Returning to Rome
by Joseph Burkholder
Was I unhappy with being Mennonite? No. Am I trying to escape people I don’t like? No. So was there an evangelistic Catholic who was twisting my arm? No. (I didn’t know any Catholics.) Was there disorder or crisis in my personal life, my marriage, or family life that motivated me? Definitely not.
So why do something as erratic as this? Everything was all together in my life . . . right? Wrong! But wrong only twice a year. Twice a year, because Mennonites have communion only twice a year. Twenty-eight years ago I began having spiritual “heartburn” whenever I participated in communion; then it would disappear for another six months. But this discomfort grew into a real emotional and spiritual distress that would not go away. I told Ruth many times: “There is something going on in the communion that I don’t understand, but it’s tearing me up. There is more here than meets the eye.”
About five years ago my study and prayer about the Body and Blood of Christ really began: Matthew 26; Mark 14; 1 Corinthians 5, 10, and 11; and John 6, and John 6 . . . I could not lay aside John 6. Then I read the writings of the early Church Fathers, the second-generation apostles, and read the early Church councils. I was shocked! These ecclesiastical leaders were saying the same thing as Jesus, Paul, Mark, Matthew, and John. They said: “This is truth: Believe it, confess it, practice it or you’re a heretic.” So I dug into Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Cranmer, then the Council of Trent.
I told Ruth, “Well, this is what they say they believe (and have consistently taught it for two thousand years). Let’s sneak into St. Francis Church a few times and see what they practice. Let’s see how they do it.”
We began attending Mass about two years ago, going there on Saturday night, and going to our Mennonite service on Sunday morning—while I was leading an adult Sunday school class and served as a deacon and church council member. This was my “dark night of the soul.” But, in attending Mass, a wellspring of joy began to rise within me. I could see in the Eucharist what my spirit had been crying out for these many years.
I am a Protestant prodigal. I’ve been in the desert, struggling for centuries. I’ve got this four-hundred-year hunger and this huge thirst. But—thanks be to God!—the Real Food and Real Drink are in sight! It’s a mystery within a mystery that, after twelve to fifteen generations of Burkholder history as Mennonites, God would say, “Now is the time, this is the place” for Ruth and me to be reconciled and restored to his one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.
So pray for us, my brothers and sisters, that we may be made worthy to celebrate this most holy, blessed, and glorious of all Feasts. May we always “keep the Feast.”
Letting Go and Coming Home
by Ruth Burkholder
Growing up in a conservative Mennonite community, I knew there were a number of givens. One was that you never would become Catholic. How marvelous is the love of our God who, despite that given, brought Joe and me into the Catholic Church last Easter vigil!
Five years ago we were chatting with the owner of a motel at which we were staying. She was Catholic—and Christian. Amazing! When we left, wanting to be polite, we accepted a catalogue from St. Joseph Communications. If either of us could have guessed what was to come of that short encounter!
We ordered a few of the tapes. They would help us know why we weren’t Catholic. The tapes were fascinating. We began asking questions, reading Church history and the early Church Fathers. It was a bit scary: They sounded so Catholic!
One day I was reading to Joe the writings of Clement and Ignatius about the Eucharist. We decided these guys were either right, or the Fathers got off track even before the death of the last apostle. Meanwhile we began attending our first catechism class (just to clear things up). We kept going back. We began talking with Father John Abe and Dan Kalas, at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Staunton, Virginia.
During this time we began facing the fact of all the splinter church groups even within our Mennonite community. Where you went to church often was a decision you made after you found the “best” one. It began to seem arrogant. Surely God meant to have a visible Church—but which one? The road began to point to Rome, and I was getting worried. I went through a phase of reading everything bad I could find about the Catholic Church—and there was plenty: Judas priests, popes more political than pious, theologians spouting old heresies with new names, feminists who want a female god.
But I couldn’t get away from this Church that, with Scripture and Tradition (and despite great odds) had kept the “deposit of faith” for almost 2,000 years—an unbelievably moving story of truth finding its way through times of darkness, again and again. The path was littered with rogues, yes, but also with saints.
At this point I began calling leaders of the Episcopal, the Orthodox, and the Anglican churches (anything without the word “Catholic”). Surely in one of these churches—surely—but our hearts were not at peace. I knew, finally, that the time had come to stop reading and roving and to fast and pray. I often ended up in St. Francis’s Blessed Sacrament chapel as, one by one, I lay at Christ’s feet the things so hard to give up: friends, family, and our Mennonite church—loving and appreciating them all, but knowing he was calling me to give them to him. But the one thing I couldn’t let go of was our children and grandchildren. What would our becoming Catholic do to our close-knit family? I was like the rich young ruler; it was the one thing I couldn’t let go of.
One day in prayer, I knew that, unless I laid this most precious gift at his feet, I would maybe, for a short time, “save” our family but, in the end, I would lose all that really mattered. This was the darkest part of my journey (and at times still is), but for love of him and his Church I had no other choice. The beautiful words we say at the Stations of the Cross mean so much to me: “Help me to love you above all else, and then do with me as you will.”
So, for me, it has been love and truth and beauty that have brought me to this Catholic Church. In the glorious truth of the Incarnation, I am discovering what it is to be a daughter of the Most High God, to partake of my love and Lord in the Eucharist, to be part of the communion of saints, to love Christ’s Mother as my own. I have found the pearl of great price.
I’m convinced that four hundred years ago some of my forefathers prayed for my family when they broke from the Catholic Church—prayed that they would come home. It’s been many generations but I have come home!