{"id":504,"date":"2008-03-25T14:20:30","date_gmt":"2008-03-25T14:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/mystagogia-sort-of.html"},"modified":"2008-03-25T14:20:30","modified_gmt":"2008-03-25T14:20:30","slug":"mystagogia-sort-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/mystagogia-sort-of.html","title":{"rendered":"Mystagogia. Sort of."},"content":{"rendered":"

Science fiction writer John C. Wright joined the Church last Saturday night.\u00a0 Now he has questions, which are being very helpfully answered by all comers over at his LiveJournal.<\/a><\/p>\n

I have heard my whole life how corrupt and superstitious the Catholic Church is, so, now that\u00a0 I am in, where do I sign up? I’d like to start with Simony. Can I buy Church offices wholesale, and then sell them through retail outlets? What are the tax implications?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A few more. er, \u00a0stories over at the Catholic Convert blog,<\/a> including this about an Arkansas family’s journey of faith. <\/a>
\nAnd on a serious, but joyful and peaceful note, if you haven’t yet, read Magdi Cristiano Allam’s account of his road to the Church:<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday evening I converted to the Christian Catholic religion, renouncing my previous Islamic faith. Thus, I finally saw the light, by divine grace — the healthy fruit of a long, matured gestation, lived in suffering and joy, together with intimate reflection and conscious and manifest expression. I am especially grateful to his holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who imparted the sacraments of Christian initiation to me, baptism, confirmation and Eucharist, in the Basilica of St. Peter\u2019s during the course of the solemn celebration of the Easter Vigil. And I took the simplest and most explicit Christian name: \u201cCristiano.\u201d Since yesterday evening therefore my name is Magdi Crisitano Allam.
\nFor me it is the most beautiful day of [my] life. To acquire the gift of the Christian faith during the commemoration of Christ\u2019s resurrection by the hand of the Holy Father is, for a believer, an incomparable and inestimable privilege. At almost 56 [\u2026], it is a historical, exceptional and unforgettable event, which marks a radical and definitive turn with respect to the past. The miracle of Christ\u2019s resurrection reverberated through my soul, liberating it from the darkness in which the preaching of hatred and intolerance in the face of the \u201cdifferent,\u201d uncritically condemned as \u201cenemy,\u201d were privileged over love and respect of \u201cneighbor,\u201d who is always, an in every case, \u201cperson\u201d; thus, as my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny, I was able to adhere to the authentic religion of truth, of life and of freedom.
\nOn my first Easter as a Christian I not only discovered Jesus, I discovered for the first time the face of the true and only God, who is the God of faith and reason. My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Science fiction writer John C. Wright joined the Church last Saturday night.\u00a0 Now he has questions, which are being very helpfully answered by all comers over at his LiveJournal. I have heard my whole life how corrupt and superstitious the Catholic Church is, so, now that\u00a0 I am in, where do I sign up? I’d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMystagogia. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}