“Daddy, why don’t you go to church with us?”
Every Sunday I would head to church with my mom, but my dad always stayed home. I was only six, but it had taken me all six years to work up the courage to ask why my father abstained from our tradition.
“I believe in God, but I’m not Catholic,” he replied.
Seven years later, I would watch as my dad received his First Communion and Confirmation at the Easter Vigil. It was a beautifully joyful moment. It was a uniting of my family with the church community. The tiny, old priest beamed with happiness seeing my father join the church and insisted he come up and talk. My mom, who was the RCIA coordinator at our church, made jokes about how she ran out of people to sign up and had to “scrape the bottom of the barrel,” but we all knew how happy it made her to have our dad at church with us at last.
Perhaps I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the beauty behind the decision at the time. Deciding to join the Catholic faith is huge choice to make. Reflecting on this, I decided to have a conversation with my dad that’d I never had before. In the same way I mustered up my courage as a six-year-old, I decided I needed to find the same courage to ask my dad about his decision to become Catholic. Having never talked to him about anything faith related before, this was a huge step, but very rewarding.
I learned my father decided to join the Catholic Church for two reasons. The first was our parish priest. Our church is very lucky to have Monseigneur Peter Lentine as our pastor, though we lovingly call him “Father Pete.” He is a tiny man, currently 95 years old. For several years, the only appearance my dad made at church was for the Christmas Pageant and the Easter Egg Hunt. Despite my dad’s seldom appearances in our parish community, Father Pete didn’t hesitate to make my dad feel welcome each time he visited. “He was also so respectful, even though I wasn’t Catholic,” my dad told me. Father Pete’s welcoming attitude helped my dad decide to start coming to Mass with our family and determine if this was something he was ready for.
My father contributes the other part of his decision to our family. Being able to participate in Mass with my mom, my sister, and I was something important to him. He wanted our family united together in our faith. “It was something I had been thinking about doing for a long time. It was a decision I was ready to make and it seemed the right time to make it,” he told me.
This was probably one of the most personal conversations I’ve had with my dad. Though my mom and I often discuss faith together, it’s a rare topic of discussion with my dad, as our father/daughter relationship consists mostly of us making jokes. Despite being initially uncomfortable, it was a really important conversation to have, because it showed the real impact evangelization had on his life. A huge part of my dad’s journey to becoming Catholic came from Father Pete and my mom. Through Father Pete’s welcoming and respectful attitude and my family’s love and need for unity, it slowly changed his heart.
It’s easy to shrink from evangelization. It’s a scary word, but it doesn’t always mean preaching on street corners or passing out bibles. It can simply mean loving and accepting people for where they are in their journey and reaching out to show them the love that you’ve experienced in your own faith. I look to Father Pete and my mom as examples of evangelization in its simplest and truest form. And I hope that one day I can evangelize as they do, with respect, and with love.
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