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Jeanne’s Story

My family belonged to the Episcopal church when I was a child and we attended every week. When I was 17, I attended a Faith Alive weekend at which I accepted Jesus as my Saviour, thus ending the Sunday morning Christian phase of my life. Faith Alive is the Episcopalian version of a revival (much calmer than other protestant revivals!) I went to a Roman Catholic college where I, for the first time, learned about Roman Catholicism. I met Thomas a few months after my graduation. He was a recent convert from Episcopalianism to Roman Catholicism. I attended church with him and we were married at his parish. I had refused to convert to Roman Catholicism until I was sure that was God’s plan for me. After we had been married about 10 months, I became Roman Catholic.

When we had been married about 15 years we were introduced to the Eastern Catholic churches. Many Orthodox call these churches Uniate. They are churches that were Orthodox but later joined the Roman Catholic church, being allowed to keep their Divine Liturgy and traditions, but being required to accept all Roman Catholic doctrines. We realized right away that the eastern Christian spirituality suited us better. We officially changed rites from Roman Catholic to Romanian (Eastern Rite) Catholic.

Up until that time, we had very little knowledge of Orthodoxy. Our pastor at the Romanian (Eastern Rite) parish gave my husband lots of Orthodox reading material, since Eastern Catholics have much in common with the Orthodox. My husband came to the conclusion that being an Eastern Christian in communion with Rome didn’t work, and that the Orthodox Church is the original church founded by Jesus Christ.

At first, I was very upset about the division created in our family by my husband’s conversion. I was not interested in Orthodoxy because I could not envision myself as anything other than Roman Catholic. For many months after Thomas’ conversion to Orthodoxy (four years after having joined the uniate parish), I was not really open to the idea that the Roman Catholic church might not be the True Church. When I’m not open to something God wants to show me, He usually hits me over the head with a 2 x 4. That’s how we started homeschooling. (Thomas had wanted us to homeschool ten years before we actually started!)

In the case of homeschooling, I had not been seriously thinking about the issue, when a single event caused me to be almost obsessed with the idea. After listening to a conversation between a couple of my friends, I realized that I had to do it, and I could hardly think of anything else for the next 24 to 48 hours after listening to their conversation. I had not really given serious consideration to homeschooling my children before that. But, it seemed clear to me that it was what God wanted since I had listened to many such conversations among my many homeschooling friends in the past and had not been fazed by them. In the case of becoming Orthodox, I had, of course, thought about it, since the issue was causing a strain in my relationship with my newly chrismated husband. However, I was not really attracted to Orthodoxy, and was, in fact, very resistant to the whole idea.

For me, belonging to the one true Church established by Christ, was more important than consideration of individual theological issues. I figured that if I belonged to that Church, then whatever its doctrines were, they must be correct. So finding out whether the True Church was the Roman Catholic church or Orthodoxy was the central issue for me.

Here’s how God hit me over the head this time. I was reading a secular college world history textbook, mainly as background reading for teaching my children history, but perhaps partly because the issue of the early church was on my mind. Contrary to my understanding that the bishop of Rome had always been accepted by the entire Christian church as the authority over all of the church, I read that it was not until much later that the bishop of Rome began to have authority over the church in western Europe. I read that the eastern parts of the church never accepted one bishop as having sole authority over all of the others, although the bishop of Rome was honored because of Peter and Paul having been in Rome. This book’s description of the early Christian Church was in agreement with the Orthodox "version" of the early church, and fit with the current set-up of Orthodoxy (well, minus jurisdictional squabbling.) The textbook’s description of the early church as it pertained to the papacy certainly did not coincide with the Roman Catholic version. Reading this caused me to begin to question the Roman Catholic version of history.

The day I was reading that textbook, I couldn’t really get the whole thing off my mind. I recognized what was happening as pretty much the same as the day I decided (also out of the blue) to start homeschooling our children. That day I had known without any doubt that God was telling me that I needed to homeschool our children. I kept thinking about the whole issue of the papacy.

It seemed to me that if the Catholic church was the Church established by Christ, then either the pope must have always been the leader of all of the church or, if not, then when the bishop of Rome began to claim authority over all the church it would have to have been accepted by them. What I read convinced me that a large part of the Christian church never at any time accepted the bishop of Rome as the leader of all of the church and the organization of the Orthodox church today is much more like that of the early Christian church than is the RC Church’s organization.

I went to the library and looked at more history books. I was particularly interested in books not written by Roman Catholics or Orthodox authors. There, I read basically the same thing in a couple of other secular history books. Then I looked at a Roman Catholic history book by Fr. Robert Fox. It seemed to me that his version was very biased. Its spin on the set-up of the early Church and the early history of the papacy seemed very weak to me. I was quite unconvinced.

Within about two weeks of my first looking into all of this, I knew what God wanted for me. He had not allowed me to put this issue on the back burner. I thought about it all the time. I had not discussed this with Thomas. This whole topic had been very difficult for us during the months after his conversion to Orthodoxy. It was the first time in our marriage that we’d attended different churches. It was a very hard year! When I was certain what I had to do, I told Thomas, who about fell off of his chair, not knowing about the thinking I’d been doing for the last two weeks. He was on cloud nine for a while after that!

The year since my chrismation has been good. My spiritual growth and understanding is progressing much more than ever before, though I have SO far to go! This is simply further confirmation for me that I am in the Church where God wants me (and all of us) to be.

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