Since the Christchurch terror attack, thousands have taken Qurans or other literature.

Imam Nizamul Haq Thanvi of the International Muslim Association of New Zealand said immediately after the attack, three to five people a day had converted at a Wellington mosque.

Thanvi said that all sorts are coming.

"Pakeha, Maori, former Christians, even one Hindu," he said.

From a family of Islamic scholars who live all over the world, the Imam said none of them has ever seen anything like it.

In Manawatu, they are setting up a database to better support new converts.

In Otago, they ran out of materials at a recent open day and are planning another.

In Auckland, mosques have also reported more visitors.

Canterbury resident 22-year-old Megan Lovelady felt called to Islam and converted to become Muslim after the Christchurch mosque attacks.

At Hagley Park for Friday prayers along with thousands of others still reeling from the attacks, the Imam's prayers deeply moved Megan.

"It was rhythmic and it made me feel inside," said Megan. "I wanted to join in to do the movements but I didn't know how - so I just stood there and I cried."

On reflection, Megan said it feels like she's always been a Muslim.

Since her conversion, she has been visiting the mosque every day, reading the Quran and other Islamic literature as well as spending time with other Muslims learning about the practices of her new faith.

"I actually feel more at home and more a part of a community than I ever have in my life," she said. "Allah was calling me home."

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• Image: stuff.co.nz Janneth Gil

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

And the Catholic Church was not his first spiritual home. He had grown up in London in an Anglican family and turned to Catholicism in his 20s. Read more

Have I left anything out? Oh, yes, there is the little matter of his conversion to Catholicism.

He said: "Were you surprised when you heard I'd become a Catholic?"

Of course I was surprised! Wasn't everyone? But why was I? he wanted to know.

Because it's weird, I said, lamely but truthfully, and we'd been talking about God for a good long time by then and we had both had enough of talking about Him.

Or at least we had both agreed he wasn't going to be able to talk me into faith — "You were raised an atheist? You poor thing!" — and I wasn't going to be able to talk him out of it.

He said, hardly smugly at all, really: "You'll probably, on your death bed, be screaming for the mercy of the Blessed Virgin." I most certainly will not.

"I shouldn't provoke. I shouldn't provoke," he recited, failing miserably at piety.

He can't really believe in the virgin birth, I said, but of course he does. "Absolutely."

He said: 'Why are we talking about religion so much?" Serves him right.

He had said, about our God talk: "It was very Dawkins versus the Bishop of Canterbury ... but maybe scaled down a bit." Huh. Only on his side.

"On my side. More like a stammering convert up against a princess of atheism; a deacon of disbelief!" Continue reading.

Source: New Zealand Herald

Image: Greg Bowker/NZ Herald

He has been funny longer than he has been a Catholic. But being a Catholic doesn't stop him from being funny.

"I can't go more than two lines without getting a laugh," Leopold told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview from New York.

Leopold has spent the better part of his adult life writing sitcoms, including episodes of "Cheers," "Seinfeld" and "Will and Grace." He recently came back from England, where he did what he called some "punching up" of a batch of scripts for new episodes of "The Muppet Show." He has written for such diverse comic talents as Bob Hope and Chevy Chase, and written with some of the most inventive minds in comedy, including Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer.

But Leopold joined the Catholic church only last year. It took a family crisis to set him on a path toward Catholicism.

"My daughter had this very serious, life-threatening eating disorder," Leopold said. She was in treatment in Arizona, where the hospital would not release her until Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, he recalled that he and his wife went to bed.

"We're trying not to let the other one know how sad we were," he said.

But for Leopold, "that's the first time I prayed." However, since he had, by his own count, "one day of religious training" in his life, he said he prayed "like they prayed on (the old TV western) 'Wagon Train': 'Lord, I'm not a prayin' man, but if you'll just see us through Comanche territory.' "

Early Christmas morning outside his hotel, Leopold said he encountered "this 75-year-old ex-Marine (who) pulls up on this homemade motorcycle with deer antlers for handlebars. He tells me his name is Shepherd. He introduces his wife to me and tells me that she brought him to Jesus at 33 — and Jesus died at 33. And the sun's rising behind his head like a halo. And I haven't said a word.

"I thought it was the Ambien kicking in."

The cyclist's last words before he roared off into the desert, according to Leopold, were "God is watching you."

"This is the first of many shocking kinds of coincidences that made it impossible for me not to come to the church," Leopold told CNS.

But why Catholicism? "I prayed, and Jesus was the first to show up. What else am I going to do?" he replied. Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Da Mihi Animas

But it is also true that conversions to Catholicism are more numerous than one might think. Departing from the most diverse shores, even the most distant and hostile.

Four years after a first series of interviews collected in the volume "Nuovi cristiani d'Europa. Dieci storie di conversione tra fede e ragione," Lorenzo Fazzini - a journalist and the dynamic director of EMI, Editrice Missionaria Italiana - has returned to explore eight more stories of great converts.

The last interview in this new series was released on Sunday, September 1 in the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, "Avvenire." And it is with a convert from Islam to Christianity, born and raised in Turkey and today living in Germany.

His name is Timo Aytaç Güzelmansur. He was born in 1977 in Antakya, ancient Antioch, where - according to the Acts of the Apostles - the followers of Jesus of Nazareth were called Christians for the first time.

After his conversion and baptism, he studied theology from 2000 to 2005 in Germany, in Augsburg, and then in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He received a doctorate from the Hochschule Sankt Georgen of Frankfurt, the same faculty of theology where the young Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio intended to complete his studies.

His "mentor" was another Jesuit, Christoph Tröll, a great expert on Islam, highly appreciated for this expertise by the German episcopal conference and by Joseph Ratzinger himself, who in 2005, soon after he was elected pope, called him to introduce at Castel Gandolfo the annual session of studies with his former theology students.

The interview is reproduced further below. In it Timo Aytaç Güzelmansur does not deny the "danger" of conversion in a country like Turkey and therefore all the more so in even more intolerant Muslim countries.

But he emphasizes how conversions are not lacking, including for a reason very similar to his own: the discovery that "Jesus has loved us to the point of giving himself for us on the cross."

It is a reason that has also motivated other converts interviewed by Fazzini, as demonstrated by the conversations published by "Avvenire" beginning last July 15.

In order:

1. PETER HITCHENS - Brother of the more famous Christopher - who with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett makes up the triad of the "new atheism" - he also comes from a radical aversion to all religious faith. He was a Trotskyite and afterward an ardent supporter of communism of the strict Soviet observance. He converted to Christianity as an adult, prompted by a reflection on a painting by Rogier van der Weyden that depicts the universal judgment.

2. PATRICK KÉCHICHIAN - From the Paris of Jacques Lacan and the psychoanalysis of Christ of Péguy and Claudel. Passing through the pages of "Le Monde," the French newspaper of "laicité." The conversion of Patrick Kéchichian, a literary critic and writer, found in the love of the Nazarene - through the pages of Kierkegaard - the answers to the questions that were troubling him inside.

3. TATIANA GORITCHEVA - A Russian theologian and activist, she chose the Gospel, accepting prison and exile in order to reject the "diabolical ideology" of Marxism that wanted to change man by refusing all openness to heaven. Today she lives in Paris, where she warns the hedonist West against another golden calf, the unbridled consumerism that annihilates the spiritual yearning of the person. Continue reading

Sources

• Vassallomalta
• Image: A Catholic Mom in Hawaii

The court overturned a lower court ruling that awarded compensation to the husband because his wife refused to change her religion so he could divorce her.

Maronites, founded in Syria, form the only Eastern church which has always been in communion with Rome.

Continue reading

Father Giuseppe Puglisi, who was murdered by Sicilian Mafia in 1993, was beatified in Palermo on May 25.

Shocked by his death and inspired by his example, many of Sicily's priests began to follow his methods of winning people away from the influence of the Mafia mob.

Continue reading

The country's largest provider of religious instruction, the Churches Education Commission, told its followers in a recent newsletter that schools were an "under-utilised mission field".

"Churches by and large have not woken up to the fact that this is a mission field on our doorstep. The children are right there and we don't have to supply buildings, seating, lighting or heating," commission director David Mulholland wrote.

Christian followers were also encouraged to join school boards so they could have "more influence" on holding religious study in class.

Public schools are secular but can choose to "close" in the middle of the day for religious lessons.

Rationalist David Hines said the loophole allowing Christian education undermined the secular education system.

"The teachers are all evangelical Christians ... the values do not include respect for other religions or for secular value systems."

Continue reading

"When we were little we'd go to his house and we'd simply hang out with granddaddy and we'd play and we'd have fun: a very different image from what most people have of him," Fr. Muñoz told CNA on a recent visit to Rome.

Fr. Muñoz was 14 years old when his grandfather died of cancer in 1979. In his lifetime, "The Duke" won three Oscars, the Congressional Gold Medal and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Of all those achievements, though, Fr. Muñoz is most proud of just one - his grandfather's conversion to the Catholic faith.

"My grandmother, Josephine Wayne Saenz, had a wonderful influence on his life and introduced him to the Catholic world," said 46-year-old Fr. Muñoz, a priest of the Diocese of Orange in California.

"He was constantly at Church events and fundraisers that she was always dragging him to and I think that, after a while, he kind of got a sense that the common secular vision of what Catholics are and what his own experience actually was, were becoming two greatly different things."

Fr. Muñoz's grandparents married in 1933 and had four children, the youngest of whom - Melinda - is his mother. The couple civilly divorced in 1945 although, as a Catholic, Josephine did not re-marry until after John Wayne's death. She also never stopped praying for her husband's conversion - a prayer which was answered in 1978.

"He was a great friend of the Archbishop of Panama, Archbishop Tomas Clavel, and he kept encouraging him and finally my granddaddy said, 'Okay, I'm ready.'"

Prior to his conversion to Catholicism, though, John Wayne's life was far from irreligious.

Fr. Muñoz summed up the hierarchy of his grandfather's values as "God coming first, then family, then country." It's a triumvirate he sees repeatedly reflected in his grandfather's films. He believes those values are much needed in Hollywood today and, if "the Duke" were still here he'd be leading the charge.

Full Story: CNA

Instead of re-writing Breen's story into an intro, I'll let him tell you about it before he answers some questions about the religion beat:

"I was baptized a Catholic, but never really in any tradition other than a vague understanding of Christianity coupled with a sort of tribal pull toward the Catholic Church. My mother died when I was very young, and my father had enough bad experiences with church growing up in an Irish neighborhood in Chicago that he wasn't particularly driven to make sure my brother and I were raised as active members of the faith.

"My father is a journalist, though, and it was his influence that steered me toward news. After college, I was working at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass., at the time the most recent sex abuse scandals began to break in Boston. Partly because I had some Catholic bric-a-brac on my desk, my editor assumed I actually knew something about the church, and so I was assigned to cover a few local stories related to the scandal.

"I quickly realized that I didn't know anything about Catholicism, and so to avoid embarrassing myself and the paper I resolved to learn what I could. In addition to reading everything I could get my hands on, I started pitching stories on religious topics that had nothing to do with the abuse scandal, hoping to bring myself up to speed.

"This continued after I moved to the Journal Inquirer, the paper in my hometown of Manchester, Conn. By now I had discovered that I was interested not just in Catholic stories, but in religion generally. It was not only a fascinating topic, but it was one that not many other reporters were interested in covering, so I could pursue stories without stepping on any toes. "

Full Story and image : GetReligion.org