Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3
I couldn’t understand the Catholic Church’s prohibition on birth control. It wasn’t like I wasn’t “open to children.” I was! I loved kids and wanted several! And if God wanted me to have a baby on his timeline rather than my own, a little pill certainly wasn’t going to stop him. What was the big deal?
I asked Tim the Seminarian about it. I don’t remember now much of what he said, so it must not have been that impressive. He gave me a CD to listen to. I decided to wait to listen to it until my husband and I could listen together.
The next weekend there were some schedule conflicts and I couldn’t make it to mass with my friends. I decided to go to the Newman Center on campus for the first and only time. At the end of the mass they were making announcements and a girl piped up from the back. I vaguely recognized her as a graduate student, one of the cool ones in fact. She announced that they would be teaching a Natural Family Planning class in a few weeks.
I shook my head at God. Okay, okay, I can take a hint. I reluctantly emailed the girl to see if I could just attend but not buy the materials – it wasn’t as if we were actually going to do it, after all. No, I really needed to actually pay and do the whole thing? Ugh, fine.
I sat with arms crossed through the first class. I hadn’t really heard anything that convinced me why I would want to switch from the pill to Natural Family Planning, despite NFP’s apparent effectiveness. I certainly didn’t relish the thought of abstaining 8-10 days a month, after we’d waited for what felt like ages anyway!
I went home and leafed through the materials they sent us away with. I saw the same CD that Tim had given me, and I figured it was yet another sign. Contraception: Why Not? Yes, that was indeed the question I had. I sent one of the CDs to my husband and asked him to listen to it before the next time he visited. I figured I’d listen to a few minutes of it each day to digest it. But once the woman started talking, I couldn't push stop. I listened in astonishment. This ridiculous teaching of the Catholic Church was starting to make sense. By the end of the CD, I was appalled by what the pill had done to society.
I wasn’t quite ready to give it up myself, though. I needed to do more reading on it. I needed to decide if we could do a few more months of long-distance marriage if our “conjugal visits” might have to be times of abstinence. Most importantly, I needed to see what my husband thought. At his next visit, we discussed it and concluded we should probably not use the pill anymore. (At the time I thought it was a mutual decision; he’s since told me that it was basically me who made the decision!) Two days after he left, I threw out my birth control.
*
This opened the door to the big question. If the Catholic Church was right about contraception – the teaching it is most mocked for, the teaching that is most reviled, the teaching that the vast majority of Catholics ignore – if the Church was right about that, then what else was it right about?
*
Shortly after this I was zoning out during an RCIA meeting. The Holy Spirit rustled in and it dawned on me: I believe this. I savored that thought for a moment. I believe this. I started to realize more and more what that meant and welled up with excitement. I believe this! I didn’t think I could make it through the rest of the class without jumping up and down. I believe this! I believe this! I rushed back to my apartment to call my husband.
“Gregory, I believe this!” I was practically shouting.
“That’s great,” he laughed.
“Do you know what this means?!” I exclaimed, not sure he was grasping how big of a deal this was. “I can become Catholic! I actually want to become Catholic!”
And that was it. Contraception had been the watershed. All it took after that was the Holy Spirit moving in me and I was chomping at the bit to join the Church.
I was truly on fire after that. I wanted to understand everything the Church taught so that, when the time came at Easter for me to answer if I believed everything the Catholic Church professed, I could give a resounding yes.
I wasn’t quite there. I needed to get a firmer handle on a few other big things – particularly Mary and the male-only priesthood – before I could really say yes. It was coming down to the wire – a week until I would become Catholic and I was urgently reading everything I could.
And then my mother-in-law had a massive heart attack. I immediately flew back to be with my husband and we spent the days leading up to the Easter Vigil in the hospital with his family. By the time Saturday night rolled around, it didn’t matter that I hadn’t had a chance to discover why the Church taught some of the things she did. I believed in the Pope and the Magisterium, and that meant accepting on faith all that they taught. I would have time later to investigate the reasoning behind the teachings I didn’t yet understand. Right now all that mattered was that I become a member of the Church and get Jesus in me ASAP. I needed all the grace I could get to help my husband through the imminent passing of his mother.
After the Easter Vigil we went back to the hospital. In many ways it was like nothing had happened. There was no party to celebrate. Only one person had ever said they were happy for me, and she was a fallen-away Christian herself. But that was all fine. For once my pride was completely out of the picture. I simply and quietly, humbly and gratefully entered the fullness of the faith.