Introduction to the Catholic Church

This is the story of conversion to the Catholic Church – of my own. It began some fifteen years ago and continues to this day.

When I met my soon-to-be husband on a cruise ship nearly 18 years ago, he was the first declared Catholic I had ever met in my adult life. I was 30. “Catholic” was a dirty word in my lifelong vocabulary. But he wasn’t a “practicing” Catholic, I can tell you -- now that I know what one looks like. He was a Typical American Cradle Catholic: he liked identifying himself as Catholic, just as one would Irish, which he was as well. A nice Irish Catholic boy from Brooklyn, NY and I was a Dixie Darlin’.

Our relationship developed further though email and we played a game every day where we emailed a “question of the day” and would answer one another. Most of them were moral questions, like would he give someone $10 for gas money, a total stranger? “No way!” he said. “Do you have any idea how many bums are asking for money around here?”

Within just a few short weeks of knowing him, I knew two things: that he could be The One and he was Catholic, really Catholic, even though he didn’t act Catholic. My hands shook as I picked up the phone book and called the local Catholic parish and asked for an appointment to speak to someone because I had questions about the Catholic Church. I knew in my heart that if Catholics were the pagans that I had grown up believing that they were, I needed to nip this relationship in the bud before it had a chance to bloom.

I met with a very nice lady, maybe a little older than me, who very patiently answered my questions. And I only had two:

Were Catholics Christians?
Did Catholics worship Mary?

During that meeting, I learned that Catholics were the first Christians and that no, they didn’t worship Mary. “That would be a grave sin,” she said. I breathed a sigh of relief and decided that I could continue to pursue a relationship with this man.

For some strange reason, I felt compelled to ask him Catholic questions. There was something about him that made him seem secure about his faith. I knew he had no intention of changing it. But I wasn’t living out an active faith anyway and had many mortal sins on my soul, I’m ashamed to say.

When I asked him something about Mary – you know, one of the Top Ten -- like, “Ya’ll don’t really worship Mary, do you?” it led to a discussion on the Hail Mary. When he explained the last part, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen,” and it’s origin (Middle Ages, as best I recollect, added by pious Catholic during the Black Death plague), I thought I might like to memorize that one. And so I did. And then he told me that if I would pray seven of them before noon on Tuesday, something good would happen to me. Yes, this is superstition that had come down to him through his Mother, God bless her. It’s what sweet Nuns told little Catholic kids to encourage their devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

So my first introduction to the Catholic Church was by a superstitious, non-practicing Catholic!