Judaism to Catholicism (1 of 2) - Roy Schoeman - Spring Marian Day 2019

[Music] okay welcome everyone to this Marian day and today we're blessed to have a very distinguished guest in speaker Roy actually I'm not even sure how to pronounce her showman Roy showman is with us today and Roy grew up in New York City in a conservative Jewish family and studied under the prominent rabbis of the time and very gifted intellectually he went on to study at MIT and also at Harvard and then after the studies went on to teach at Harvard so at a certain point there was a divine intervention and marién intervention in his life and he had a conversion to Christianity to the Catholic faith and he's gone on to speak at conferences like this and also on EWTN and he's written a couple of books that are available in the vestibule so during the break you're welcome to to go and get your books and have Roy sign them and so we're very pleased to have Roy with us today and and welcome to Roy [Applause] hi thanks for coming and I'm very happy to be here I've felt very close to the franciscans of the Immaculate for a long time in fact I owe my vocation if I can say so to brother Francis Mary who was the Franciscan of the Immaculate who got me in the book writing business but anyway I just want to start at the beginning with my witness testimony and I have the great luxury of speaking twice today so between the two talks what I want to do is give my witness testimony and also talk about the role of Judaism in Salvation history and the way that Judaism and the Catholic Church are actually not two separate religions they're two state I'll just start with here I well got to my witness testimony pretty soon it seems totally evident to me and the only logical really view point is that the kind that Judaism and the Catholic Church are essentially two phases of the same religion there are two phases of the same plan for salvation that was basically stretches from the Garden of Eden until the second coming when God originally created man he created him to live in a state of uninterrupted intimacy with God bliss no work no suffering no death and so forth right we know that in the Garden of Eden when man chose to sin that original relationship between God and man was shattered but God knew at that very moment that at some point in the future he would not only restore man to that original exalted state but raised him infinitely higher by the incarnation of the second person of the Most Holy Trinity as a man at a future point in time if the second person of the Most Holy Trinity was going to incarnate as a man it would be at a particular point in time in a particular place in the world among a particular people in the womb of a particular virgin and of course that people would have to be prepared they would have to be separated out from all of the people wandering the earth in those days kept separate for almost 2,000 years while they received a tremendous amount of divine revelation first to know about the one true uncreated creator God to know about the creation of man to know about the fall of man the seriousness of sin the need for redemption the future coming of a redeemer they would have to be given enough divine revelation to identify the Redeemer when he came and would have to be given enough understanding of theology essentially to make sense of what was happening and to spread the new religion to the four corners of the earth after it happened that's what the Jews were right they were just picked out of all of the people on the earth you could say at random or I could talk about why God chose the Jews there's an old ditty how odd of God to choose the Jews but in any case they were chosen for this most important single role ever given to any people to basically enable the incarnation of goddess man and to enable salvation to flow to all of mankind through Christianity through the in particular the Catholic Church and the sacraments the intention always being that when the Incarnation and life and passion and death of Jesus took place that original special relationship between God and the Jews would be extended in a far amplified form to all of humanity through Christianity and through the Catholic Church and the sacraments so they're not two separate religions there are two phases of the same plan for salvation but that make sense so anyway that is by the way I don't want to start with salesmanship but that's what my first book was about the salvation is from the Jews the role of Judaism in salvation history from Abraham to the second coming it's really from Adam and Eve to the second coming but I didn't want to sound pretentious anyway so where was I I don't even know where I was but anyway so my witness testimony I'm so anyway I don't even consider myself a convert by the way because a convert implies that they change from one religion to another I just went from a Jew who was not a follower of the Jewish Messiah because all of Judaism was about the Messiah to come who was Jesus right I just went from being a Jew who kind of missed the boat when the Messiah came - a Jew who follow the Messiah through the transition to the fulfilled stage of Judaism which was the Catholic Church so that actually should make me more of a dude rather than less of a Jew more of a Jew than ever I consider myself more of a Jew than ever after having enter the Catholic Church I then that is exactly the viewpoint of every other Jew that I have ever met or read about who became Christian or better yet Catholic they don't consider themselves as converts they consider themselves as completed Jews fulfilled Jews and so forth okay take a breath start with my witness testimony that's what they promised you okay so I was born and raised actually was outside of New York City in a suburb of New York City my parents were both German Jewish Holocaust refugees they both were born and raised in Germany my father left shortly after Hitler came to power when Jews were still allowed to leave as long as he didn't take anything with them my mother was less fortunate her family fled to France to Paris but that didn't last for long Paris of course fell very quickly under the Nazis and my mother was actually arrested and put on a train to go back to Germany to a concentration camp but she escaped while the train was still in France and eventually made it to the United States where my parents met and married and growing up I mean I was entirely Jewish my family was entirely Jewish needless to say the the communities who are more separated in those days in the town where my parents bought a house was actually the only town in the area that allowed Jews to buy houses so of course you know all of our friends were Jewish all of my parents friends were Jewish all of my friends were Jewish I went to Jewish religious education from the beginning of my school years until University alongside the normal secular education in my senior year of high school I became even more devoutly Jewish religious and I spent the summer between high school and college living and traveling in Israel in the as a kind of a disciple of a Hasidic rabbi you know the curse is for the ear curls and the long black coats and the beards that look a little like Franciscans spend anyway anyway so I and I consider not coming back to the United States to begin University but entering the closest thing that Judaism has to religious life which is a life of prayer and study in a yeshiva and Jerusalem Biden I returned the United States I began MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology and I lost my faith there under two influences my Jewish faith of course first of all under the pseudo scientific worldview that religion is basically just a superstition that man came up with to give him answers until he had science to give him the true answers of everything now I call that a pseudo scientific worldview it's that's what it is it's the opposite of a scientific view because the essence of science is you have to look at the data look at the evidence and form a theory that can explain the evidence and if it's successful in explaining the evidence you can keep that theory and if it fails to explain the evidence you have to discard it throw it away and come up with a theory that does explain the evidence now in fact materialism the the idea that there's no God no spirituality that everything is just the physical world that you see totally fails to explain the evidence not only the more fundamental evidence having to do with life and so forth but I think that in our day God has because of ours like scientific orientation given us the special favor of a lot of physically material listicle documented evidence supporting the truths of the Catholic faith right we have a Shroud of Turin which you know I'll know about that the image of Jesus on the burial cloth that even today could not be counterfeited literally by all of the signs of today we know one could succeed in imitating successfully the Shroud of Turin the tilma of Guadalupe similarly the miracle of the Sun at Fatima where the Sun spun and seemed to crash to the earth and was seen by 80 to 100 thousand people including skeptics and communists and and cynics and atheists and on and on and on we have the Eucharistic miracles the the medieval ones like like lanciano but there was a very similar Eucharistic miracle I think was in 1999 in bornus eras and then another one in France somewhere in 2004 the same thing where the consecrated host turned into human flesh and blood we're talking about 1999 and 2004 they were totally examined by you know forensic pathologists by you know by all of science and it was actually human blood human heart muscle tissue the the tissue actually revealed the fact that the person died under great suffering and so forth I don't didn't prepare without so I don't have the details but anyway there is just another example that that it's like totally unscientific to say that that you know we're superstitious peasants believing a bunch of myths I mean you can't nail down these people and say oh yeah how do you explain this how do you explain this how do you explain this but they're totally unable to in fact if you could nail them down to as a matter of fact what they say and now I'll go back to witness or start my witness as the money but anyway what they say is essentially well we know the medical healings had Lourdes that's another example there was a very famous journalist of the turn of the century Emile Zola who went down to Lourdes to disprove the Catholic faith to show that the medical miracles were just like what do you call it hypochondriacs you know who had you know psychological illnesses or whatever and they thought they were healed but in any case he saw a number of very dramatic cases including a woman whose face was eaten away by cancerous growths who was completely restored when she went into the baths instantaneously and his response was I don't care how many miracles I'll see I don't care how many of these healings I'll see I still won't believe and that's basically that's basically the counter Catholic attitude is first of all I'm not going to allow myself to expose myself to the evidence and if I do I don't care how much evidence I'm exposed to I just choose not to believe so anyway that's not scientific it's the opposite it's as mattify G K Chesterton has a wonderful quote that those who believe in miracles right or wrong believe in them on the basis of the evidence those who do not believe in miracles right or wrong refuse to believe in them on the basis of faith right it's exactly opposite what MIT would have had me to believe so to speak but back to my witness testimony by the time I didn't realize this and I bought that party line I came out of MIT agnostic or atheist I went on to Harvard Business School I did well enough there that upon graduation they invited me back to join the faculty I found myself as a newly minted professor of marketing at Harvard Business School at the ripe old age of 29 and that's really where my witness testimony begins because what had happened what was happening was the following was all my life since I was a small child I felt there has to be a real meaning and purpose to life which I thought when I was older I would come into the real meaning and purpose of life which I thought would come from entering into a personal relationship with God as a child I really expected that to happen on my bar mitzvah the bar mitzvah is parallel to the Catholic confirmation when the child is about 13 there's a ceremony in the synagogue where he enters into religious adulthood and I really thought that would be the moment when I would enter into a personal relationship with God when that didn't happen it was actually one of the saddest days of my childhood but then pretty soon I decided the real meaning and purpose of life would come when I got a driver's license or when I got a girlfriend or when I began University or if I got into Harvard Business School or when I began my career and so forth but here I was already more successful in a worldly career than I ever expected to be being a professor at Harvard Business School but there was still no meaning or purpose to life you know I thought that we're just like a chemical accident five billion years ago a bolt of lightning hit a puddle of amino acids and we eventually crawled out there's no meaning or purpose to anything we live for 80 or 90 years and we die and that's it things happen there's no pattern to it actually one of the things that bothered me the most was I I couldn't figure out any reason to be good actually I couldn't find I couldn't figure out any basis to respect morality if you know if everything's just an accident so anyway I fell into the darkest despair of my life at that point because at this point there was nothing more I could imagine might give this meaningless life meaning and so it was in that darkness despair that I was walking in nature early one morning it was in the like low pine woods behind the sand dunes on Cape Cod just lost in my thoughts when I received the most spectacular grace of my life I was just walking along and from one moment to the next the curtain between Earth and heaven disappeared and I found myself in the presence of God very knowingly in the presence of God seeing my life as I would see it after I died looking back over my life in the presence of God and I understood everything as I would understand it after I died looking back over my life in the presence of God I saw that after I died my two greatest regrets would be number one of the time and energy I had wasted worrying about not being loved when every moment of my existence I was held in an ocean of love greater than I ever imagined could exist coming from this all-knowing all-loving God and the other great regret would be all of the time and energy I had worried about not being loved when every moment of my existence I was held in an ocean of love greater than I could ever imagine coming from this God I saw that absolutely everything that had ever happened to me had been the most perfect thing that could have been arranged coming from the hands of this all-knowing all-loving God not only including those things that had caused the most suffering at the time that I had thought of us the greatest disasters at the time but especially those things that had caused the most suffering at the time I saw dad it was all true that we live forever that every action has a moral content that is observed and recorded for all eternity that every time we take advantage of an opportunity to do something a value in the eyes of heaven we will very literally be rewarded for that for all eternity and every opportunity we let slip and don't take advantage of will be a lost opportunity for all eternity I obviously I saw that the meaning and purpose of my life was to worship and serve my Lord and Master in God who was revealing himself to me the most profoundly affecting part of this revelation was to come into the absolute and full knowledge and understanding that God Himself the God who had not only created everything that exists but actually created existence itself out of non-existence not only knew me by name not only loved me not only was controlling everything that ever happened to me but cared about how I felt at every moment as though I were the only creature he had ever created as though he had his ear held up to my lips to hear the faintest murmuring of how I felt and as as though and it very real way he knew how I felt at every moment and cared about how I felt at every moment such that everything that made me sad made him sad and everything that made me happy made him happy and it was coming into that knowledge which is by far the most transformative part of this experience now I saw all of this kind of instantaneously needless to say was really neat it was as though I had a searchlight on my forehead and wherever I looked in other words whatever question I asked myself I was shown the answer it was like an intellectual vision I could still see the physical world by the way I was actually still walking during this I could see the physical world but I could also see the spiritual world and it was as though the physical world was a you know painted very thin gossamer veil over the spiritual world in front of the spiritual world and I wasn't surprised that I could see the spiritual world the only thing that surprised me during this experience was that I could ever have not seen it because it was so much more real and more concrete and more substantial than the physical world that I just couldn't understand how I could ever have been blind to it and I could not imagine I literally could not imagine ever again being unable to see it it was just so much more real and more present than the physical world anyway I saw all of this stuff I understood all of this stuff but that wasn't an instantaneous moral transformation needless to say all my life had been totally selfish I don't know about totally selfish but very selfish and and I didn't understand there was anything wrong with it I thought that you know you were supposed to do the best for yourself that you could so during this experience because I saw see during this experience I understood house how foolish I had been to have been I didn't understand how foolish have been to be selfish all my life that late until later but I understood how foolish I had been to be stupidly selfish all my life because I was putting all my time and energy into accumulating things that wouldn't do me any good at all even eighty years later after I was dead and if I want to be smart and selfish the only thing that made sense would be to try to accumulate as much treasure in heaven as possible essentially and so if I want to be smart and selfish the only thing that made sense would be to try to be as much of a saint as possible I didn't understand that the selfishness was the problem but I understood that the image I had was as though you had a child that was playing Monopoly and trying to greedily accumulate all of the brightly colored monopoly money that was me when there was a pile of solid gold coins next to it that he was ignoring so that's how I undersold itself in this experience now I obviously understood that the meaning and purpose of my life was to worship and serve my Lord and God and master who was revealing himself to me but I didn't did what I didn't know was what his name was and what religion this was I couldn't think of this as Judaism and him as the god of the Old Testament now I know that it was the same God but when one reads the Old Testament the picture of God that emerges is of a God far more distant and judgmental and severe than this God was the picture I had of God was the picture that you get like in the book of Exodus but when the Jews are in the desert before God calls Moses up to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments God tells Moses build a fence around the base of the mountain to prevent any of the people from approaching the base of the mountain while I'm on top because if they even touch the base of the mountain while I'm on top they have to be instantly killed for the sacrilege so that was you know kind of my picture of God whereas this God as I said was you know more intimate more more present and intimately connected with me than I could ever imagine and more caring and doting over me than you know a grandfather over his you know one and only grandchild so I want to know who this God was of course I want to know what religion to follow so I prayed as I was walking as I said I was still walking I prayed let me know your name so I know what religion to follow to worship and serve you properly I don't mind if your buddha and i have to become a Buddhist I don't mind if you're Christian and I have to become a Hindu I don't mind if you're a Paolo and they have to become a Roman pagan as long as you're not Christ and I have to become Christian and I very literally prayed that somebody here asked me where that came from I'm not gonna I'll give a short answer now which is first of all if there any Jews here they certainly understand where that came from but anyway all my life growing up I had thought of Christianity as the enemy that basically Jesus was a false messiah who started this false offshoot of Judaism called Christianity and which resulted in the last two thousand years of persecution of the Jews essentially so it was like going over into the enemy camp and that Jesus was the worst thing to ever happen to Judaism and the Jews so that's a very short version of the answer so anyway he didn't reveal his name to me at the time I obviously wasn't ready to hear it but I went back home happy probably happier than I had ever been in my life certainly happier than I had ever been since childhood I knew it was all true I knew we lived forever I knew there was never any reason to worry about anything that absolutely everything that happened was the most perfect thing that could be arranged no reason to for any anxiety ever I knew that the happiest day of our life would be the day with that we die if we play our cards right and that's really true that's really true we I mean I can't quote st. Paul off the top of my head but we are totally incapable of comprehending what the joy will be as soon as we die and for all eternity and I'll actually get to that a little more if I if I guess further my witness does the mone before I have to stop anyway I will so anyway I was I mean I was walking on cloud nine I mean I all I wanted to do was you know spread the good news and also a cumulus art accumulating you know building my bank account in heaven I gotta admit I you know really I I you know I had that selfish motivation also so anyway so I go back to Cambridge where I was living and you know in this academic career and I instantly had lost all interest in teaching Harvard MBAs how to make a little more money and all I wanted to do was you know as I said build on my bank account in heaven and and and honor and worship and serve this God who had introduced himself to me and if possible repeat the experience and so forth and so I had just had this mystical experience and I want to find out more about it I never heard of mystical experiences actually and you have a mystical experience we want to find out more about what you do you go find a mystic to talk to which wasn't a very prudent thing to do in a university town in the 1980s and so I found this mystic to talk to who was actually falling away Catholic a would-be kabbalists and so forth and I made an appointment to go see him hoping that he could shed some light on what this was all about and you know teach me about what was going on and so forth well he was uh you know he was basically into this New Age stuff in Kabbalah and he put me on some wrong paths kind of this new age kind of Hindu type meditation and I wasted some time for a number of months you know looking into that stuff but one very good thing happened when I was visiting him that evening which was he had on his coffee table book something like I was called the hundred greatest miracles of modern times it was his you know coffee table like picture book of miracles in our times and when he went in the kitchen to prepare us some tea at one point I kind of just casually leaf through the book and my eyes fell on a page dedicated to the miracle of Fatima I never heard of the miracle of Fatima I can't counted it up I had been in school 25 years of my life at this point and nobody had ever told me about Fatima so I read this one-page description of the miracle of Fatima and he comes back from the kitchen with a tea and I point to the page and I say is this really true did this really happen and he says oh yes and then my next question to him is has anyone else ever heard of it and his response is oh yeah yeah all the Cal Catholics know about it and then I ask them you know has anything else ever been written about it and he said oh yeah just go to the public library you'll find a foot of both you know a foot of bookshelf space of books on the miracle of Fatima well my immediate reaction was to be filled with furious indignation how could they have kept the secret from me how could they have not told me about this I felt that my whole life had been different if I knew that miracle still happened throughout whatever it was was 13 years of religious education growing up my constant question to the teachers was why did God use to perform miracles in the days of the Old Testament and no longer does so and they never had an answer I felt and I was right I feeling that my life would have been totally different if I knew that miracle still happened I'm getting back to my earlier digression but it's really it's really important it's it's really a very powerful means of evangelization and even if people don't believe you it's really important to plant that seed in their mind that there are these miracles they're the miracles that involve the Blessed Virgin Mary miracles that involve the Eucharist and so forth and that they're happening and there are that there's scientific documentation of it and that thousands and thousands and thousands of otherwise credible people attest to them and are eyewitnesses of it so anyway so I leave his apartment that night with my arms full of these horrible New Age books but with the plant seed planted of the miracle of Fatima and anyway and I waste about a year almost a year on this stupid New Age stuff but there were one smart thing I did during that year which was every night book long for going to sleep I would say a short prayer I had made up to know the name of my Lord and God and master who had revealed himself to me in that first experience and a year to the day after that first experience I know it was a year to the day because I remember praying pray or Thanksgiving before going to sleep for what had happened exactly a year earlier I went to sleep and I thought I was woken gently by hand on my shoulder and led to a room and left alone with the most beautiful young woman I could ever imagine and I knew without being told that it was the Blessed Virgin Mary and when I found myself in her presence all I wanted to do was throw myself on my knees and honor her appropriately in fact the first thought that crossed my mind was oh my goodness I wish I at least knew the Hail Mary but I didn't now the first thing she said to me was she offered to answer any questions I might want to ask her before I go into that let me say a couple of things about finding myself in her presence first of all let me back up and say I now understand that if there had been a video camera in the room it would have shown my body asleep in bed throughout this experience at the time I thought it was completely awake I thought I was completely awake my memory represents it as though I were completely awake I remember thinking about different questions should I ask that no that's silly I'll ask that I have a word-for-word memory of it as though I were completely awake but I now understand that it was some kind of you know out-of-body kind of a thing so I wanted to you know clear that up but I also two things about finding myself in her presence first of all as perfectly beautiful as she was to look at even more profoundly affecting was the beauty of her voice the sound of her voice and the only way I can describe it is her voice was made up of that which makes music music and when she spoke this incredibly beautiful voice just flowed through me carrying with it her love and lifting me up into a state of ecstasy a continual ecstasy greater than I ever imagined could exist and I am convinced that that ecstasy was a taste of heaven and that the love that flowed through her and flows through her now is actually I don't know whether say an echo of the Bliss of heaven anyway so back to this experience so as I said the first thing she said was she offered him any questions I might want to ask her the first question that I kind of wanted to ask her was to teach me the Hail Mary so I could honor her appropriately but I was too proud to admit that I didn't know it so as a kind of indirect way of getting her to teach me the Hail Mary I asked her what her favorite prayer to her was well her initial answer was a little bit coy it was I love all prayers to me but I was a little bit pushy so I said but you must love some pray of see more than others and so she relented and she recited a prayer to Mary but it was in Portuguese and I didn't know any Portuguese so all I could do was make the effort to remember the first few syllables phonetically and the next morning when I woke up I immediately wrote them down phonetically and then much later when I met a Portuguese Catholic woman I asked her to recite the prayers to Mary in Portuguese so that I could identify the prayer and to the best of my ability I identified it as Oh Mary conceived without sin pray for us have recourse to me most of the questions I asked her were came out of just being overwhelmed by who she was and being overwhelmed by her presence so at one point I kind of stammered out more of an exclamation than a question I kind of stammered out how can it be how is it possible how can it be that you're so exalted that you're so magnificent that you're so glorious how can it be and her response was to look down at me almost pityingly and shake her head gently and say oh no you don't understand you don't understand anything I'm nothing I'm a creature I'm a created a thing he's everything and then again out of the desire to honor her somehow appropriately I asked her what title she liked best for herself and her reply was I am the beloved daughter of the father mother of the son and spouse of the Spirit well of course I I knew I was never stupid I knew that if this is the Blessed Virgin Mary up in Christ in the earlier experience and this was all about Christianity and I had better get up to speed pretty quick and all my life I had heard the expression the Holy Spirit but I had no idea what it meant I had no idea that he was a person I had never I never literally probably touched a New Testament much less opened it for fear of the contamination which would come from touching a New Testament not uncommon among Jews even today so anyway I I knew if this is Christianity and I had always heard the expression the Holy Spirit I had better you know get up to speed pretty quick but I apologize for the way I phrased the question but I didn't know any better I asked her what's this business about the Holy Spirit and her reply was just to a response was just to look up words with an expression melting with love and say he's his gaze so I asked her a couple more questions it went downhill from there the other questions were either personal or silly and then she said she has something she wanted to speak to me about so she spoke to me for about another 10 to 15 minutes and then the audience was over and I went back to sleep the next morning when I woke up I knew that I had been Christ in the earlier experience I knew that I wanted nothing other than to be as fully and completely a Christian as I didn't know what that meant I didn't know what the difference was between a Protestant in the Catholic and there wasn't much I could do other than open local phonebook and find a local church to go to which is Protestant I'll going to in a few moments you know what put me on the right path here but I want to say something else about the next morning when I woke up my first thought when I woke up very literally was oh boy I can't wait to go back to sleep again tonight and see her again and then when that didn't happen I said to myself well it's bound to be at least once a week right and then when that didn't happen well once a month and so forth and by the time I realized it would never happen again the memory had faded to the point where I could face the prospect of going through another 60 or 70 years of life without seeing her again but if I had known the next morning when I woke up that I would have to live to the end of my life and die before I got to see her again I don't know how I could have gone on because all of this life was so colorless and tasteless and gray and cardboard compared to being in her presence that it would have been extremely hard to face it and I feel sorry I mean I I mean I I again I don't like to go into controversial areas but I feel sorry for the magic or visionaries I know that they have suffered that that it's very hard to reconcile oneself to this world when the alternative is being in the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary's love so anyway but anyway so I I knew this was Christianity I started going to this Protestant Church but as soon as I got to know the pastor a little bit I kind of shyly asked him what about the Blessed Virgin Mary and when he answered without the respect that I knew that she deserved I knew this was no place for me and the other thing I was happening was that I was spending all my free time Marion shrines in particular there was a shrine to Our Lady of La Salette not far from where I lived in Ipswich Massachusetts the shrine was and I would go up there three or four times a week just walk the grounds and feel the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary and kind of commune with her I literally I didn't know what prayer was but just talk you know mentally talk to her and feel her presence and of course I was Catholic shrine and sometimes when I was there there would be a cat mask going on and whenever I was in the presence of a mass going on I was filled with this tremendous desire to receive Holy Communion even though I didn't know what it was and so those are basically the two things pulled me fairly directly into the Catholic Church was knowing who the Blessed Virgin Mary is and wanting to receive Communion daily if possible so I will actually take a breath and I will ask for invite any questions and I do have right now I do have about another 20 minutes to talk so I like to ask questions because the Holy Spirit works through all of us right and sometimes the questions bring me to something that I should have talked about and didand and if there's time afterwards I'll talk about that it was a couple of years in between the experience of the Blessed Virgin Mary and finding myself into the heart of the Catholic Church and I can talk about some other both providential and and miraculous experiences that kind of bridged the Gulf but are there any questions yeah okay so the question is how do my family react well they were fine with it for the first three years because I didn't tell him I I was scared too but I also thought it's better if they see how I've changed that I've become a nicer person a more loving person a kinder person it will set a better foundation for what I'm going to tell them it didn't exactly work that way I when I did tell them first of all they did acknowledge that I had become a better person but they became furious especially my father full of this kind of Jewish fatherly pride and when he realized he couldn't talk me out of it he went ballistic said you know he never wandering hear my name again he never wanted to see me again I have no son my son is dead and so forth you know it's not an uncommon response and Jewish families but it was very severe and but that only lasted less than a year and his paternal love kind of didn't let him maintain that completely so he reestablished contact with me on a very kind of awkward basis and still very hostile he was kind of ok if nothing reminded him of my conversion but as soon as anything reminded him he became as nasty as could be imagined and that being it pretty much lasted until a long time you know like 30 plus years but it had a very happy ending which I'll tell God has been very faithful so that that experience of the Blessed Virgin Mary was 1987 so I told my parents in 1990 ok in 2014 maybe 2015 my parents had gotten too old to live on their own I lived in Naples Florida which has some very good assisted living facilities and you know apartments plenty you know that are designed for people who are very old so I moved my parents down there I took care of them you know I visited I arranged everything for them and you know kind of interceded with the institution and everything and had dinner with him probably about four or five times a week and there were a lot of little needs that had to be met and everything and that really softened my father's heart he never expected that you know especially given the hostility it had melted his heart and he actually got warm-hearted for the first time probably since I was an infant and and then he had a fall and he broke his femur actually he was 102 and a half at the time so it started like downward slope and so he was in a rehab facility while the femur was supposed to heal it was a very painful experience the in the in whatever you call it checking into that facility was a horrible torture I won't go into the details but incredible pain he was put through I was with him but eventually I went home the next morning when I went to visit him he was sitting up in bed glowing and he said to me you know last night after all the commotion was over and everyone had left and the room was dark Jesus appeared to me interesting don't you think and that's all he said and then when I would forget to wear this once I forgot to wear this when I visited him he said where's that thing you you usually wear around your neck you really ought to be wearing it you know and he became extremely positive towards Christianity and this when this happened in other words when the Jesus appeared to him was about two weeks before Easter I baptized him on Good Friday and he passed away on Easter Tuesday so you know all's well that ends well my mother similarly I won't go into this story that actually made my mother more hostile towards my conversion because not only had her son joined the enemy side but her husband had joined the enemy side because my mother knew about this about Jesus appearing to himself and and so she became even more hostile and nasty but again when she was essentially on her deathbed she was just kind of on her deathbed she was down to about 68 pounds she was immobilized you all she could do was stare up at the ceiling 24 hours a day so I figured it's safe I'll get tell her my witness testimony now so I told her my witness testimony I had tried to tell her before but you know it didn't go over too well and the next morning when I visited her she turned to me very warmly and she said I want to thank you I really want to thank you for what you did yesterday her childhood faith had come back and it included actually faith in Christianity whenever my wife would go to visit her after that and we would pray the rosary by her bedside she would be mouthing the Hail Marys I had my priests I'm a member of in FSSP parish you know the Troodon teen right the Latin Mass parish very traditional the priest came and confirmed my mother invested her with the brown scapular or gave her an apostille Aulick blessing gave her last rites after that whenever I visited her she'd be clutching the brown scapular in her face whenever I brought a priest she couldn't get enough of him she couldn't talk at that point but she would just gaze up on him lovingly clasping his hand I'm gonna cry and then when she did pass away she was buried out of a Trenton right Latin Mass with a sung Deus array with you know the black cloths and the black candles and the incense and and and then processed to the grave you know from the Trenton Requiem Mass and buried with the full you know incense and and holy water and everything but it was a Jewish cemetery because I had bought the plot earlier I don't know what they thought about it yeah well when he was doing it yeah when he processed in and everything but the gravestone was still the gravestone that I had gotten when my father passed away it was a common gravestone so at that point I was still in the closet as they say I mean I wasn't in the closet but my you know Padma the situation with my because you know the family was gonna come and everything when my father passed away so it's a Jewish gravestone on on Jewish tombstones there's usually Hebrew writing right and nobody really can read he I mean you know people think Jews can read Hebrew but they can really they can maybe phonetically read it but they're unlikely to understand it so I had all the Old Testament verses in Hebrew that talked about Jesus and even that used the name Jesus one of them so I had the passage from Jobe that says you know I know that my redeemer lives I had the passage I forget where it's from I think it's from Isaiah that says we will drink with joy from the fountains of salvation and the neat thing is the word for salvation in that Hebrew is Yeshua it's in its the name Jesus and that verse has always been seen in Christianity as being about baptism we will drink with joy from the fountains of salvation that's the waters of baptism from the waters of salvation so anyway so the gravestone looked like a Jewish right but if you could read the Hebrew it was extremely messianic so anyway that's that story I will tell I'll tell one like final conversion story about how I overcame my anti-catholicism and ended up in the Catholic Church because this is there's a lot of meaning to this story so anyway as I said I was spending all my free time at this shrine to Our Lady of La Salette in near my house Our Lady of La Salette was a Marian apparition that took place in 1846 it was a lot like Fatima but I was very high in the French Alps above the tree line about 13,000 feet somewhere around there 12,000 feet it was 2 to shepherd children it was a one time apparition and anyway so what happened was I knew about of course the shrine of the the apparition of Our Lady of La Salette that following winter I was skiing in the French Alps it rained for a couple of days straight the skiing was pretty dull during you know in the rain so I got on my rental car I decided I would drive to the real La Salette for the afternoon and check it out so I drove there and I thought it would only I Drive them back that afternoon but because of the mountain roads and and the blizzard that had started it took me until the evening to get there and so I saw there was a sign saying reception I asked if I could stay there that's actually I'll mention I asked if I could stay there because the sign said reception but I was still Jewish and I was actually anti Catholic still I mean I was in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary but I still had a real chip on my shoulder about the Catholic Church so when I went up to ask if I could have a room there I said can one stay here and they said yes and I said but I'm Jewish can I anyway and they said of course which was really surprised me a couple of years later I was in Israel and I tried to stay in a Jewish hostel and they had a big sign you know over the saying for Jews only you know say oh no that I'm not sure they had to sign but in any case when I asked to stay there they said are you Jewish and I said well you tell me let me tell you the story and I told him the story and they wouldn't let me stay there that's kind of what I would expect happen at La Salette but it didn't happen I'd lost luck so I stayed there and then the next day when I want to leave the road was closed because that rain that what had been rain in the ski area was a blizzard there was snow I thought altitude and three feet of snow was falling a day and so I was stuck there until the end of the trip oh gosh I wasn't planning to tell that part of the story anyway I did so anyway I met a French Catholic woman there when I got back home before I get back home I will really stop on time but before I went got back home I got off the mountain just in time to catch my flight back from Geneva so I come off of mounts off of La Salette I Drive to Geneva I'm staying on the couch in a friend's house in Geneva waiting for my flight the next morning and I before I go to sleep I say a prayer which was a whine to God I said I can't believe you did this to me I go halfway around the world to go skiing it would have been the best skiing in my life because three feet of snow was falling a day and you won't let me go skiing you keep me stuck at La Salette and with that I go to sleep and I wake into the stream and I'm confronted with this man who was very grave and very serious but at the same time you could tell he was very loving and the image I had of him was like that high school teacher that some people had that I had that was very serious and no-nonsense but the kids still knew he actually loved them more than the clappy happy teachers you know so I'm I'm confronted with his man and he drills me with his eyes and he says you can go skiing or you can work for the second coming it's your choice which do you choose yeah so anyway I felt about two inches tall and um anyway I anyway that's the end of the last last story except that French woman I had met there calls me when I'm back in the United States and she says I think it would be a good idea if you checked out the Carthusians now I don't know how many of you know who the Carthusians are if you saw the movie integrate silence that's the Carthusians they're the strictest contemplative order in the church they follow their 11th century rule still pretty literally they eat one meal a day they live in solitary confinement no community you know no socializing or talk between them except recreation and even that's actually very restricted once a week and so she tells me about it and I say to myself yeah I want to I want to you know talk to them because I still want to understand what was happening to me which had been heavily mystical and I figured if anyone has mystical experiences it should be these guys so I pick up the telephone I call this Carthusian monastery it's in France and I say could I could I visit and and take a retreat there they say oh no absolutely impossible were strictly cloistered we don't receive anyone but then he says tell me something about yourself so I started telling him something about myself and I could hear his voice softening so I say should I send you a letter and he said oh yeah good idea send me a letter so I write him a letter and he immediately writes back you're welcome anytime of course what I didn't know was there one exception to not receiving anybody is when they think it's a possible vocation so so I get on the next plane I fly over there I show up at the Carthusian monastery and I'm I'm joining them I'm I'm staying I don't wear the the prior is coming to speak to me once a day to give me spiritual direction if I have any questions I'm I'm still Jewish I'm still anti-catholic I think he's going to give me a sales pitch about why should become Catholic every day he comes in you know after after the meal after lunch every day I'm braced for okay today is the day I'm gonna get the sales pitch he doesn't give it to me he just you know ask do you have any questions and so forth so I can't stand the suspense anymore after about three or four days of this so the next time he comes I you know just like hit him between the eyes and say aren't you going to tell me why I should become Catholic very hostile ii and he says oh no not at all all i ask of you is that you keep your eyes open and be honest with yourself about what you see and this so impressed me was the opposite of what i expected from the catholic church and it showed that he had faith that this is God at work that the Holy Spirit was at work and that what he had started he wouldn't you know stop Midway and so all I had to do was you know keep my eyes open and be honest with myself and this so impressed me and then two other things impressed me one was I was joining them for their offices every night they only sleep about three hours at a time they sleep from like you know 8:30 to 11:30 at night then they get up and they chant I'm not a very good Catholic they search and vigils together in its vigils right the the night Matins I'm sorry of course it's Matins they chant Matins from like 11:30 to 2:30 in the morning and then they have a couple of hours of sleep before Lodz and Mass and so I was joining them and you know this is in these stalls in this you know 14th century monastery they're all these old monks they are actually using chanting the Psalms out of parchment books that are like you know two feet by three feet they're the old you know hand written parchment books and they're chanting the Psalms and I'm looking around at all these men doing this every night through the night and they're chanting what are they chanting they're chanting Oh Jerusalem Jerusalem should I ever forget you let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth you know and ozai and there's no place in the world as beautiful as you and I'm looking around these guys and saying to myself these guys all want to be Jews [Laughter] and so the other thing that happened there and I'll and my you know my witness testimony this was they couldn't they weren't allowed to talk right so sometimes when they had a chance to cheat a little bit they would take advantage of it so I was doing my job there which was sizing the grass in the orchard one day and this elderly monk shuffles out to me and he says do you mind if I ask you a question and I said no and he says well then if you don't mind my asking you're not Catholic are you because we noticed you weren't receiving Communion and I said no that's right I'm not Catholic and he says well then if you don't mind my asking what are you then and I stand up very proudly and I said I'm Jewish and he said oh that's a relief we were all afraid you were Protestant so I mean you see how much I learned in this experience you know the you know the the they're not being propagandized but the faith and the holy spirit the fact that the Catholic Church is the continuation of Judaism the fact that the real Catholic spirit integrates and adopts the identification with the Jewish people and with the Old Testament of course the fact the reason among said this was of course they saw he saw Protestants as having had the fullness of the faith and turning away so they were apostates but the Jews were there are elder brothers in the faith so to speak and the final thing I experienced there was I experienced the loving gentle presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary was what made these monks joyful despite the rigor and severity of their lives and I understood how the Catholic Church is like the institutional shell around the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Virgin Mary is the in some sense and I don't want to be you know burned at the stake for the heresy of this it may not be strictly speaking correctly expressed but the Blessed Virgin Mary is kind of the soul and heart of the Catholic Church and where you have one you have the other so that's how I ended up being Catholic so thanks you [Applause] you [Music] you

Channel: franciscanfriars

Views: 64,265

Keywords: Conversion Story, Judaism to Catholicism, Roy Schoeman, Spring Marian Day 2019, Apologetics, apparition, Catholic Apologetics, Catholicism, Christianity, conversion, Happiness, heaven, Jewish, Judaism, La Salette, Marian Shrines, Modern Miracles, mother of god, Mystical, Pseudo Science, Virgin Mary, Conferences, Franciscans of the Immaculate, Religion, Christianity (Religion), Catholic, Spirituality, Salvation, Faith, God, Church, Gospel, Catholic Church, Jesus Christ, Christ, Jesus

Id: sw_GOtFlQ8A

Length: 60min 29sec (3629 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019