Something that may not be clear from my writings on this website is that I have not, in fact, been a Catholic. I have referenced the Church, the CCC, and St. Thomas Aquinas before, but have never actually been a Catholic for my almost 30 years. That has changed.
On May 30, 2026 I officially came into the Catholic Church after nearly 30 years of reductionist Lutheranism, and I have never been so happy and relieved (I’ll explain the “relief” later) in my life. I tire of people calling it a Faith Journey, but I guess that’s what this post will be about. If these kinds of stories aren’t your cup of tea, click away and do something more productive.
After being an idiotic apostate in my college years and spending too much time reading modern philosophy thereafter, something grabbed ahold of me one night and told me to read John’s Gospel. Over the course of a few years, I ended up reading all of Sacred Scripture a few times over (except maybe 1st Chronicles. Those of you who have read it know why.) Once I started reading Scripture again, I was called to direct music at a local Lutheran church, and it didn’t take long for my faith to deepen.
For a number of years, I was satisfied with my Lutheran faith, but about 3 years ago I started picking up a few Catholic books that showed up at the thrift stores I frequent. These books suggested to me that Protestantism was anti-history and shallow; there was so much more to the faith than just Scripture. Then, being the hack self-taught “philosopher” that I thought I was, I started picking up the stronger wines of serious theology, especially St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
I kept my reading somewhat secretive and didn’t commit myself spiritually to these men’s theology at first. It seemed to me I could use these men’s teaching to justify Lutheranism just as well.
My curiosity had grown, and I really wanted to attend a Catholic Mass just to see it for myself, but being, as my priest recently said, “extremely reserved,” I didn’t attend for 3 years. Finally, a book came along that pushed me over the limit and got me over that fear. Perhaps it isn’t the kind of book that you would think would convince someone to attend Mass, but for whatever reason, Karl Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism, with its dense research into the ancient history of the Church used to counter fundamentalist opinions, threw me overboard.
(Not that Lutherans are chiefly fundamentalists. But the history lesson truly helped me to attend the Original Church.)
So I grew brave sometime last year, and attended a local Traditional Latin Mass. As you might expect, I was nervous and confused about the whole endeavor, but still felt drawn to this mysterious worship practice. I probably attended for 5 months or so before I was brave enough to actually speak to the priest about coming into the Church.
I began catechesis one-on-one with the priest in August 2025, and quickly found that I had only a few initial hang-ups with Church doctrine: The Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, very typical Protestant hang-ups. After many catechetical meetings and reading 3 different catechisms (the CCC, the Catechism for Adults in the United States, and the Aquinas Catechism), these concerns were alleviated and my knowledge grew tremendously.
With all that knowledge you’d think that would suffice to be convinced; to be clear, I was convinced in the intellectual sense that the Catholic Church was The Church, but I wasn’t convinced in the spiritual sense. Then the season of Lent came, and that changed.
The parish has an adoration chapel, and during the season of Lent, the parishoners in charge of its upkeep started inviting people to attend it. I was already curious about it, but was too reserved to even inquire about it. But one lady asked me if I was interested in checking it out, I responded yes, and she took me to it. Soon after, I signed up for 2 hours a week in the chapel.
At first, my adoration time was spent with much reading and somewhat juvenile prayers. Over time, I began to appreciate the presence of Christ in the Eucharist; He was there in a greater degree than I was there. Soon, I realized that I wasn’t just in the presence of a consecrated Eucharist, but was before the greatest of all Kings, the monstrance like a great throne. I felt very small, like a speck of dust.
Prayer time began to overtake spiritual reading, and my prayers became better, longer, and more humble. A kind reader of this website emailed me a suggestion to read The Ways of Mental Prayer by Dom Vitalis Lehodey after my last post on this website. I devoured the first two parts of the book which are very accessible to laymen, but the third part on mystical prayer still eludes me. As the author has said though, mystical prayer is itself a gift from God which He may or may not give a man, or perhaps simply not yet give it to him. In short, get this book; you will learn more about prayer from it in a few pages than you will in 30 years of praying on your own with no assistance.
Prayer increased, knowledge increased, and I began to feel the weight of my decades of sin on my shoulders. I have always been very melancholic, but this was different. I wasn’t depressed feeling sorry for myself or some other selfish reason, I was depressed because I had deeply offended the King Whom I claimed to love. I reflected that when Christ was in Gethsemane “feeling sorrowful unto death,” it wasn’t His own sin that pained Him, for He had none, it was the sins of all humanity, past, present, and future that was upon Him. And, having not yet received the sacrament of reconcialiation, I was still living trying to bear my sins alone. I had but a small taste of what His pain must be like.
Finally, with a date set for Confirmation, I needed to confess an entire life’s worth of sins. Prayer time was mostly spent not asking the Lord to do or give me anything good, but rather that He would reveal to me all my mortal sins in life that I could confess them and receive absolution. As I had read in The Ways of Mental Prayer, I believed that He likely wouldn’t answer any of my other prayers until I was fully confessed of my sins, therefore I focused on dredging up every single sin. I compiled a list on my phone’s note-taking app that kept growing longer and longer. Never had I felt such melancholy.
While I was nervous for my first confession, I was extremely excited for it too. It was finally a chance to be set free of the past, a concrete act, a nail in the coffin of those past sins. The priest was very understanding and could tell I was contrite to the point of physical illness, but he did warn me of scrupulosity, especially as a convert, as he once was. He assigned a full Rosary for penance and I immediately flew to the adoration chapel to pay it in Latin (and yes, coincidentally it was Friday).
I was finally relieved of this horrible pain, and felt a future was possible again after the hopelessness that was near to crushing me. Never again did I want to offend God with another mortal sin, and prayed constantly that He would keep me safe from it, especially until Confirmation.
I should add another event in the midst of all this spiritual turmoil that kept me from a sort of insanity. I joined with the Schola for Latin Mass, singing the Propers, Ordinary, and other chants for the Mass. It is indeed true that chant is elevated prayer. Not to disrespect Novus Ordo or those who attend it, but TLM has been a real blessing at my parish. I highly recommend attending one if you never have, just don’t turn into a SSPX person or other schismatic who claims that Novus Ordo isn’t valid or true. Novus Ordo, whether we like it better or not, is valid. As I read somewhere online, “If your liturgical preferences cause you to sin, cut them out and throw them away!”
Finally, the day had come. On May 30, 2026 at 5:00PM Vigil Mass I was confirmed by the priest with the oil of the local bishop, and got to finally take of that Blessed Eucharist that I had spent dozens of hours adoring in the chapel. The next day being Sunday, I was finally able to commune at TLM. When the TLM priest (different from the one who confirmed me) came to me to bless me at the rail, and saw me stick out my tongue instead, he put on the biggest smile and communed me instead. That smile is forever burned into my memory. He congratulated me after Mass, as did my confirmation sponsor.
Now I am a Catholic and over the moon about it. Since January, this is all I have thought about, it has been my only goal. Of course, my lifelong spiritual goal is to, in death, be worthy to pray alongside my confirmation saint St. Thomas Aquinas at the throne of God (for I feel certain that humble genius of a Doctor prayed for me incessantly), but I am at a slight loss as to what to do now. I guess now I can live, sustained by the Bread of Life.