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| From left: Kent Shi, Loren Brown, Katie Cabrera,Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, and Kyle Richard |
They say that God writes straight with crooked lines. How true that is can be seen in the life stories of five people who joined or rejoined the Catholic Church at Easter. All have links to Harvard University.
Twenty-five-year-old Kent Shi's path was typical of many young people in that he was agnostic to belief in God for a good part of his life.
However, there was movement toward trying to understand the depths of his being so that as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.
Then during the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s Church near the Harvard campus that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.
Soon after a friend invited him to attend eucharistic adoration even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant”. But kneeling in the front few pews he started asking questions about the host displayed in a monstrance on the altar. Catholics hold that, taking Jesus at his word, the consecrated host is his body and blood in the form of bread.
This is a key point of Shi's story:
For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.
Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.
Shi began attending Mass and decided to take part in the program that prepares non-Catholics for baptism or, if they are already Christians, for full participation in the life of the Church.
The wish to be fully involved in a way of life that brings us close to God seemed to be driving Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, on a path that led her to the Church.
She grew up in Massachusetts, was baptized as a child and comes from a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Her father had little education, but during a difficult life maintained Catholic traditions in the home.
Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.
One day she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started”.“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn't know what to do with it.”
“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick [Fiorillo] started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I've been looking for my whole life.’”
[...] She felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community.
Coming to understand Catholic doctrine was not an obstacle because the priests available at Harvard were experienced at explaining the faith.
For the next Harvard student God used poetry and art to open the door to a closer relationship with him. For Loren Brown, 25, being at Harvard was "providential" in the way God worked in his life. Here is the account of his journey:
[H]e comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized. He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith”.
Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot and the Confessions by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.
Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest was also key.
One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.
It was Father George Salzmann, graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.
“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine.”
Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him: “You know, there's this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul's [Church] and you should come see it." Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church.
Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard's engineering school.The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s.
Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.
“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed. Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.”
She began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith. Her journey continued in this way:The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.
“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she said
She found herself on her knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.”
She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church.
In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone”,she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough.
Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled "The hour that will change your life," in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest known for his Bible in a Year podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.
Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Father Fiorillo.
When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism”.
Kaynig-Fittkau went on to join the program for those seeking to know more about the traditions and practices that Catholics have received.
The journey to the Catholic Church for Kyle Richard, 37,was fostered by an attachment to the rosary, the prayer to Mary, Jesus' mother, asking that she intercede for us now with all our needs, and at the hour of our death, when we have to give her son an account of our life.Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun”.
A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”
Richard works in a technology startup company in downtown Boston. His journey is described here:
A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s program for those learning about the Church, something that he feels was a continuation of his father's desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating”, which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.
When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father's yearning to return to the Church.
“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.
Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves”.
Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.
Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot”, he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.
Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.
“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more."
Several times in scripture God points out to us that his care continues even when we are not attentive: "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear" (Isaiah 59:1); or, "The Lord answered Moses, 'Is the Lord’s arm too short? Now you will see whether or not what I say will come true for you' ” (Numbers 11:23).
All the best for your enchanted journey in life toward a deeper relationship with God!
Ω With thanks to CNA writers Joe Bukuras and Shannon Mullen
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