. And for a time it seemed that Joshua would follow their path, until his life took a different turn. Today he is a Catholic who regularly attends Mass and prays the rosary. He’s also an active member of the community at St. Thomas More Chapel & Center at Yale.
“This was really a new experience for me,” he said. “After taking First Communion at the Vigil Mass, they shepherded the new converts into the lobby to be congratulated by the parishioners. I shared with them what brought me to the Church and why I felt called to be a Catholic. Then, a man shook my hand and said, ‘Welcome home’ … and I started balling.”
Ken Donnelly of Seymour was raised a Protestant and attended a Baptist church for 28 years. Sometimes he would “shop around” at different churches but “never really felt at home” until he walked into a Catholic church for the first time when he was going through a personal crisis.
“I don’t know why I went,” he recalled. “I think God was acting anonymously in my life. I didn’t know it at the time, but I look back now and realize God did that. And the moment I was there, I felt at home.”
He came into full communion with the Catholic Church several years ago at the Easter Vigil Mass at Church of the Assumption in Ansonia, where he is a Eucharistic minister.
After her first year at Washington University in St. Louis, Christina Skelley went through a personal crisis after her grandmother died and she realized she “desperately needed God and other people.”
“After long searching and prayer for guidance, I awoke one morning with a clear sense that God was directing me to the Catholic Church,” she recalled. “I got up the nerve to go to the Catholic Student Center and found out about RCIA.”
Later, while watching the congregation receive Communion, she had “a powerful sense that the Eucharist is Jesus, the Body of Christ. From then on, I longed to receive him.”
She says that her baptism at the Easter Vigil was “amazing beyond words…and so was receiving the Eucharist and knowing that Jesus was truly inside of me!” Eventually, she became active at the Catholic Student Center and did post-graduate service as a campus ministry intern, when she met Sr. Virginia Herbers, an Apostle of the Sacred Heart of Jesus who was working in campus ministry.
Christina later got her “dream job” at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but Christ kept calling. Today, Sister Christina Skelley, ASCJ, is a member of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
At a time when the Church is under constant attack by the secular media, when we are battered with news about the growing number of young people who have abandoned organized religion, when Catholics are disenchanted by the lingering effects of the sex abuse crisis, when Catholic teaching is abhorrent to the general population because it is counter-cultural, people are still coming into the Church. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, they are leaving behind their former lives, and their example offers a profound lesson for those of us who take our faith for granted.