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by Jim Holman.
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I'm Home

CATHOLIC NETWORK HELPS SMOOTH CONVERSION

By James McCoy

The Church has been described as "the family of God;" and while many Catholics today feel like it's a dysfunctional family, their separated brethren, Protestant ministers especially, are rallying round her as the pillar of truth.

These Catholic converts have a sense of coming home; yet the journey homewards is usually a lonely one. "When I went to look into the Catholic Church," said Rosalind Moss of Placentia, "it was the most lonely journey... because I couldn't speak to my evangelical friends." As staff director of women's ministries for her church, Moss hid the new faith quickening inside her from even her closest friends. "So I couldn't have them as my support," she said, "and I was afraid of the Catholic Church because I couldn't trust it yet. There was no home for me."

But about a year before Moss became a Catholic, a Catholic friend put her on the mailing list for the Coming Home Network newsletter. She said was relieved to find people "on the same journey, going through the same struggles. It didn't make me trust the Catholic Church was true, but it did make me feel that I wasn't insane."

When Moss became a Catholic on Easter 1995, she was one of 240 clergymen who converted with a little help from the Coming Home Network, which Marcus Grodi founded in 1993. A former Presbyterian minister, married with three children, Grodi understood the struggle of converting ministers, and so he could help the 120 ministers still on the journey. "Some of the things we did struggle with," he said, "was the loss of most of our friends in the first 40 years of our life." Another was the "loss of my pastoral vocation," Grodi said-- he was a "late vocation" to the ministry, having worked as an engineer since the early '70s.

Today Grodi, 46, boasts 6,000 members in the Coming Home Network, which is headquartered in Steubenville, Ohio. Grodi has a weekly television show watched by millions of people on EWTN. His board of advisors includes leading Catholics converts like Scott Hahn, now teaching at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Father Ray Ryland, a married Episcopalian priest who eventually became a Catholic priest for the Diocese of San Diego.

But back 1992, Grodi was a Catholic man with plenty of conviction-- "I've never doubted becoming a Catholic ... I've never doubted that this is the Church Christ established." He was, however, a former minister with a scarcity of options. "Here I could do almost anything except the sacraments," Grodi said, "and I offered myself; but for years I wasn't asked to do anything except Bingo."

"That's not true now," he added.

Grodi works full-time for the apostolate out of his home near Steubenville. "The majority of my work is on the internet," he said. The Coming Home Network has a website (www.chnetwork.org) and people frequently fire off e-mail to Grodi (mgrodi@chnetwork.org). He recently analyzed the network's database and found that on average one clergyman converts to Catholicism per week.

Most of these clergy are men, according to Grodi, and many of them are married. "About 80 percent of the time the spouse isn't so far along," he said. "Sometimes it can be a great stress in the marriage ... When you're called to be a minister and ordained, that's a certain identity, and the spouse shares in that identity; and so when we convert, there's an identity crisis."

Clergymen converts often face a financial crisis as well. When she came home figuratively, Moss found herself without a home-- literally. "I was full-time Protestant minister," she said, "so I didn't have any financial worries. Since I'm Catholic, I'm trying to find ways to earn money to pay rent." Moss, 55, now makes a modest living teaching the Catholic faith. "I'm speaking at churches and parishes and conferences all over the country now." But when she did that for the evangelical church, she got "a very good salary plus a parish house which was part of the church there. I was taken care of as far as medical insurance. Now I haven't been able to get medical insurance because I can't afford it."

But both Moss and Grodi downplay any financial straits they've squeezed through, and Moss praises the network for its concrete help. "The Coming Home Network was a comfort and a sign of hope for me on my journey in the Church," she said. "But since I'm in the Church they have been a tremendous support as well." She said that Grodi helps people not just spiritually but materially by things like giving references.

Perhaps the financial loss seems like a small, localized pain in comparison to the overwhelming loss of an entire worldview. Moss explained: "The difference between Catholicism and Evangelicalism is not just doctrinal; it's a whole way of seeing. It's a new world. It's just a new world... And as I was on my journey, I started thinking, 'if the Eucharist is true, and the communion of saints is true, and Mary is true ... what God have I known for 18 years?' It almost makes it seem as though he's not the same God. "The extent that I knew Him as an Evangelical was true, but very limited," Moss went on, "and as a Catholic now, all of life is restored to me. The whole of creation is now mine, because as an evangelical I was under the Calvinist theology that the whole creation is totally depraved."

Has the honeymoon with Catholicism worn off? "No, and in fact I've hardly left the honeymoon," Moss laughed. "It's taken the time just to get used being Catholic." Her life as a Catholic the past three years has only further convinced her that "Truth is the issue, and I recognize that the fate of the Church is no surprise if in fact it is the church that Christ established on earth. Satan ... goes straight for the jugular-- which is the Catholic Church. So the problems in the Church is proof that it's Satan's target, and if it's Satan's target it's the Church that Christ established on earth."

Father Ray Ryland, a former assistant at St. Catherine Labouré Catholic Church in Claremont, is also not surprised. "At a time when the Church's warts are being publicized endlessly," he said, "this is the very time when hundreds of Protestant clergy are finding their way into the Church ... They come in quite aware; but they're also quite aware that's irrelevant to what the Church is ... They're not disturbed by aberrant opinions of some bishop or theologian. "Many of them are coming into the Church through a more intense study of scripture," Father Ryland went on. "Some of these men are very attracted by the Church's clear moral stand... In a world were moral stands are crumbling all around us, the Church is quite countercultural. Some have seen the doctrinal and moral walls of their denominations crumble."

Father Ryland, 77, who currently resides in Steubenville and teaches at the university there, is married with five grown children. He is one of about 80 or so members of the Coming Home Network who have become Catholic priests. The Ryland family became Catholic back in the '60s. In 1983, with the support of the then-Bishop of San Diego, Father Ryland received special permission from Pope John Paul II to be ordained a Catholic priest.

He and his wife "both were raised in a conservative Protestant tradition, so I do speak their language," Father Ryland said. For years, both he and his wife "were trying awfully hard to evade Rome, but we were drawn to Catholicism."What made them want to evade it? "The prejudice one gets in a Protestant culture," Father Ryland replied; "further the prejudice one gets from spending five or six years in (Protestant) seminary; and then studying Orthodoxy I saw another prejudice against the Catholic Church." There was no one there for the Rylands to help dispel those prejudices. "Our journey was very much alone so far as human support was concerned," Father Ryland said. "There were very few persons in the process of this pilgrimage who were a very great help to us."

During her journey, Moss had only the Coming Home Journal as a traveling companion, but it was a helpful guide. Grodi said that, while the network is happy to put people in touch with people like Father Ryland, "from the beginning that's been our main thing: the journal. It's a journal that's written by converts to present the faith to non-Catholics in a way that's winsome." (The Coming Home Journal is free to all members of the network, the vast majority of whom are Catholics who support it with a small annual donation.)

While "winsome" may win some, hasn't the Church's recent softening of its call to conversion to Catholicism lost many more? "That's a struggle for me in my work," Grodi allowed. He has to steer between the two extremes of a "convert-the-infidels" mentality and a complete "hands-off" policy which some claim is the teaching of Vatican II. "Well that's not true," Grodi said. "But there's that idea out."

Grodi also confessed that "sometimes when I encounter some of my problems with the Church, I'm so angry with the local priests, I realize I can't receive the Sacrament. ... Sometimes the temptation is to say (to a potential convert), 'stay where you're at.'"

Grodi, however, keeps trawling the net, and the converts-- without being proselytized by the Coming Home Network-- keep wading in. Rosalind Moss, for one. "This is the Church that has always existed," she said. "I'm home."

Home with a dysfunctional family? "What family is not dysfunctional?" Moss replied. "You'd rather be home in your dysfunctional family than outside in something that's perfect."

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