Everyone has their own story. This is a brief account of how I came home to the Roman Catholic Church.
I was raised in a very religious, Protestant family. Going to Church on Sunday was not an option, it was a necessity, but, we always lived a good distance from our church, so there was always a significant car ride involved. This meant we had time to pass constructively so we would sing hymns as we rode in the car. This was effortless because my mother was usually in the choir, if not the organist. The Catholic Church was never presented as an option. Like most Protestants, it was quite easy to move between different styles of Protestant, all of which my family did.
In my teen years, I had been looking for God’s direction, with my help, of course. My prayer went something like “God, please show me what you want me to do with my life…but of course you would never want me to join the Armed Forces or become an ordained minister.” The latter qualification was because I had enormous respect and reverence for my late grandfather, who had been a Protestant pastor, and I felt that I could never measure up to his standard of personal holiness.
Some years later, I joined the Canadian Armed Forces and discovered the liturgical Protestant tradition aka Anglican. It felt like I had discovered a new world: Lectionaries, a Calendar of the Saints, seasons of the church year, Creeds, Sacraments and more books in the Bible (what we call Deutero-canonical). I was also discovering that God had put in my heart a reverence for the Holy Eucharist as well as a desire to be united with the Early Church, which I had been taught that the Anglican tradition was.
My military service was also a time when it felt like I was being regularly asked “Do you think God might be calling you to be ordained?” That was the LAST thing I was willing to consider as it was one of the two things I was positive God would never ask of me, but as He had already proved me wrong on the first, military service, I was not surprised when I was forced to choose between a long-term military career and going to seminary.
Following seminary, I married my wonderfully patient Catholic wife, was ordained, had a daughter, and thought I was settled in my vocation until 2009 when Pope Benedict XVI wrote the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus which seemed like a way forward to the Christian Unity I had been praying for. I had also been increasingly concerned after reading many things in the Early Church Fathers which agreed with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, but not what I believed at the time.
After much prayer before the Blessed Sacrament in Roman Catholic parishes, I resigned my Anglican orders on Divine Mercy Sunday 2012, and entered the Roman Catholic Church as a layman. How I became a Catholic priest will be covered in another column.
Fr. Kipling Cooper