My 'Road to Damascus' Moment

Forty-two years ago today, I was a 33 year old Serbian Orthodox with 'Catholic leanings'. I was unable to accept the Dogma of Papal infallibility, not because I disagreed with it, but because I did not believe in the Immaculate Conception. I am a Thomist, and the Angelic Doctor did not believe in the Immaculate Conception either, ergo that was good enough for me. So, how could an infallible Pope define a false doctrine as Dogma? 

So, on Saturday, 20 September 1980, I was alone in St Paul's Student Centre at Wichita State University. I attended Holy Mass there when I couldn't make it to my Orthodox parish for Divine Liturgy.  I had gotten to know the Chaplain well enough that, when he locked the Centre at night, if I was there, he locked me in to use the library. There was a crash bar so I could get out. At any rate,  I was in the library when I found a little booklet, published probably in the late 50's or early 60's, entitled 'Catholics and Orthodox--Can They Unite?' I came upon a chapter on the Immaculate Conception and, to my amazement, I read a quote from one of my great heroes, Georgios Scholarios, the Patriarch Gennadios II. Gennadios was the first Patriarch of Constantinople after The City fell to the infidel jihadists  and he was also a prominent Aristotelian-Thomist, one of the few in Orthodoxy, which tends to be Platonist. He had translated the Summa Theologica into Greek and when he reached the section on the Immaculate Conception, he said, 'Thomas was a wise man and indeed may be a Saint (he had been canonised in the West almost 200 years earlier), but on this point he was wrong!' To my amazement, I learned that the doctrine had first been developed in the Orthodox East, but as the West came to view it favourably, the East reacted against it. 

At that point, my last defence against Catholicism gone, I walked into the small Chapel where Daily Mass was said and the Blessed Sacrament was reserved. I fell to my knees in front of our Lord and began to cry. A few minutes later, I stood up, a Catholic!

The next morning, I went to Mass at the Parish Church (I wasn't a student, so I couldn't belong to the Newman Centre) and after Mass asked the Pastor, Fr Richard Stuchlik (R+I+P), about being received. After talking, he said that, based on my own reading of Catholic material, I already knew more than he was trying to teach the Baptists and Methodists he was instructing and I should go home, pray about it, and let him know when I wanted to be received. A week later, at the evening Mass on Sunday, 28 September 1980, which is the Feast of St Wenceslaus (fittingly enough, a pre-schism Saint, and the Patron of the Parish in which I now live!),  I recited the Creed in the Western form, promised obedience to the Pope of Rome and was received into the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church founded by our Lord Jesus Christ! By chance Fr Stuchlik wasn't available to say Mass that evening, so he asked me if it was OK if I was received by the visiting priest. I said yes and the visiting priest turned out to be Fr (later Monsignor) William Carr, the Chaplain at St Paul's,  who had locked me in the library!  He is still alive, so please say prayer for him. He was ordained 59 years ago last March!

Anyway, 42 years ago next Sunday, I was received. After all these years, despite frustration, confusion and, yes, sometimes anger, at what is happening in the Church and a fairly rapid transition into full blown Traditionalism, I have never, once, for an instant, regretted the decision I made that night. I give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity and to my Patrons, but especially to our Most Holy Mother, the Blessed Virgin, to whom I developed, somehow, a devotion as a young protestant boy, and who finally got tired of waiting, slapped me upside the head, and said, 'OK, Son, it's time to come home!'

A few years later, when I made my Profession as a Carmelite Tertiary, I took as my Name in Religion, Mary of the Immaculate Conception, and I gave all my children, boys and girls, 'Mary' as a third baptismal name in her honour.

As the Christians of Ephesus shouted in the Streets after the Ecumenical Council there in AD 431 declared Her to be Theotokos, Mother of God:

Blessed Be the Great Mother of God, Mary Most Holy!!!

And, as the Divine Praises add:

Blessed be her Holy and Immaculate Conception!