My Husband's Catholic Conversion Story!

[Music] hi guys my name is ryan i am ali's husband so today i think we're just kind of going to talk about my conversion story to the catholic church just kind of go from the start to the end so when i was younger i was raised in the lutheran church it was something that was kind of a family thing my parents um my grandparents and and my siblings and i all went to the same lutheran church it was you know 10 15 minutes from our house every sunday and uh sunday school right after church and then we kind of have like a little church lunch brunch kind of thing down in the basement as well it was always not always something that i necessarily wanted to do but something that we always did as a family as i got older we kind of had some issues like family issues maybe things that just kind of didn't work out with the pastor and some things that were going on in our family with my grandmother and it kind of left a bitter taste in the mouth of everybody in my family my family stopped going there the next couple years were interesting because that that pull to have to go to church every sunday was was no longer there so it wasn't something that my parents were necessarily encouraging us to do as as kids to go to church so my siblings uh you know kind of stopped going and they were all younger so it really wasn't something they could like decide that they were going to go to church you know for myself i i still did want to go and there was actually a church that was very close to our house it was probably less than two miles away that a lot of the kids that i went to high school with were there and they had a really big you know youth program and a lot of the guys that i knew um in athletics and and you that were friends when i was in high school they all went uh to that youth group so i wanted to be a part of that and i figured that you know that would be an easy place to kind of transition over so i went from the lutheran church to a brethren church i was in the brethren church for i don't know maybe four or five years probably from the time that i was you know 12 until you know 16 17 years old i'm kind of going back to both of these churches both i never felt good after i'd leave the service so it was always something that whatever the the pastor was talking about it was something that you know i would leave the church service feeling pretty terrible about myself i say that like it was more of like a hellfire and brimstone kind of service specifically remember one when i was in lutheran church as a as a you know a young kid that the pastor told me that if if you were ever angry at anybody that it was basically like you had murdered them in your mind which was a sin and if you were doing that too much you were definitely going to go to hell your 10 year old kid i got mad all the time and you know i'm sitting there thinking like man i've murdered a lot of people in my head this is bad like i'm definitely gonna go to hell and i was always too terrified it just it was never good it was never something that i felt like i was bettering myself for having done it was more of something that i felt like i had to do i don't know if it was like forced or or what the the feeling was but definitely not a good one so any i i go to this this brethren church i was there for it actually may have been closer to you know maybe five or six years until i'd actually graduated from high school a lot of my friends were there went to youth group had a great time the services again were still something i couldn't really get my head around it as i got older i started asking more questions about the church there were things that were in the bible that didn't make sense to me or not even so much you know any of the moral teachings of the church but more stories or or parables or things that that i would i would hear that were taken very literally when i was in the lutheran church and at the brethren church that they didn't really leave any room for for questioning i always had a very hard time with that and i would talk to the pastor about it or i'd talk to my youth leader about it never really got any answers that satisfied me that made me understand it more or believe it more the longer i was at the the brethren church there was even some more things that that started not going so well and and one of those things was an issue with the deacon of the church so one of my best friends um had had uh some issues where this guy was basically grooming him from a very young age from the time that he was you know eight nine years old all the way up until we were in high school he actually told me a story about you know some of the weird things this guy was doing with him and and i'm not going to get into all the details but just some weird things that that were definitely not normal and definitely not appropriate he came to me and kind of you told me about it i was like man that's something that is not normal and should not be happening but had been happening to him for so long and it had escalated over such a long period of time i don't know if he just didn't realize it or just didn't know what to say to somebody so that became a very big issue it actually ended up getting child protective services involved and there ended up being a lot of stuff that we had to talk to kind of the other board members and deacons of the church and the pastor and i remember one of the things that that had happened was you would end up getting in the news and talking about you know these kids from a school or involved with this deacon and i had some part in it never anything you're too extreme but i mean he definitely did some things with me that were very odd like he made me pull money out of a pocket of his once he followed me to a girl's house uh when i had come back from a trip to a medical academy when i was in high school he like saw my car on the road and followed me to this girl's house and was like asking me out it was just very weird but anyway we had this meeting with the board members the church and other things one of the things they told my friend and i were you guys are lying for attention like we know this guy he would never do this stuff that you're you guys are saying he would do yeah just it was not a good situation actually really turned me off of the church i went to college so i was you know 17 18 years old when that happens i wouldn't say an atheist but definitely very angry with the church i had a lot of problems with like i said before a lot of problems with you know certain things i had questions about that i never got really good answers for i had a long history of going to church and not feeling great about it i you know have this experience with the deacon that you had abused one of my friends as well as the members of the church kind of throwing it back in our face saying that we were lying to them just was not a good look and a lot of it you know if you think about it was not really the teachings of the church or you know what's going on in the church it was more just people but you know regardless i go to college actually end up going to a private catholic university interestingly enough but had no no faith did not have anything that i necessarily believed in you know in the church i thought that you know a lot of it was just uh hypocrisy in people i don't know i just did not have a good opinion of of the church at that time you go to two years the bitterness kind of fades so i had a lot of less problems with the church i didn't really have an interest in debating with anybody anymore about the merits of whether or not god exists and that kind of thing but interestingly enough i take a class at saint francis which was the only class that you had to take that was religious religiously based which was franciscan values and the whole class was about the values that saint francis had kind of put forward and you know how those are implemented in the school the professor that i had in that class was amazing i i would ask her questions all the time about questions that i had back when i was a kid even it was a young adult and she would always tell me it seems like you were taught to read the bible literally instead of reading the bible critically like a big part of faith is not that it's completely blind like it's okay to ask questions it's okay to look for more information to do research to find answers and actually kind of even deepens you know your faith and what especially for me the more answers i was able to find the easier it was for me to to kind of have faith and change a lot of the opinions that i had so you know i have that class you know things go very well i actually ended up meeting my wife ali as an r.a at saint francis the longer that her and i were together the more i realized i definitely wanted to marry her and i saw a future with her so i knew that if alien i got married that we would have to raise our kids catholic i'd probably end up going to mass all the time so i knew that it was something that i wanted to at least understand another part of the church that i had growing up was there were times that you know i talked with i don't want to name specific people but just you know people in the church about other faiths or christian faiths and catholicism was always like the black sheep a lot of people would say that uh catholics are they think they're better than you they think that they're all gonna go to heaven everybody else gonna go to hell i think they have everything right i definitely did not have a great opinion of catholics from what i learned as a kid going into a catholic university so you know i meet ali and i realized that i went to raise my kids catholic and all these questions are going through my head but i wanted to know i wanted to learn at least so that if we were going to raise our kids catholic that i would understand the sacraments i would understand what was going on if i was going to go to mass every week so i started rcia just to kind of learn father chris was my you know kind of the mentor that i had through it i was very lucky that because i was in a private catholic school that it was only me and him so my whole rcia experience was one-on-one i could ask a lot of questions the more i learned about the catholic faith the more information i was given the more it just made sense the more questions that i had i actually got answers to i'll never forget this moment i was sitting with father chris we were in our little room talking and he he's asking me don't you he's asking me questions about what i think and i i said you know father chris i feel like catholicism was you know christianity that that was left when christ died like that's what catholicism was the disciples were catholic you know that that's like original christianity was catholicism and he was like yeah i mean that's that's about right and i said and i feel like a lot of the protestant derivatives like a lot of the derivatives of catholicism were kind of created by people taking parts of the church that they didn't like out or adding parts that they wanted in and he was like yeah i mean that's also about right and i kind of looked i was like i feel like i've been lied to like i feel like i don't like i didn't learn what christianity was and he kind of laughed and he was like no that's you know not necessarily true you could kind of see that i was becoming more and more kind of coming back because i mean him and i had conversations before about what i believed when i didn't believe and you could kind of see that you know the wheels were starting to spin in my head and this whole time you know i'm going to mass with ali every week we're you know constantly talking about faith in god and that kind of thing by the end of rcia i ended up saying that i wanted to convert to catholicism so easter of my junior year of college is when i went through and was you know brought into the church it was a great experience ever since then you know every mass i've been to i leave mass i leave confession i feel so much better i still have questions but i still have parts that i don't understand you know as well but i i feel much more like founded in my faith and for that i mean it's it's changed my entire life i used to have a very pessimistic attitude about a lot of things especially you know after everything that happened when i was graduating high school and now i have you know a lot more to live for a lot more to be happy for than i used to so it's definitely been a much needed and good change for my life over the past five six years so that's basically about it if anybody is interested i mean i'm more than willing to you know make something else kind of explaining things a little further this is kind of like a very brief overview there's a lot more like little things that have happened throughout but just let me know what you guys think and we'll see what we can do but i appreciate it guys [Music]

Channel: somecatholicchick

Views: 4,075

Rating: 4.9859157 out of 5

Keywords: #catholicconversionstory

Id: Nl_SbZG7kX0

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021