Why They Convert: Conversations with New Catholics
- André Escaleira, Jr.
- 54 minutes ago
- 16 min read
Neither homelessness nor divorce, neither addiction nor loneliness, neither anxiety nor brokenness can keep these new Catholics from God’s love
We’ve seen concerning data about the number of people who leave the Church.
We’ve heard a lot about the apostolic age in which we live, one in which Christianity is not the default, one in which an increasing number of people do not know Christ.
Such an environment begs a major question: Why be Catholic? Really, why practice any religion, but especially this one?
Yet, year after year, some make the confounding choice to embrace the Catholic faith, a choice to which they feel drawn somewhat inexplicably. Recent surveys and data even show that the number might be increasing, especially in the previously shrinking churches of France and England.
But why?
“I felt like I was missing something. I felt like my kids were missing something,” Larry Robinson recalled. The cradle Methodist had not been all that involved in his church community throughout his life, saying that he was a bit too self-involved and did whatever he wanted. That all changed suddenly, years later.
“It just kind of hit me all of a sudden that I felt that my family needed this, and I’ve been depriving them of at least exposing them to this,” Larry shared. “I felt like I was doing them a disservice because I had that when I was younger; I had an idea of God and Church and Baptism and everything, and I just chose not to accept it and go with it. But then they’ve never been exposed to any of this, and I felt that it was detrimental at this point.”
The sudden realization almost inexplicably led Larry to attend Mass for the first time in decades. As a child and in college, he attended Mass with friends and had a positive experience, but he didn’t pursue faith further.
“It just felt more real to me. It felt like a real presence, like the presence of God. It just felt more real,” he remembered.
This time, as he grew in faith, Larry brought his family with him to join the candidates and catechumens at Our Lady of the Valley Parish in Windsor journeying through the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA), the process by which individuals enter the Catholic Church.
It was a mysteriously magnetic attraction, one that Larry still can’t really explain, and one that runs through many new Catholics’ stories.
For Andrew Joslin, Nederland fire marshal and cradle Episcopalian, a similar sense of something missing led him to seek something more. He’d drifted from faith over the years, in no small part because of a difficult relationship with his father. For 16 years, Andrew didn’t speak to his father, during which time Andrew got married and had children. But one day, out of the blue, Andrew’s dad called him for his birthday, and things shifted.
“For whatever reason, it was more important to me to have a conversation with him and try to re-establish him in my life. I felt like there was so much I wanted him to know,” Andrew recalled of the providential call. “I didn’t really care about the past that much at all. It felt so far away.”
The surprise call led to an even more surprising reconciliation between Andrew and his father, which Andrew says was the first domino to fall in his return journey to faith.
“I think that was that first little anchor of my faith in God starting to grow again, that first step of submission to something greater than me,” he said.
“Getting right” with his dad, becoming a father himself and meeting a solid group of men at St. Rita Church in Nederland — another chance encounter, to be sure — opened Andrew’s eyes to a much broader horizon. Suddenly, he could see that he had been missing out on something big.
“There’s this whole side of life that I’d never really seen before. And I was ready for something,” he recalled. “My wife and I had gone to all the churches around in Nederland, and just none of them spoke to us. There was just something always missing in every one of them. And the minute I went to Mass, I said, ‘Oh. Here it is, what you were looking for.’”
From there, everything changed — and Andrew’s wife and children took notice. As he started praying, he quit drinking and left behind anger, frustration and anxiety. The effects were intoxicating, and Andrew’s wife and son decided to follow him to the Catholic Church, desiring what he had found. His son, Billy, even began joining Andrew for a bit of his daily holy hour. Today, Billy will now make his own holy hour while his dad attends OCIA classes — at only nine years old.
“In the past year, I’ve reoriented every single priority of my life to focus on God: every morning, throughout the day, at night. It all makes sense to me. I felt for a long time that something was missing,” Andrew said.
Though they may not be able to put their finger on it at the time, many newly converted Catholics said they had an “I want what they have” moment.
For Kathy Conde, that moment came after a great deal of suffering. Fresh off a painful divorce from her son’s father and a subsequent failed relationship with another man, she said she moved to the outskirts of Boulder to be alone. Locked in a prison of her own making, Kathy self-medicated with alcohol for six years to numb the pain.
“I was up here drinking too much and being alone, wanting to be alone, but I was calling out to God the whole time. I had always prayed from my heart straight to God often for help. It was a difficult life because of all the strife in my family,” she recalled. “I kept saying to God, ‘Do you love me? I need you. Do you love me?’ But, of course, I couldn’t feel a thing.”
Miserable in her self-imposed solitary confinement, Kathy eventually reached out for help and was connected to an online recovery group out of California. In that group, she met a woman — her future sponsor in recovery — who would change her life.
“She kept talking about the spiritual solution, this spiritual aspect of her recovery. And she talked very happily about her Catholic upbringing. She was Catholic all her life and loved it. So I started calling her and we would talk about the Church,” Kathy shared, her voice breaking with emotion. “It was like I had found the most amazing treasure.”
No stranger to faith, Kathy had experience with the Southern Baptist and Episcopalian traditions before she decided to give Buddhism “a college try.” A bit more than that, she practiced the meditative tradition for a decade, even studying writing at Naropa University, the Buddhist university in Boulder.
But, when push came to shove, Kathy said whatever faith she had, whatever centering practices she had adopted, could not compellingly answer her brokenhearted cry: “Why?”
“That was not something I could lean on in the time of real crisis I was in,” she said. “I gave it all I had, and I really did come up feeling like this is not something that I can lean on in this most awful time.”
The hard-won lesson coincided with her recovery sponsor's joyful witness and led Kathy to consider joining the Catholic Church at Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Boulder. Now a newly baptized member of the children of God, she said she has rock-solid assurance that the Catholic Church is the “real thing.”
“I know so well that the Catholic Church is the real thing, because I did so much searching and I came up empty-handed so many times,” Kathy shared as she recounted her journey to the Catholic Church. “I have to tell you right now, I’m 66 — and you can print that, too! — I am 66 and just converting to Catholicism, and it is the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life.”
Like Kathy, Laith found his spirituality crumbling when life got tough. Raised in a nominally Muslim household, the theoretical physicist studying string theory and teaching at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden would become agnostic in his 20s. He would search over the years that followed, exploring Eastern meditative practices before coming to believe in God in his 30s.
“I really got into physics because the feeling was not just that it gave me intellectual answers to things, but the feeling of doing it was somehow a transcendent sort of experience. It was a sense of being connected with something bigger,” he recalled of the experience he would eventually categorize as a “religious experience.”
“I was pretty agnostic in my 20s, I would say, in terms of the interest in God or the thoughts about God,” he continued. “To me, it was more about exploring these transformative experiences, these transformative practices that were meditative practices, and so I really was taken by all that. It’s interesting, through those practices, I would say I became a theist [a believer in God] in my 30s.”
He would go on to explore Catholic and Christian mysticism, even visiting Catholic churches to pray, yet without committing to the faith. That all changed when hard times hit, and he found his spiritual practices lacking.
“A couple years ago, work was getting harder for me. My personal dealings with anxiety and depression and that sort of thing were becoming more pronounced and less amenable to the practices I’d been using to sort of self-medicate, if you will, over the years. I knew I had to go deeper,” he remembered.
“Even though I have done a lot of work with meditative practices, in the end, I’ve felt like they’ve run their course with me,” he later added. “For me, it’s just a sense of things that haven’t worked in the sense of having had deeper experiences or a sense of connecting with God and noticing how those have left me. When I walk into a Catholic Mass, that sense of grace is extremely powerful.”
For Steve Bentley, the suffering and difficulty that led him to faith was even more dramatic — yet somehow, mysteriously, he rediscovered faith through it. In a story only God and Hollywood could write, he found himself homeless after a series of unfortunate events. After he and his wife divorced so that she could marry another woman, Steve left Idaho for Colorado under a dark cloud. To make matters worse, the army veteran experienced severe mental illness after his service and quickly ended up on the streets.
“During that time, I had fallen away from the faith. I was very hostile. I blamed God for a lot of the things that had happened to me,” he remembered. Though he was raised Protestant and felt connected to his faith at one point, Steve struggled to believe.
In a glimmer of light years later, he one day met someone from Veterans Affairs who would connect him to resources, housing and healthcare. He began to engage recovery, slowly finding mental health treatment that helped and eventually leaving his self-medicating prescription of alcohol and marijuana behind.
“As part of my recovery, God started tugging on my heart again and pulling me back towards him,” Steve said. “And that really manifested itself just in trying to communicate with God through prayer and through reading the Bible again.”
Steve “picked up where he left off,” reading the Scriptures and even enrolling in bible college, thanks to VA benefits. While studying, he encountered the Catholic perspective on the Eucharist — that the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ are actually mysteriously present on the altar, not a simple symbol but a tangible reality. Even still, despite his best efforts to reengage and go deeper in his faith through study, Steve said it wasn’t enough as he navigated his reentry into society. He needed community.
“Being homeless is a very isolating experience. Even once I got connected and rehoused here in Boulder, you just don’t start having relationships again without some kind of a connection,” he said of the desire that led him to explore various area Protestant churches in order to “reconnect with the Body of Christ.”
But he too felt that something was missing, until he walked by Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Boulder on his daily outdoor walking exercise route and felt inexplicably drawn towards the parish’s beautiful brass doors. For months, he’d pause at the parish, staring at the doors. Occasionally, when the weather was fair, he would sit and pray in a small courtyard adjacent to the church, which features a large crucifix.
“That physical place of the church became so comfortable for me. It was a place of solace where I really felt like I connected with God in a very real and substantive way while I would pray at that crucifix,” he recalled. “So I kind of decided I’ve just got to go through whatever the process is to become a member at this place that I already feel so comfortable.”
Though comfortable near the church, he felt profoundly unworthy to approach those dazzling doors.
“I would go by the door, but I would never go through the door. I just would never go through the doors because I didn’t feel worthy. I didn’t feel that I was good enough for Christ,” Steve shared.
But when the parish reinstalled a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus above those doors — one that he had never seen — Steve couldn’t help but feel like Moses before the burning bush (see Exodus 3). He’d received a sign from the open-armed, heart-inflamed Christ that he was being called closer. Soon after, Steve joined the parish community for Mass as he inquired about OCIA.
“I finally walked through the doors, and ‘I’m finally home’ is the feeling that I had,” Steve recalled. “And that hasn’t gone away. Now, every Mass, when I walk through those doors, I’m like, ‘I’m finally home.’”
For David and Kelsey Lawson, a former nondenominational youth pastor and pastor’s wife with backgrounds in the Seventh Day Adventist and Baptist traditions, a similar sense of community drew them towards the Catholic Church, even amid great strife and serious preconceived notions about the Church. Despite their commitment to the church David helped pastor, they would eventually experience serious burnout that led them not only out of the community but away from Christianity as a whole.
“I don’t want the guilt; I don’t want to raise our children with that,” Kelsey remembers thinking at the time.
They would go on to dabble in alternative spiritual practices like yoga and tarot cards as they searched for meaning in this new stage of life.
But when COVID hit, and David’s mother ended up hospitalized and placed on a ventilator, everything shifted.
“I remember in that moment where there was that uncertainty, all that new age stuff, positive energy or whatever went right out the door,” David explained. “My faith in Christ came back in that moment. I started praying in the name of Jesus. I started praying for healing in the name of Jesus.”
“It was David’s mom’s illness that drove him, when he realized, like, ‘I depend on that.’ I think we both realized that we weren’t giving our kids that same opportunity,” Kelsey added. “So, when they have hard times in the future, they’re not going to have that hope to fall back on. So that’s where we started to kind of dabble back into it.”
Thus began the Lawsons’ re-engagement with the Church. Searching for meaningful connection and community, they explored several churches in Northern Colorado but always found them lacking in an almost inexplicable way.
But then, one day, Kelsey met a family with seven children at the local pool and felt an immediate connection. At some point in the new friendship, Kelsey asked what church the family attended.
“She was like, ‘Oh, it’s Our Lady of the Valley,’” Kelsey recalled. “So immediately I knew it was Catholic, and I immediately thought, ‘Well, we won’t be trying that one because it’s a cult, obviously.’”
But through the witness of these new friends and others, as well as consistent invitations to theological discussions, bible studies, small groups and parish events, the Lawsons found their negative preconceptions about Catholicism clearing.
“A lot of preconceived notions that we had about the Catholic Church were kind of dismissed, like what we perceived for such a long time, some of that went away,” David said. “So because of that going away, I thought, ‘Okay, well, not to say that I’m going to become Catholic, but I can drop that guard down of other preconceived notions that I’ve had for such a long time.’”
As the Catholic clouds parted and the warmth of community shone in their lives, David and Kelsey began to feel a pull towards the Windsor parish.
“I think a lot of what drew us in is not only meeting Andrew and Rebecca and their family, but through her bible study, Kelsey has met a lot of great women, and I’ve met a lot of their husbands,” David added. “The community pull, that was a huge impact for pulling us in. It was a very welcoming environment. Guys that I’ve just known for a little while, they’ve been awesome, just great connections.”
Kelsey entered the Church in August 2023, and this Easter, David and his two older children were baptized and confirmed before receiving Jesus in the Eucharist for the first time.
For all of these newest Catholics, the grace of God has gone before them, inspiring them in mysterious ways. As they’ve come to embrace the unseen yet powerful share in God’s life, they’ve seen incredible fruit budding forth. As they’ve reconciled with God through the sacrament of Reconciliation, these new Catholics have found tremendous freedom and reconciliation with loved ones.
“I have found liberation for the first time ever, that I have been truly seeking for a really long time,” Kathy shared. For her, the freedom came in the form of an unexpected, even miraculous, moment of forgiveness with her mother. Despite serious difficulties stemming from childhood, Kathy found herself led to forgive her mom totally, completely, unreservedly.
“It wasn’t in my mind, but something inside me completely embraced the ability to forgive my mom, and when I did, it even had an effect on her,” she shared of the interior moment. Though she could not explicitly express her forgiveness to her mother, Kathy noticed a shift that left her with a profound hope for the rest of her family, including her son.
“It was really beautiful,” she continued. “A forgiveness all around happened because of my asking for that. I was praying for Jesus to help me with that. That has been huge. I actually believe if I’m able to make progress in really forgiving something that was really hard for me, that has a ripple effect that might even affect my son in some way, and that definitely affected my mother. I could just feel it. It was like everything was transformed.”
That experience of forgiveness and re-connection is leading to a dramatic shift in Kathy’s own life, too: she’s releasing herself from her self-imposed solitary confinement.
“I’m going to move down. I’m going to sell my place in the canyon, move back down to the valley and join the community,” she said. “I want to be of service at the church, to the Church regularly, which I do from up here, but I can get snowed in, and it’s quite difficult. I don’t want to just be isolated anymore. I want to rejoin society, join the Church, maybe do something with my writing as I get down there. I pray for God’s will and want God’s will as far as what I do from here. I know I need to do something. I can’t just stay up here and be a hermit.”
Steve, too, has seen a marked reconciliation with his younger son as he’s re-engaged faith and prepared to enter the Catholic Church.
“There’s been not just a little, but a lot of reconciliation of our relationship,” he said, though he describes his relationship with his older son as estranged. Even still, Steve says he’s hopeful. “Every day, I pray for my sons, but I don’t necessarily pray for my sons to reconcile with me. I just pray that they know they’re loved, that they’re worthy of love. And then, I just have to believe that, hopefully, we’ll have a better relationship someday.”
For his part, Larry has also noticed how his journey of faith has brought his family closer together.
“We were happy before, but it seems like we’re even happier now. We are much tighter as a family now, doing this together and going through this process,” he shared, later adding, “I do feel that doing this has brought us together in a more substantial way, other than just sports or going on vacation. It’s something that will last us a lifetime.”
For Andrew and his wife, and for David and Kelsey, the process of becoming Catholic has brought reconciliation to their marriages in addition to their families.
“We’ve never felt like we were on the same page like we do today,” Andrew shared. “Our arguments are normal, good, loving, always-coming-from-a-place-of-love arguments. And that wasn’t always the case. When you surrender yourself to one another and truly give yourself to the other and have trust that the other person is truly doing that for you, it opens up so much in your life.”
“I definitely feel our marriage has gotten so strong,” Kelsey said, recalling David and her experience. “I mean, we were on the brink of divorce when our son was two.”
“I do give credit to God that he kept us together,” David added, later commenting that “it’s actually a miracle” that the pair remained united through the tough times, given that they were not “centered on God or anything during that time.”
“That’s what my prayer has been lately,” Kelsey continued. “I just want God to be the foundation and our center. He’s never been that before. He’s already started to do that, and it’s really changed our marriage. It’s made us more loving towards each other and towards our kids, and just way more peace, way more dependence on him versus self-dependence.”
“I think, ultimately, the way my conversion and my reprioritization of God in my life have helped me is to have a complete peace in the midst of chaos,” Andrew added. Called to serve his community in a particularly intense way, the first responder has seen a dramatic transformation in his life over the past year as he’s put God first.
“It’s been an incredible, incredible year. I can’t believe it’s only been a year, but our lives have changed forever,” he said.
For Laith and all the new Catholics, their personal encounter with Jesus and his Body — through the Church, the Eucharist and the poor — has changed everything.
“Ultimately, why I’m here doing this is because of the deeply personal. With my ups and downs in terms of the struggle in this process, I do embrace, and I love the moments when I’m elevated by grace,” Laith shared. “My sense of opening my heart... I think of the people I love, the people in my life, and there happens to be a much deeper sense of caring for them. There’s an integrity inside that I feel.
“When I think of the people I love, to be able to feel compassion for them with less baggage, I love that and I want that,” he concluded.
“I am so grateful to have found the Church,” Kathy added, reflecting on her experience. “I’m so excited and I just feel the love. I feel God’s love. It’s unmistakable now.
“It’s because of the Catholic Church, it really is. It’s really opened the way for me to feel love, God’s love,” she concluded.
