Converts travel varied routes to the Catholic Church

Everybody has a story. But not every group of people going through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults together has traveled such varied paths to the Church as those preparing for the Easter Vigil this year at St. Mary and St. Michael in Stillwater.

Twenty-five children and adults are preparing for full communion with the Catholic Church through those parishes’ shared RCIA process. That number includes a 9-year-old boy whose family didn’t practice a faith. Yet he said he’s known “since before he was born” that he wanted to become Catholic. He even influenced his mother, who is joining the Church with him. “I’m his first convert,” she said.

The class also includes a Mormon who survived a frightening bout with COVID-19, a young man who found God on a solo camping trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior, a family of five joining the Church and the daughter of a retired Lutheran pastor.

Last year, St. Mary and St. Michael — which share a pastor and programming — had five RCIA participants. Why this year’s five-fold jump in people entering the Church?

Corey Manning, director of faith formation, said he isn’t certain, but he imagines several factors could be at play. St. Croix Catholic School is “a huge part of conversion for many families,” he said.

“Some are people asking for the first time, ‘What do I do?’ Some are saying, ‘Hey, I’ve never actually received this (sacrament) as a child and now I want to be fully Catholic,’” Manning said.

Located about 20 miles northeast of St. Paul along the St. Croix River, Stillwater — with a population of almost 20,000 — is one of the oldest cities in Minnesota. St. Michael was founded in 1853, five years before Minnesota became a state, and has 2,331 members. St. Mary was founded 31 years later, and has 1,034 members.

Twenty-two of the parishes’ RCIA candidates and catechumens will receive sacraments at St. Michael April 3 at the Easter Vigil Mass — the traditional liturgy for initiating new members into the Church. The other three are children who made their profession of faith on Ash Wednesday and first reconciliation the following week. They will receive their first Communion in late April with their school classmates.

Manning cited other unusual circumstances this year, including nine people who haven’t been baptized — three children and six adults. “Usually it’s someone (who has) already been baptized in another faith and coming into the Church,” Manning said.

Last year, St. Michael was being renovated and St. Mary celebrated a livestreamed Easter Vigil because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The five participants in the RCIA process received the sacraments at a different time. This year, both parishes will celebrate the Easter Vigil, and the RCIA participants will be initiated into the Church at St. Michael. With many pews roped off to accommodate social distancing, St. Michael will largely be filled by the families of candidates and catechumens, with additional room for people in the parish social hall and school gym.

Mormon ‘always knew’ he wanted to be Catholic

Julio Garcia, 26, lives in Forest Lake and is a parishioner at St. Michael in Stillwater, his fiancee’s childhood parish. He was born in the predominantly Catholic country of El Salvador, but was raised in the Mormon faith.

Garcia’s parents grew up in the 1970s in El Salvador, at a time when a civil war raged and changed the dynamic of the country and culture, he said. Many cities were “completely decimated.”

“When that happened, it was actually the Mormons that came and … helped rebuild,” Garcia said. “And they did a lot of conversions.”

His mother, then a teenager, was under the care of an aunt in El Salvador who converted to the Mormon faith. “She was so grateful (to the Mormons), a very religious woman,” Garcia said, and she influenced his mother’s conversion. So, Garcia was baptized a Mormon.

When Garcia was 5, his parents brought him and his sister to Texas. During high school there, Garcia met Victoria Plumbo, now 26. They became engaged last March.

Last July, Garcia contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized in Dallas for 11 days, five in intensive care, requiring a BiPAP machine to help him breathe. While being prepped for a ventilator, a last-minute X-ray showed some improvement in his lungs.

“Once I was good enough to be taken off the BiPAP machine, they sent me home with a portable oxygen tank and one stationary oxygen tank at the house,” he said.

With no preexisting conditions, Garcia was an athlete before COVID and a bodybuilder in his early 20s. He said the virus attacked his respiratory system but also affected “everything else in my body, mainly my legs. It took three months to recover and be able to walk normally again” — and six to seven months to not be out of breath from simply walking. He said every cough, every breath hurt for four months.

“My faith has been really tested this past year,” he said, “but honestly, it has brought me closer to God.” Besides COVID, a close friend was killed and he lost his grandmother.

Garcia “always knew” he would convert to Catholicism, he said. It was never “if,” but “when.”

“But I’d be lying if I said almost dying was not a factor in my decision,” he said.

His mother’s “mannerisms” remained Catholic, he said, even after she became Mormon. “So most of (what) I used to do was under the Catholic faith.” Garcia started attending Mass with his fiancee’s family when they started dating.

COVID-19 left Garcia with residual lung damage, and relatives in Texas encouraged him to live in a location best for his recovering health, which is why the couple moved to Minnesota and began attending St. Michael. Plumbo grew up in Stillwater, where she attended St. Michael and went to the Catholic grade school. Her parents were married at St. Michael, where Garcia and Plumbo will be married this fall.

Young man finds home in Catholicism

Mark Allen, 20, was baptized in the Lutheran faith and raised a Christian, but when he was 11 or 12, his three siblings fell away from the faith. “That had a big impact on me because I’m the youngest,” he said. His parents divorced around the same time.

Back then, Allen said, “I would have probably said I was an atheist.”

Now a junior at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul studying supply chain and operations management, Allen took solo camping trips once a year during high school to Lake Superior. One trip stands out: In July 2017, between his junior and senior years at Forest Lake High School. Allen stopped at several places on the largest of the Great Lakes and remembers feeling “almost like I was in a heavenly state,” he said.

“I was just in so much peace, and it’s hard to describe. But after that … I knew that there was a God. And so, I considered myself Christian again. … I knew that I wasn’t an atheist. I knew there was something more.”

After one semester at Lake Superior College in Duluth, Allen spent the second semester of his freshman year at Century College in White Bear Lake. He took a philosophy class, which he said helped him see more of an intellectual side to Christianity than he had realized.

His search for faith included visiting evangelical churches. One in particular felt like a rock concert with a fog machine, he said. It wasn’t what he was looking for.

“I really wanted to become part of a church so that I could grow in community and effectively volunteer,” he said. “I knew eventually I had to look into Catholicism.” The first time he attended a Catholic Mass was for his grandfather’s funeral five or six years ago.

He contacted St. Michael and spoke with a priest. He read more about the faith. Allen values that the Catholic Church takes a stand on issues like abortion, and he believes it has less division than other churches because of its magisterium. “At the end of the day, we submit to the authority of the Church, which has already ruled on (an) issue,” he said.

When Allen started attending Mass at St. Michael at the end of 2018, “it was the first time I accepted Jesus again.” He looks forward to volunteering with a parish youth group — maybe even on a hiking or camping outing at some point. Getting people involved in activities like that can help people talk and open up about their feelings, he said.

Reflecting on his faith journey, Allen said that at one point he couldn’t imagine being a follower of Christ — and certainly not one submitting to the authority of the Catholic Church.

“So, when I think of my siblings or those that persecute Christians, it gives me hope to just know that God is capable of anything,” he said.

Family of five entering the Church

Luke Przybylski grew up Presbyterian in Stillwater. His wife, Beth, grew up Lutheran about 20 miles north in Scandia. The two met in their early 20s while working at the same restaurant. Their paths crossed again when Luke moved to Madison, where Beth was going to school, and they started dating.

During college, Luke said both lived a fairly secular life, and afterward they shared a sense that something important was missing in their lives. “We were trying to figure out what’s right for us and why we were feeling this way,” Luke said.

They explored various church denominations and read about beliefs and differences. They read books by Christian authors including C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien.

“That really showed me that there is a lot more intellectual fact behind everything,” Luke said. But he reached a point in what was becoming an exhaustive process to find “the right thing” when he didn’t think he could intellectualize it anymore.

“There’s so much material, so many arguments all over the place … and I kind of reached a point where I was like, I can’t really be my own priest,” he said. “I don’t want to (have) a non-intellectual approach, but I did a lot more prayer.”

Luke said he also kept thinking about his Polish Catholic grandmother in Milwaukee, whom he visited every year or so throughout his childhood. That visit including attending Mass together. “I just felt that there was something speaking to me through her and through that experience about the Church.”

Beth said the Catholic faith just felt right. “I was always drawn to it and I just felt at home.”

Before moving from southwest Wisconsin back to Stillwater in fall 2019, Beth had a 50-mile roundtrip commute through the countryside. “One thing I really connected with was listening to Relevant Radio,” she said. With its phone app, she would listen to and pray the rosary. “I didn’t even know what the rosary was at the time,” she said.

Another factor in their decision to convert to Catholicism is having three children. The two oldest had attended public school, but Beth and Luke decided to move them to St. Croix Catholic School. “It just all became clear that this was the right thing to do,” Beth said.

Going through the RCIA process confirmed for them that they made the right decision. “We both are overwhelmed by feeling like this is the right thing — which is amazing for me,” Luke said. He added how loving and vital are the parishes of St. Michael, St. Mary and St. Charles in nearby Bayport, and how the community drew them in and made them feel so at home.

“It wasn’t a matter of me … putting the pieces together,” he said. “It was more about submitting to the process and then feeling like we were receiving a blessing.”

Their two oldest children, Lina, 11, and Penny, 9, also are joining the Catholic Church this spring. Walter, 2, will be baptized on Mother’s Day.

Minister’s daughter becomes Catholic

Before she married her husband, Ryan, a Catholic, Erin McAlpine remembers the late Archbishop Harry Flynn telling her never to become Catholic for a man. “He said, ‘Do it because you want to do it,’” she said. “That always resonated with me.”

The McAlpine family became acquainted with the archbishop, who died in 2019, through a close family friend, Father Charles Lachowitzer, who presided at Erin and Ryan’s wedding and baptized their three children. Erin grew up Lutheran and Presbyterian. She was baptized at her mother’s Presbyterian Church. Her father is a retired Lutheran minister.

When Erin was a young girl, her parents divorced, so when Erin stayed with her mom or dad, she attended that parent’s church. Both support her decision to become Catholic.

“My father loves that my kids go to a Catholic school (St. Croix Catholic School), and he absolutely loves the school,” she said, noting that when he visited the school, he thanked the principal for the school’s great faith-based environment.

Erin, 41, and Ryan, 45, have been married for nine years and have three children: Jackson, 8, Neve, 6, and Brynn, 4. She called sending their children to the Catholic school “the best parenting decision we’ve ever made.”

When Erin was a child, her father took her to many different churches, from contemporary to evangelical and Baptist, but she loved the history and tradition of the Catholic Church. “It just felt right to me,” she said.

“My husband’s family just loves the Catholic faith, and I have a lot of Catholic friends and they are just amazing people,” she said.

Erin intended to begin the RCIA process years ago, but evening classes didn’t fit her work schedule. This past year, she said, “the stars aligned” for her to participate Wednesday evenings. And with her second-grade son preparing for his first confession and first Communion, she said it’s even more of a special time.

Her husband, who is her sponsor, attends classes with her.

“We get to spend time together and grow in our faith together,” she said. “It’s been awesome for him, too, and for our marriage,” she said. It’s also become a date night, as they often grab a bite to eat after class.

Erin’s younger brother has cancer, but growing in her faith and prayer life has helped her deal with her brother’s illness, she said. Learning about the Catholic faith helps her want to grow as a person and grow in her relationship with Christ, she said. “It has helped me tremendously,” she said.

---

What is RCIA?

The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) is a process of education, faith sharing and rituals whereby adults and children who have reached the age of reason are formed to join in full communion with the Catholic Church.

Catechumens preparing to enter the Church have never been baptized and are preparing for baptism, first Communion and confirmation. Candidates are baptized Christians preparing for the other sacraments.

Traditionally, RCIA candidates and catechumens enter the Church at the Easter Vigil.