Rite of Election: 374 coming home to the Church

By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press

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Life-changing experiences of God led some 
people to St. Paul Cathedral in Worcester 
Sunday for the next step in their journey of faith and initiation into the Catholic Church.
Among stories were a desperate woman seeing a golden light “in the middle of nowhere,” a teenager following her repentant father to God and a Mormon missionary returning to the Catholic Church.
They were among those who filled the cathedral for the Rite of Election and Call to Continuing Conversion. This liturgy on the first Sunday of Lent is for people preparing to receive the sacraments of initiation – baptism, first Communion and/or confirmation – at the Easter Vigil, in churches around the diocese.
Elizabeth A. Marcil, director of the diocesan Office of Religious Education, reported 152 catechumens (unbaptized individuals) and 222 candidates (182 baptized Catholics seeking to complete their initiation and 40 individuals baptized in other Christian traditions who are seeking full communion with the Catholic Church). She said they are from 39 parish communities, and three college/university communities.
Catechumens inscribed their names in the Book of the Elect and the bishop declared them “members of the elect, to be initiated into the sacred mysteries at the next Easter Vigil.”
He told candidates: “The Church recognizes your desire to be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit and to have a place at Christ’s eucharistic table. ... Hear the Lord’s call to conversion and be faithful to your baptismal covenant.”
In his homily, the bishop said God is calling them to surrender their old way of life and put on Christ, who has chosen them to live holy lives.
“If you told me two years ago that I would be doing this, I would have laughed,” mused 35-year-old Leona Mitchell, who is to receive all three sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil at St. Anne and St. Patrick Parish in Sturbridge. “Everything I was doing was sinning.”
One night, with nothing going right, she went outside and saw what was like a golden light, she said. At first, she thought she was crazy.
“I heard the voice of God, I guess, [saying] I am forgiven and ‘of course I love you,’” she said. “I was stunned. ... The next day I started looking up churches.” She went to different Christian services and Mass. Her family is nominally Catholic but she wasn’t baptized or brought up Catholic, she said.
She said she looked online at Worcester diocesan information for places to go to adoration, although she didn’t know what that meant, and visited different Catholic churches to adore Christ in the Eucharist. She also “quit drinking and making bad choices,” she said.
“I needed to get baptized; I want the ‘Real Deal,’ and the Eucharist,” she decided.
To prepare for the sacraments, she’s going through the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA), which is “expanding on what I already knew and felt inside,” she said. “The next thing is getting my son [age 11] baptized. ... I felt I had to do it for myself first. ... That way I can teach him.”
Jean-Paul Laramie, 54, is bringing his daughter, Elyse Laramie, 18, to the sacraments, but says “she found Somebody much more important” – God. She is to receive all three sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil at North American Martyrs Parish in Auburn, where he is to receive his first Communion and be confirmed.
He said he was baptized at St. Rose of Lima Parish in Northborough and “brought up marginally Catholic.”
A few years ago he had experiences he described as follows.
“I was at a very low point in my life. ... I was sitting in my car in a parking garage. ... I had all these pieces ... from different religions – the facts about God” that came together as if in a puzzle.
Then “it was like there was a great eye looking back at me” – God’s eye. “He wanted me to know how much I was loved.”
Mr. Laramie considered himself a good person, but was shown his sin, stretching heavenward like black smoke.
“I had never repented of it,” he said. He felt its weight crushing him, and how it had hurt God.
“I immediately fell out of the car, dropped onto the concrete and repented,” he said. “Real repentance hurts; it was like having a part of me ripped away.”
He said he started reading the Bible, talked to a priest at St. Rose of Lima and attended Mass close to home at St. Joseph Church in Worcester, then at North American Martyrs.
“I asked God if there would ever come a time” when he would be closer to human beings, “where God would be walking among us,” Mr. Laramie said. The answer came on a white sheet of paper, with the word “YES” handwritten in capital letters, in a font he’d never seen.
Shocked, Mr. Laramie responded with laughter, “You really don’t equivocate, do you?”
The answer? “No.”
He felt that God - “the only source of objective truth” - was saying this isn’t a laughing matter.
Now Mr. Laramie asks God, “What do you want me to do?”
He said his wife’s father took him to a rosary group at his own parish, Immaculate Conception in Marlborough, before his death last year.
Miss Laramie said that when her grandfather died it was sad, “but I knew he was somewhere better” and she thinks that drew her closer to God.
So did her father’s experiences; “I started following God after my father.” They went from going to church for funerals to regularly attending Mass.
Sean Mahony, 30, returned to Mass. He said he was baptized Catholic and made his first Communion and first confession.
Now he’s trying to “finish the cycle,” getting confirmed at the Easter Vigil at St. Anne and St. Patrick Parish in Sturbridge. Around the time he would have been confirmed as a teenager, he became a Mormon, he said.
His mother was Catholic, his father Protestant, and “I was looking for my own identity,” choosing “bits and pieces” from both sides, he explained.
He went with a friend to Mormon religious services, and their faith seemed to align somewhat with his beliefs, he said. They baptized him and he did door-to-door missionary work on Cape Cod, where he lived. After graduating from high school, he became a Mormon missionary in Salt Lake City, Utah.
“I’ve always felt a call to serve God,” he said, and he thought that was where to do so.
Finishing his two-year assignment, he returned to Massachusetts and studied astrophysics at UMass Dartmouth. Still sensing a call to serve God, “I changed my major to history” to study the history of religions, he said.
He transferred to the Mormon Brigham Young University-Idaho, focusing especially the history of Mormonism. He said he was disillusioned by discrepancies between how it was presented and the actual facts, and because parts of Mormon theology don’t align with “classic arguments” for God’s existence.
“There are phenomenal people” in the Mormon religion, he said. But, “through my own study of theology, I came to realize that Catholicism was true.” Last February, a Catholic friend took him to Mass.
“That’s when I wanted to come back” to the Catholic faith, Mr. Mahony said. “There was a feeling of the Holy Spirit at that Mass. ... It felt like I was home.”
He returned to Massachusetts after graduation, and is preparing for confirmation and looking into becoming a religious priest or brother.
He said he is “excited to ... work towards that closer relationship with Christ.”