“The Eucharist”
What draws people to the Catholic Church? Converts tell their stories
By Rich Reece
Dr. Edwin Hartman, a Presbyterian who became Catholic in 2000, is uncomfortable with the term “conversion.” To Dr. Hartman, “It denotes a turning away from something, and while I’ve embraced Catholicism I haven’t turned away from my religious roots or the community I found in the Presbyterian Church. In that sense, I know it sounds odd, but I think of myself now as completely Catholic and completely Protestant.”
Dr. Hartman believes he felt drawn to the Catholic Church from his childhood in Pittsburgh, where many of his friends were Catholic. That “lifelong familiarity” with the Church blossomed into fascination in Italy, when Hartman was pursuing medical studies there. On his return to the States, he settled in Clayton and enrolled in a Catholic home study course on the Internet. Finally, in what he calls the “Internet moment,” he e-mailed Dr. Terry Jackson, then Director of Evangelization and Catechesis for the Diocese of Raleigh.
“I told him to stop by and we’d have lunch,” Jackson recalls. As luck would have it, then Bishop F. Joseph Gossman was also free, and the inquiring doctor had lunch with both men. Soon afterwards, Hartman entered the RCIA at Cathedral Parish. Although he had a desire to join the Church, he approached the initiation process with typical intellectual rigor. “My RCIA director said I asked too many questions,” he recalls, laughing.
Blanche Ellison, the director at the time and now a close friend of Dr. Hartman’s, recalls those questions, and laughs as well. “I remember at one point saying, ‘Ed, are you going to Mass?’ And he looked at me, puzzled for a moment, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. So I said, ‘You’ve got to go to Mass.’ And I think it was his experience of the Eucharist that finally solidified his decision.”
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For Father David Brockman, Vicar General of the Diocese of Raleigh, the Eucharist was the “doorway” to the Catholic Church.
Fr. Brockman grew up in the Chicago area, where his father is a physician. But the family had deep Southern Baptist roots, and when it came time for college, like the Brockman men and women of three generations before him, he attended Furman University in Greenville, SC. “As a child I’d had Catholic friends, had noticed their devotional practices and even been to Mass,” he recalls. “But serious intellectual and spiritual exploration really started for me, as it does for many young people, in college.”
In South Carolina, Fr. Brockman would drive 25 miles on Sunday to attend the Baptist church with his relatives. But several of his Catholic fraternity brothers were less conscientious about Mass attendance. In what seems in retrospect a pastoral impulse, Brockman offered to go with them to the local Catholic church. Several times, out of curiosity, he attended the Sunday evening Mass with them, and enjoyed it.
“I appreciated the sense of reverence, the structure of the Mass and the architecture of the church building,” he says, “but I was most drawn to the Eucharist. It helped me understand what I had read in the Bible about Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, ‘This is my Body.’ I was drawn to His Real Presence.
“The parish also had a very committed, holy pastor, Msgr. Don Gorski. He seemed grounded in the Lord, at peace.” The pastoral associate also encouraged Fr. Brockman. She was Sister Kitty Bethea, O.P., who would later come to the Diocese of Raleigh.
Eventually, Fr. Brockman regularly attended Mass and other community activities. In his senior year, he began RCIA. How did his parents react?
“I didn’t tell them,” he explains. “Frankly, I was frightened of my dad’s reaction. And later, when I went to the seminary, he was not pleased. That changed gradually, though, when he realized that I hadn’t been influenced by ‘outside’ forces.
“At least,” he says with a smile, “not by outside human forces, but by the Lord.”
The reconciliation became complete several years later, when Father Brockman was Pastor of St. Luke the Evangelist in Raleigh. His father said he was visiting at Easter, and would like to receive Communion.
“I said I would love for that to happen, it was a goal, but it wasn’t possible,” Father Brockman remembers. “Sort of jokingly, I said, ‘You should join the RCIA.’ And he said ‘I did.’ He had started in August the year before, and even though we had visited twice since then he hadn’t said a word. ‘But Dad,’ I said, ‘you never said anything!’ And he said, ‘Neither did you!’” That Easter the young pastor had the great joy of welcoming his father into full communion with the Church.
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Melissa DuCharme joined the Church in 1997. Raised Lutheran in the Midwest by a family that was very involved in their church, she married a Catholic.
“We wanted to go to the same church,” she says, “and we visited several. We loved St. Michael’s (in Cary).”
The most important factor in her conversion? “The beauty of the Eucharist,” she says without hesitation. “The meaning of Communion.”
“I fell in love with the faith during RCIA,” she explains. “The Church has so much to offer as life unfolds. When my grandfather died, it was so comforting to think of him as an intercessor. When I became a mother, I learned to appreciate my relationship with Mary. More recently, the social teachings of the Church have spoken to me especially powerfully.”
DuCharme volunteered to assist the Diocesan Office of Peace and Justice, and today gives presentations through Catholic Charities to help parishes enhance their social justice ministries.
“One of the great things about the Catholic Church,” she says, “is its vast history. It has thousands of years of thinking and guidance to offer in every area that challenges us.”
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Church history, and a Protestant minister, started Echo Lewis on the road to conversion. In college in the ‘60s, she signed up with friends for a Church History course at a nearby Presbyterian church. “Two things the minister said got me interested,” Lewis recalls. “He said that Protestants don’t give Mary her due, and that Church History started with the Catholic Church; Protestant history only went so far.”
One Sunday a time later, “I was bored, so I went to Mass with some Catholic friends.” At Communion, she noticed a bearded priest in the congregation. Later she asked her friends, “Who is he? Why wasn’t he up in front with the other priests?”
His name was Father Patrick McNulty, and his social and ecclesiastical activism had earned him a reputation as a “radical,” and disfavor with his bishop. “I don’t know what it was about him,” Echo Lewis recalls, “but I had a sense that he would be important in my life.” Under the pretext of writing an article for her college newspaper, Lewis arranged to meet the priest, and discovered her intuition had been accurate. “He was a man who lived what he talked,” Lewis says.
Father Pat became a guide on Lewis’s journey in search of spiritual truth. “After one of our conversations,” Lewis says, “he told me to go home and read the Gospels. I wasn’t sure what a ‘Gospel’ was – we hadn’t used that terminology. So I went home and narrowed it down to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts. The next week I proudly told Father Pat, ‘I read all five!’”
The priest would be Lewis’s sponsor when she was received into the Church, and today she cites him as one of the most important influences in her conversion. But not the most important.
“That was the Eucharist,” Lewis says. “I connected with the Real Presence at a deep, intuitive, almost unconscious level.”
It was Father Pat who first told Lewis about the Madonna House Apostolate, which became her vocation. Madonna House is a Catholic community of lay men, women, and priests dedicated to loving and serving Jesus Christ. It was founded in 1947 by Catherine Doherty in Combermere, Ontario, Canada, and has established missionary field houses world-wide. Today Lewis is an associate at the Raleigh field house, and is writing a biography of Catherine Doherty.
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As a pastor, Father Brockman has seen many conversions to Catholicism. Every journey is unique, but he sees some similarities.
“There are things that attract people in the beginning,” he says. “The vibrancy of the faith community, its mission work, the beauty of the architecture, compelling preaching heroes of the faith, canonized or not. Those things are touchstones. But what ultimately wins a person to our Church is experiencing, through the Mass, the depth of what the Church teaches. The Latin phrase says it: Lex orandi, lex credendi. ‘The law of praying is the law of believing.’ Through the liturgy, when it’s celebrated with deep reverence, you are drawn into what the Church has believed through inspired Scripture and sacred Tradition throughout Her entire history.”