Various stories from today:
A convert (of five years) tells his story in the LAtimes
At St. Patrick’s, the new members ranged in age from 10 to 60. Jarvis said this is the largest group of converts she has seen in the past four years. The new members include two special needs youngsters and a 22-year-old man with Down syndrome. The parish offers religious education classes for the mentally challenged.
"It’s an incredible feeling seeing their dedication, coming every week for classes, especially the high school kids," Jarvis said. "It strengthens my faith watching them and their excitement as they come into the church."
Two days before they formally entered the church, Jim and Kim Pyle’s faces bore the same untroubled expression as young children at their first communion.
Jim Pyle, 46, born and raised a Lutheran, borrowed a quote from Martin Luther himself to explain his conversion: "Here I stand, I can do no other."
Looking back a few years, it does almost seem as if Pyle’s conversion was preordained. Like the young Luther, he enthusiastically played the questioner’s role, engaging priests, teachers and other students in theological debates, when he was a non-Catholic seventh-grader in a Catholic school.
Even before he ever considered converting, he said, "If I was running from the devil and I had my choice of churches, I would run into a Catholic church. You can feel the presence of God there."
She graduated from UB in 1989 and then enrolled in graduate school in California, where she studied for an advanced degree in social work. And, for 11 years, she enjoyed life there – her career, her friends – to the point where she felt she would never return to Buffalo.
But she felt herself slipping away from her faith. She explored other religions, confused.
Then she realized in her heart that she needed to give Catholicism one more try.
"I came to a point where I was just disillusioned with myself," she recalls. "I had friends, I had a career. But I was like, how am I living my life? That was the part that was missing."
And so she came back: to a renewal of faith, to her hometown – and then back to the Felician convent on Doat Street. She had kept in touch, all those years away, with the nuns she had known there. She asked them if she could come for a weekend, to make a retreat.
"There was an overwhelming sense in my heart," she said. "I knew. I literally said: I surrender. Yes."
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