Conversion Stories

[Virgil the Roman]

I am a convert from the LDS (Mormon) Church.


God Bless :crosself: and Pax et Bonum!
Simon

God Bless you, very much!

 

[Virgil the Roman]

Here is mine:
http://gnosticgoth.com/journey.htm

I'm sorry, but i tried to access the link to your conversion story, but i've been thus far unable to access it. I keep getting a webpage error screen

 

[Virgil the Roman]

Hi,
Not to bring back an old thread or anything, but I am in the process of conversion to the Catholic faith.

Its hard to explain here on the boards...but if someone wants to send me a PM I can explain it in fuller details.

cool!! what's making ya come from lutheranism to the catholic church? ( I know this post's old, so if ya already converted let me know.)

 

[Febe]

hello, great news and welcome home
may i ask You? i read a book about monastyr community in benedictine way in Sweden, created by Protestants (!). They became later Catholics, but part of brothers are still Protestant. they need a priest and one Polish benedictin came to Sweden. th ebook was wrote in 1980s.
have You some information about them?

I´ll give it a look!
We had protestantic monks close to Gothenburg, (Franciskans) and nuns (same); the brothers converted to Rome, and the sisters are still in the Swedish church...

 

[MissKittyFantastico]

I am converting from a pentecostal church... Its happening this saturday!!! YAY!!!

 

[Veritas]

I am converting from a pentecostal church... Its happening this saturday!!! YAY!!!

Why now and not at Easter? I'm just curious.

Congrats!

 

[MissKittyFantastico]

Why now and not at Easter? I'm just curious.

Congrats!

Because I didn't decide until just after easter this year and I spoke to one of our Priests and he said that I could either wait to do RCIA (which doesn't start til after Aug) and then be received into the church next Easter or I could do it before then at a time that would suit me.
He went through alot of questions with me to make sure i knew what i was doing and that I was doing it of my own free will etc...
But I would have hated having to wait til next year!!!

 

[IgnatiusOfAntioch]

cool!! )

I notice your profile says you are searching. Have you looked into the Byzantine, Maronite, Syriac, etc. Catholic Church. I recently attended a Maronite Catholic Divine Liturgy. It is from the Antioch Church and part of it is still in Aramaic, the words of Jesus are in the same language that He spoke. It is truely awsome.

God Bless.

 

[Bartlomiej Dyszkiewicz]

This is pretty weird.
I'm seriously considering the catholic church and just recently began thinking about monks and today even rented a book on bennedictine oblates fron the Library.
I've been attending nondenominational churches, charasmatic and have a good group of friends in the messianic jewish church.

what strikes me is a few of posts ago i was reading the posts and noticed someone from Poland asking questions about monks. In the post Sweden was mentioned and i just found a swedish first aid kit at a yard sale and don't know what to do with it for now.

The thing that struck me is the guys name is BArtek which is the name that I go by. I thought i might have been sleep walking and wrote his post untill I noticed the age of the other Bartek.

The thing that struck me recently is that inside i have been dealing with alot of negative voices towards Christ and God and the Holy Spirit and i so have been desperately wanting freedom.

today i went to the catholic church and a seminarian prayed a short prayer for me and right now I'm staying at a chrisitan counselor friends house typing on her computer.

The majority of what i wrote is kind of loose.

The truth is that I'm looking to come home to Christ and be in the truth. Home is the Church.

 

[Virgil the Roman]

This is pretty weird.
I'm seriously considering the catholic church and just recently began thinking about monks and today even rented a book on bennedictine oblates fron the Library.
I've been attending nondenominational churches, charasmatic and have a good group of friends in the messianic jewish church.

what strikes me is a few of posts ago i was reading the posts and noticed someone from Poland asking questions about monks. In the post Sweden was mentioned and i just found a swedish first aid kit at a yard sale and don't know what to do with it for now.

The thing that struck me is the guys name is BArtek which is the name that I go by. I thought i might have been sleep walking and wrote his post untill I noticed the age of the other Bartek.

The thing that struck me recently is that inside i have been dealing with alot of negative voices towards Christ and God and the Holy Spirit and i so have been desperately wanting freedom.

today i went to the catholic church and a seminarian prayed a short prayer for me and right now I'm staying at a chrisitan counselor friends house typing on her computer.

The majority of what i wrote is kind of loose.

The truth is that I'm looking to come home to Christ and be in the truth. Home is the Church.

Well, I certainly hope, you stay here. the Lord guides us in all that we do. I, for one would be glad to count as one of my brethren, a brother-in-christ, a member of Christs's Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. May the Lord God Guide, where he will.

 

[Ashytaria]

I was born what people call a "Cradle-Catholic." But as time went along, i begain thinink, this is all stupid. Then a couple months ago, I had what alcoholics would refer to as a "moment of clarity." I was thinking about, how do i know for sure that Jesus existed. Then i thought...Well the Palpacy dates back to jesus with Peter becoming the first Pope. Which led me to relize that if Peter was true, then he knew Jesus, which mean Jesus existed. And if Jesus existed then it all fits together. Simple Logic brought me back to the church and now "I'm rolling strong, attending church classes and conventions.. Since then i have read about how Peter was probaly not the first pope, but it doesn't really mater anymore.

 

[Virgil the Roman]

I notice your profile says you are searching. Have you looked into the Byzantine, Maronite, Syriac, etc. Catholic Church. I recently attended a Maronite Catholic Divine Liturgy. It is from the Antioch Church and part of it is still in Aramaic, the words of Jesus are in the same language that He spoke. It is truely awsome.

God Bless.

Not any more! I 've found the Lord God and he has shown me his love, compassion, and kindness, and I along with faith in him, must show the love of Christ by sharing his holy gospel with others, and doing good deeds with the only thoughts of Christ's Love within those deeds, and then when I realize these things start to happen more, hopefully I'll see how much i've changed. Right now though, i'm still young spirtually, and i need to spirtually grow-up and live out the Love of Jesus Christ.

 

[SpoiltMonk]

I was born in no particular religious tradition. My father was an agnostic and my mother was a hugely lapsed Southern Baptist (her brother was a preacher, in fact).

Anyhow, my mother and father were divorced when I was still a toddler and my Dad got custody when he came back from Viet Nam.

We moved to Detroit and he married a Lutheran woman who never went to church except for weddings and funerals.

Fast forward to the late seventies:

I began getting interested in religion and read everything I could find on it eventually settling into a routine of reading Thomas Merton and various lives of the saints. This led me to believe that I had a vocation to the priesthood (I wasn't even Catholic yet!). I began talking to priests and made very good friends with the Jesuit vocation director for the Detroit province.

I told my Dad I wanted to become Catholic. I was about 13 or 14 at the time. He said no but we could talk about it again when I was 16.

When I was 16 I asked my high school guidance counselor who was a laicized ex-priest how I could go about becoming Catholic. He put me in touch with a catechism group (what would be called RCIA today).

At the Easter Vigil of 1982 at the ripe old age of 16 I was baptized and confirmed in the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church.

After this everything got really weird. I was a sporadic Catholic. I maintained my connections with the Jesuits and was now, technically, a "candidate" which is more or less what they call a postulant.

I went into the Army, drank too much, behaved horribly, got out of the Army, continued behaving horribly and only going to church when the guilt and shame got to be too heavy.

I was living in Seattle at the time and during a period of relative calm and conversion I visited a Trappist monastery in Oregon where I expressed an interest in joining them. I was not immediately rejected and was enrolled as a tentative postulant.

Eventually they said they didn't think it would be a good idea probably because I was till quite immature and had all the marks of an inveterate worldling about me.

Not long after this I fell in with a very bad crowd.

That's right, Fundamentalist Protestant Evangelicals *GASP*.

Well, they got me. I sobered up and more or less straightened up and started flying in a more direct trajectory.

I returned to the Detroit area, met my wife, a Lutheran, got married in the Lutheran Church and settled down to have a mortgage, babies, car payments, jobs the whole nine yards.

I was also confirmed in the Lutheran Church shortly after this.

About a year or so ago I began having stirrings of desire for the church of my youth.

I had, off and on, always gone to mass, even in my most hectically protestant days. Sometimes I would get up and leave before it really even got started, berating myself for continuing to be enslaved by "popish nonsense".

Anyway, during one of these times of refreshing I visited a priest in my area and told him my story. He told me that my marriage wasn't valid as far as the church went and that I couldn't come back.


I wasn't at all sure what I thought about this; I wavered between acceptance and indignation.

He said that there were a couple of ways the situation could be remedied, the easiest of which was to have my wife "remarry" me in a private Catholic ceremony.

My wife was not interested.

This left us with the option of having my marriage "radically sanated", from the Latin sanatio in radice meaning a "healing at the root". My case went to the Archdiocesan tribunal and my marriage was "sanated" and upon my confession I was received back into the Catholic Church.

I currently attend my wife's church with her though I do not, of course, commune. My daughter goes to the School and they are both very active there.

Right now the likelihood of my wife joining me in the RCC seems small, but, with God, all things are possible.

 

[Virgil the Roman]

Well God bless you, and i certainly hope that he brings your wife to his Holy catholic and apostolic church! May the Lord Jesus be with you, SpoiltMonk!
Sincerly, your brother-in-Christ
Ravenonthecross

 

[Bartek]

This is pretty weird.
I'm seriously considering the catholic church and just recently began thinking about monks and today even rented a book on bennedictine oblates fron the Library.
I've been attending nondenominational churches, charasmatic and have a good group of friends in the messianic jewish church.

what strikes me is a few of posts ago i was reading the posts and noticed someone from Poland asking questions about monks. In the post Sweden was mentioned and i just found a swedish first aid kit at a yard sale and don't know what to do with it for now.

The thing that struck me is the guys name is BArtek which is the name that I go by. I thought i might have been sleep walking and wrote his post untill I noticed the age of the other Bartek.

The thing that struck me recently is that inside i have been dealing with alot of negative voices towards Christ and God and the Holy Spirit and i so have been desperately wanting freedom.

today i went to the catholic church and a seminarian prayed a short prayer for me and right now I'm staying at a chrisitan counselor friends house typing on her computer.

The majority of what i wrote is kind of loose.

The truth is that I'm looking to come home to Christ and be in the truth. Home is the Church.

May Jesus lead You , brother . My way to the Church was very painfull. But i'd do the same one more time. I discovered, man is really happy only when he is sure, that his way of life is correct, even by the broken heart. Emotions are nothing. One day they are good, other day bad, but the truth is the same always.

 

[Big_Dave]

Hi, I just would like to say that I have been an evangelical christian all my life. I am now in my 70's and have started RCIA classes this past june. I have a long story to tell and perhaps one day I will tell some of it.

Glad to be coming home to rome!!!

 

[Aaron-Aggie]

 

[Virgil the Roman]

............

 

[exnihilo]

I can´t really say I converted. In reality I was raised a Catholic until I got to the age of "reason" as some people put it and got very distant from faith. Not to long ago I got to a point that my life felt simply meaningless and I had the urge to go back and reassess my priorities.

This period was very difficult but I were very lucky for having a reference in my life from a period in my young years. Even tough I was never really an atheist I lived like one and I had absolutely no hope in anything. The best, I figured, was to live in the moment and indulge myself.

Now that I look back I see that God had never really abandoned me. I was simply searching for something, desperately, but without knowing what it was. And that, I could only find in my childhood faith.

To make this long story short.

All my search halted when I reached the limit of my own understanding, (Now I get St Augustine´s: believe to understand, understand to believe), so I took the only step I could think of: saying the "pater noster". And it was even difficult to remember the words at that point.

That was about a year ago. I think I´ll always remember that moment.

 

[PolycarpII]

Out of interest, is there anybody here that has converted to Catholicism?

I, myself, am in the process of converting to the Catholic Church from the Anglican Communion and was really wondering whether others have had similar experiences. My own reasons were that there was no real faith anymore and that leaders were wasting there time trying to make the Church look "cool" and "modern" by pandering to atheistic and hedonistic ideals.

I too am a convert. I converted from the Southern Baptist Tradition due to "sola scriptura" and the fundamentalist approach to theology and faith. I wanted a liturgical and Spirit based Church that was historically founded. In the Catholic Church, the true Church, I found this. I was recieved into the Church on Father's Day of 2000 and was Confirmed on the feast of the Queenship of Mary in 2003. I enjoy Catholicism because it is centered on grace and Spiritual development, unlike the Baptist Church which is centered on literal scripture interpretation and eschatology. In Holy Mother Church we grow as one body in Christ together enriching ourselves and each other; I also have a problem with "once saved, always saved."