The Immaculate Conception and My Conversion

Surprisingly, it was the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception that kept me out of the Church for years! 

Whilst I was a young Anglican, I had developed a deep devotion to Our Blessed Mother, but I had also been heavily influenced by St Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor. Thomas did not believe in the Immaculate Conception, which was not yet defined as dogma, and was a major intellectual bone of contention between his Dominican Order (anti) and the Franciscans of his good friend, St Bonaventure (pro). In fact, Thomas scholastically 'disproved' the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in his Summa.

Even tho', at the time, I believed in the 'branch theory' of Catholicism, Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism being the three 'branches', as the Anglican Church moved further and further away from any relationship to historic Christianity, I began to have serious doubts about its 'Catholicism'. The final straw was the 'ordination' of female 'deacons'. I realised that if women could be 'ordained' to the diaconate, there was absolutely no reason they couldn't become 'priests' and 'bishops'.

I had friends who tried to convince me to stay, telling me that there would never be woman 'priests'. I saw the ironclad logic and left. I became Eastern Orthodox because Orthodoxy was 'Catholicism without the Immaculate Conception'. Even tho' I had been Chrismated as an Orthodox, my mind and soul were still Western. My prayer life was centred around Western devotions and the Western Office.

Interestingly, I had very little problem with the concept of Papal Infallibility except for that Catch-22 of the Immaculate Conception! Whilst I could understand the idea, it was a logical impossibility for an infallible Pope to infallibly define a false doctrine!

I had moved to Wichita, KS, and due to distance, it was very difficult for me to attend Orthodox Divine Liturgy. As a result, I began attending the St Paul Newman Center at Wichita State University, which was only a few blocks from where I lived. I became an active part of the St Paul's community, regularly spending time in the Centre's library.

On Saturday night, 21 September 1980, I was in the library when I found a little booklet, published probably in the late '50s or early '60s, entitled "Catholics and Orthodox--Can They Unite?" I came upon the 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 of Constantinople. Gennadios was the first Patriarch of The City after it 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 (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "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 developed in the Orthodox East, but as the West came to view it favourably, the East reacted against it. With my last defence against Catholicism gone, I walked into the Chapel where our Lord was present in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, I fell to my knees in front of Him and cried! A few minutes later, I stood up, a Catholic!

I was received into the Church shortly thereafter. A few years later when I made my Profession as a Tertiary of the Order of Mount Carmel I took as my name in religion Mary of the Immaculate Conception, and all five of my children, male and female, have Mary as a 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!