The Roman Catholic Church is an institution roiled by scandal. Its handling of an epidemic of child sex abuse has brought scrutiny from law enforcement and undermined the moral authority of bishops, who have struggled to assuage followers whose confidence in the church, and in them, has eroded.

But those lined up weren't thinking about that.

"Welcome to fullness in the church," Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, told the 15 people converting to Catholicism — known as catechumens — after they had been baptized, confirmed and received communion, the sacraments that solidified their entry into the Catholic Church. "You'll always have a home here with us."

The Easter vigil service is when the church welcomes newcomers.

There were thousands of people in the New York area going through the same rites of initiation as the group gathered that night in the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark.

The Archdiocese of Newark alone saw more than 1,000 people receiving the sacraments this Easter, roughly the same number of people as have been welcomed fully into the church each year over the past decade.

The Diocese of Brooklyn, where just over 1,000 people received sacraments for the first time this Easter, also said its numbers were on par with prior years.

Many catechumens this Easter were part of groups that were well over a dozen people, huddled together in large churches. But there was also a service with just one woman, surrounded by family and friends, alone in her neighborhood parish.

Why convert, and why now?

It is not a capricious choice. Converting required months of preparation, diving into the abundance of rituals and traditions of Catholicism and the theology that underpins it all.

For each catechumen, there was a different path.

Finding God, gradually

Many of the other worshipers at St. Rose of Lima in Short Hills, N.J., had assumed that Joanna Huang (pictured) was already a Catholic.

She had been in Mass nearly every Sunday for a decade, and she brought her daughters, now teenagers, to religious education classes.

In truth, her daughters were Catholic because it was the religion of her ex-husband.

When they married, she had promised to raise their children in the church.

She continued to attend Mass because it was easier than dropping the girls off and coming back to pick them up.

She had not been especially spiritual before, but she found herself looking forward to the readings and to having a set-aside time to reflect. At some point, she said, a belief in God took hold.

"I don't know if it was five years into it, or three years," Ms. Huang, 49, said. "It was a gradual process."

Ms. Huang, who works in marketing and strategy for a technology company, said the shadow of scandal has not crept into her relationship with the church, as she has gotten to know priests and sisters through her initiation.

She appreciated the sense of community at her parish and the way she saw faith shaping her daughters. Her younger daughter, a competitive skater, says a short prayer before stepping onto the ice. It also helped them weather the divorce.

"It helped to have that faith," she said, "to know that God has a plan for them."

Her daughters had pushed her to be baptized, telling her, "You're more Catholic than a lot of Catholics we see." Yet when she casually inquired about the conversion process roughly a year ago, she did not expect that she would be standing at the front of St. Rose of Lima as this year's only catechumen, her daughters serving as her godmothers as she was baptized.

She figured it must be part of a plan. Continue reading

Toaipuapuaga (Toa) Opapo Soana'i is the daughter of the Congregational Christian Church (CCCS) the Reverend Opapo Oeti.

She and her husband Patrick Ah Chong formalised her conversion by renewing her wedding vows in the Catholic Church.

Asked about claims from unbelievers she has lost her marbles, Toa said she is not worried about them.

"I know the majority of the people misunderstand almost everything I say, they twist it," she said.

"But being chosen by God as a messenger is something I did not ask for. He chooses whoever he wants as a messenger."

Toa said she could not wait for the leadership of the CCCS to make up their minds about accepting her and most importantly the messages she was "receiving from God."

"We don't have that much time to prepare and get things done because God gave us this mission to complete right on time," she said.

Toa said one of her desires is to travel to Rome. Becoming a member of the Catholic Church is a step closer towards fulfilling that wish.

She added that while she continues to be fully supportive of her parents' work as Church Ministers of the CCCS some recent developments have left her with no choice but to become a Catholic.

"The elders of the church (CCCS) are trying to stop us from spreading the messages and my father was instructed to distant himself from what's going on with me," she said.

"He was told to remove the statues from inside the church."
Toa said she feels sad about this.

She first experienced stigmata earlier this year during an Easter play at her CCCS Sunday school.

She began to bleed from wounds on her hands, head and feet.

Toa, told the Talamua Online News that since then she had received a total of 44 messages from God.

She has gathered a following in Samoa including the Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi and the local Catholic clergy.

Source

• talamua.com
• samoaobserver.ws
• matangitonga.to
• Image: samoaobserver.ws

It happened in the attic of the guest house at Ealing Abbey. There was just me, a friend and a monk, and the operation took about an hour.

Afterwards we went for cocktails. I started things as I meant to go on.

I guess the two big questions to ask a convert are: why did you do it and are you happy? Answering the first point is hard.

It's like asking a man why he married a woman. There's a temptation to invent a narrative - to say, "this happened, that happened and before we knew it we were where we are today".

But the simpler, yet more complex, answer is this: I fell in love.

I was lucky to grow up in a household open to religious belief. My grandparents were Christian spiritualists; Grandma advertised as a clairvoyant.

Mum and Dad became Baptists in the 1990s. I remember the pastor one Sunday telling us that evolution was gobbledygook. The teenager in me came to regard the faithful as fools, but I was wrong. I couldn't see that they were literate, inquisitive, musically gifted and the kindest people you'd ever meet.

But I went my own way and embraced Marxism.

By the time I arrived at Cambridge University I was a hard-left Labour activist and a militant atheist. I saw life as a struggle. Salvation could only come through class revolution. The life of the individual was unimportant.

Mine was unhappy. Very unhappy. I disliked myself and, as is so common, projected that on to a dislike of others. I'm ashamed now to think of how rude and mean I was. Perhaps I was ashamed then, too, because I had fantasies of obliterating myself from history. Continue reading

• Tim Stanley is a historian and writer for the Daily Telegraph.