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Conversion
Dear God, Why?
I always considered myself to be a good Catholic. I was born in Boston to Catholic parents of Portuguese descent. I attended Catholic school and went to Mass on a regular basis at the insistence of my parents. When I was six, my family traveled abroad, where we were encompassed by traditions of the Catholic faith. My first rosary was handed to me by a very close family friend, Blessed Padre Pio. As I grew older, however, my involvement with the church became rote. The years went by, and I began to visit church only occasionally.
The Voice of My Conversion
I write this with reluctance because I’m certain that there are many others, both behind bars and in the free world, whose conversion stories are more interesting and spiritual. But maybe I’m supposed to write this because God often uses ordinary, simple things to manifest himself.
Los Milagros de Cristo
You could hear the sounds all over the neighborhood—a loud crack, a pop, then sizzling. The stench of burning flesh greeted those who ran from their houses to stare in horror as a young lineman dangled by his safety belt from a high wire while 7,200 volts of electricity shot through his body that summer morning in 1974.
The Miracle of My Conversion
To get to the point, I will omit the first fifty or so years of my life, since there were no earthshaking events up to that time. But when I was about fifty years old, some friends invited me to a Cursillo, a Spanish word that means “short course.” It was a three-day retreat at Mount St. Francis Retreat Center near Indianapolis. Little did I realize what was about to happen to me.
Getting on the Right Path
The day of my confirmation was the happiest day of my life. As the priest anointed my forehead with chrism and pronounced those beautiful words, “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit,” I thought I was in heaven. My heart was filled with love for Jesus, my Savior.
All Life Is Sacred
Twenty years ago, my brother was murdered in New York. At the time, I was living in California with my husband and two young daughters, and we were joyfully anticipating the birth of our third child. Then, on a sunny Friday afternoon in September of 1975, my husband had the grim task of telling me that Andrew had been shot through the head and killed. Words cannot fully express what I felt--denial, uncontrollable weeping, a sense that part of me had died, a sense of being enveloped by darkness.
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