A Mother Finds Her Son
Rev. Dcn. John Greenwood

Each year as we begin I explain how they are embarking on a journey of spiritual and moral discovery and that, if they reach the end, this will unquestionably be the best thing to happen in their lives. How do I know this? It’s because I made the same journey myself eleven years ago and so I know. Becoming a Catholic late in life is an experience hard to describe; it is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the gift of untold grace so great and overwhelming that most of want to do something in return. In my case the parish priest suggested I apply for and train to be a permanent deacon in the diocese and so here I am!

How did all this come about? Well I had good and loving parents who took the trouble to have their babies baptised in the Church of England and every day I can thank God the Father for the great blessing of these parents and that baptism which so many people nowadays lack. While my parents were Anglican, on my Dad’s side were two sisters who had become Catholics. Their story, too, is interesting. One of them became my godmother. She lived on her own and ran kennels in Dorset which became a favourite destination for our holidays. The other took vows as an Ursuline Sister in Belgium (another early holiday destination) where she remained for over seventy years.

Despite the best efforts of parents, aunts and godparents I did not turn out that well, rebelling against God, school, parents, all sorts of things – a true 1960’s teenager you could say. By the time I got to university I was an atheist (or so I told myself) and a communist, an extreme one, so extreme I actually got expelled from the official Communist Party!

But in between school and university I had the great fortune to go and work for a family on a farm in rural France. It truly was rural, so much so that there was noone around for fifteen miles or more who spoke any English. So I learned French, but I learned more than French, because this was a Catholic family with, at the time, six children. For an English lad six children seemed enormous, but the family would calmly tell me this was nothing and reel off the names of other families in the neighbourhood with eight, ten, twelve children. There was even the famous family of Dutch immigrants with fifteen children! You learn a lot from a large family, especially when work (the farm) and the family go together. You learn about mutual help and understanding, about authority, living cheek by jowl, about valuing good things and good occasions, in short, about human love. No doubt it helped that this family was relatively poor, lived in the country and had no television. I have been greatly blessed to be adopted as honorary son of this family whose members continue to be among my closest friends to this day. “John, he’s one of us, one of the family,” they say.

While I was there in France the aunt in Belgium wrote to me to say she and the community were going to Lourdes on pilgrimage and could I join them there? I explained this to my French “mother” and then asked, Lourdes where is it, what is there? Without really giving any explanation she decided I was definitely going to Lourdes and made the arrangements over my head for trains and taxi. And so I went. Well the the sisters in Belgium were always extremely kind to us as children so it was good to see the aunt and mother superior and others again in Lourdes. It was an exciting and interesting journey, another part of France to explore. But what about Lourdes? The memory stuck with me. I remember in particular the young couple who ran the hotel where I stayed. They had just had their first child and were attentive to me. Was I Catholic? No, I wasn’t. Then I must be a Protestant. I tried to explain I wasn’t that either but this cut no ice, if you weren’t a Catholic in Lourdes at that time you had to be a Protestant. Right at the end on my last evening they asked me when I thought I would come back to Lourdes. Well, I said, it was good to have been there but I saw no reason why I should be coming back. Oh Yes, they told me; once you have been to Lourdes you always come back, Our Lady calls you.

She did, but it took some years for me to hear her! Once I had got over being a communist I came back to faith. Memories of the convent chapel in Belgium were strong but I remained an Anglican. Perhaps that was a mistake, perhaps God wanted me to wait longer before my final conversion; I do not know. It took many years, a career first in universities and then in the family business, many heartaches and many false moves before I could see there was only one path to follow, the path to Rome.

Sometimes the difficulties for converts from the Church of England are intellectual – the papacy, papal definitions and so forth. Sometimes they are more aesthetic – the barrenness of much Catholic architecture, art and music, at least in this country and the perfunctory way of conducting liturgies. Sometimes too they are moral. What the Catholic Church has to teach is quite definite and unmistakable whereas elsewhere now it is loosely defined so you make up your mind and, so to speak, do your own thing. To make this point let me quote from Peter Kreeft:

“By its own admission, what our age finds most unacceptable in the Church’s perennial wisdom is her sexual morality. Almost every controversial issue dividing ‘dissenters’, inside the Church as well as outside, from the Church’s traditional teaching today is about sexual morality: fornication (sex outside marriage), contraception, homosexuality, divorce and, most radically of all, abortion.” (Catholic Christianity, ch 8.)

If we think about this, about the world around us, the world in which I grew up, this need not surprise us. Yet it needs to be faced and every convert needs to confront it since in embracing the Catholic Faith we embrace all that the Church teaches us and not selected parts of it. My godmother died quite young but her sister in Belgium outlived her and my parents; the “old aunt” she called herself. Before becoming a Catholic I asked her advice since by then we were corresponding regularly. Read the Catechism ( the new one that is), she said, and see if you can accept all of it. She did the underlining and I knew what she meant! As Pope Benedict keeps teaching us, it is easy to see the Catholic Faith as something restrictive on our freedom, but this is an illusion. Truly to accept the faith of the Church, accept it and make it ours and live it, is in fact liberating; it is the truth that makes us free.

Why did I become a Catholic? That is a question lady in our parish kept asking me several successive Sundays after I was received. Somehow my answers did not seem to satisfy her, so I asked myself the question – Actually why was it? I remembered that first trip to Lourdes and that couple in the hotel. They were quite right, I did return several times over the years to Lourdes. So I told the lady, it was Mary when I was young she called to me and then somehow through thick and thin she never let me go. The lady understood that and at last was satisfied with my answer. At the end of the day it is not down to us if we become Catholics; we do not choose Him, it is He who chooses us. And who better to guide us than Mary, Mother of the Church.

“Mother of Christ, star of the sea,
Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.”