After a diagnosis of aggressive cancer and during a five-week stint in the hospital she prayed the rosary.

Tammy Peterson's story

Tammy Peterson's relationship with the rosary began in 2015. She had a renal cell carcinoma diagnosis and painful arthritis that made it difficult to use stairs.

As her husband gained massive popularity as a media commentator, she struggled with daily tasks.

Then she had a second biopsy and worse news arrived.

Her cancer was far more aggressive than initially supposed. Her doctor gave her ten months to live.

That's when the rosary entered her life.

The rosary

Queenie Yu, a Catholic convert, introduced Peterson to the rosary when she visited Peterson in hospital.

She brought with her a rosary Pope Francis had blessed, as well as a pamphlet on how to pray the rosary and an image of Our Lady with baby Jesus.

"Jordan and Tammy were together at the hospital and they both thought the image was beautiful" Yu recalls.

"And when she saw the rosary, she [Tammy] said ‘Oh it's a rosary.' I said ‘Oh you know what it is' and she replied ‘Yes, but I don't know how to use it'."

She soon learned.

Over the next five weeks, while Peterson was in the hospital, she and Yu prayed the rosary together every morning and shared their thoughts about faith and family.

Today - eight years later, Peterson tells her story about her faith and health scares.

Finding God in illness

"Through my illness, I found God and what could possibly be better than knowing your own Creator?', Peterson says.

She prayed through her physical pain, she adds.

"I'd wake up at night and I'd pray the Lord's Prayer until I went back to sleep. I didn't allow myself to worry," she said.

"I pretty much prayed all night unless I was sleeping."

During her illness, one of Peterson's friends - Father Eric Nicolai - gave her a blessing and novena to Saint Josemaria Escriva who founded Opus Dei.

On the novena's fifth day, Peterson was scheduled for surgery.

That was when her doctors shared exciting news - her medical issue had resolved itself. She no longer needed surgery.

Conversion

Peterson was raised in a Protestant family. Her parents stopped attending Church however, leaving her without any religious direction.

Since her association with the rosary she's set her sights on the Catholic church. She's recently announced her intention to begin classes in the Order (formerly Rite) of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA).

The OCIA is the programme the Church uses to prepare adults who hope to become Catholic.

Her husband Jordan supports her choice.

"She's trying to aim up" he says.

"This is an extension [of] what's happened to her in recent years, of that vow she took when she first decided we were going to get married.

"It's a crucial thing to commit to the truth."

Through her trials and health battles, Tammy Peterson says she has gained a powerful testimony to her faith in the Lord.

She plans to become a baptised member of the Catholic Church at Easter once she has completed her OCIA classes.

Source

• ChurchPop

All she knew was that her life was filled with darkness and she hungered for something more.

It was January, and our RCIA sessions had begun months before.

So our catechetical team asked Rocio to come to Mass each Sunday and hang out with the community.

We hoped this would keep her interested until she could join the next RCIA in the fall and we could teach her about becoming a Catholic.

Spirituality

Rocio came to Mass every Sunday and sat with several people we had asked to keep her company.

After Mass they would go out for coffee and answer her questions, basic things such as "Why do you put your hand in that water?" or "Where do you find all those readings in the Mass?"

They introduced Rocio to their friends and other parishioners.

Some of them invited her to their homes for dinner.

Others told her about their Bible study group and made plans to bring her when she was available.

Some young adults close to Rocio's age discovered they shared a love for cooking, and Rocio became a regular at their monthly cuisine nights.

Rocio saw a bulletin announcement about the rosary and asked her new Catholic friends about it.

They connected her with the parish rosary group and accompanied her to one of their gatherings.

The group heard Rocio was coming and gave her a rosary of her own.

They were so patient with her that day, teaching her how to pray this devotion they loved as she imitated their gestures and prayerful demeanor.

When they saw her at Mass, they would always stop to chat with her.

Service

That summer the parish was going to Tijuana for an annual service trip at an orphanage.

Rocio's new parish friends convinced her to go with them.

She fell in love with the kids there, and her previous shyness gave way to an exuberant personality.

Neat RCIA planning

Meanwhile my RCIA team had been meeting every Wednesday night with that year's catechumens, candidates, and their sponsors.

We had our lessons neatly scheduled and our Powerpoints all planned.

By the time Easter came we had covered all our topics, but our biggest challenge every year was keeping the newly initiated involved in the parish.

No matter how much we encouraged them to be part of the community after Easter, they still lamented that they "couldn't be part of RCIA anymore" or disappeared from the parish altogether.

While Rocio was serving at the orphanage, the RCIA team was planning our 26-session curriculum for the next round of RCIA candidates.

We also had to find enough presenters and convince parishioners who could make the 26-week commitment to be sponsors.

Most years we had to double- or triple-up and have catechumens share the same sponsor because we just couldn't find enough people to say yes.

September came, and we were relieved that finally we could teach Rocio about becoming Catholic.

She attended the first meeting with two of her friends from the parish and asked us if they could be her sponsors.

We were pleasantly surprised and gladly agreed.

They were excellent choices and model parishioners!

Teaching the teachers

Rocio kept surprising us over the next several weeks with how much she already knew about the faith.

She talked about reading the Bible each week and could reflect prayerfully on many of the gospel stories.

One night she shared about how she prayed the rosary and her growing love for Mary.

On the topic of the Eucharist, she immediately connected her young adult cooking group and those gatherings to the meals Jesus shared with his friends and the outcast.

When the lesson on Catholic social teaching came around, she told us of her experience serving at the orphanage, and we were all deeply moved when she talked about seeing Christ in those children.

It was Rocio who taught us that night the true meaning of the preferential option for the poor.

Infectious enthusiasm

Our biggest surprise came at her rite of acceptance.

She had an entire cheering section made up of people from the Bible study and rosary groups, the young adults, those who had gone to the orphanage, and other friends she had made in the parish.

Their enthusiasm was infectious, and our assembly, typically annoyed by our RCIA rituals, seemed genuinely engaged in praying for Rocio as she made her first public commitment to follow Christ.

For the last 30 years, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults has been the way communities in the United States initiate adults and children.

Yet I believe that in many parishes—at least in my parish with Rocio—what we have been doing is not actually RCIA. Continue reading

In my defence, if there is bad news, then it's much better that the Church knows about it. For instance, the fact that - as I've reported previously - for every one British Catholic convert there are ten cradle Catholics who no longer even tick the "Catholic" box on surveys is, it seems to me, something eminently worth our being aware of.

That said, a recent Catholic Herald leader, commenting on statistics showing the growth of the Church worldwide, warned against unremitting "declinism" - that is, on focusing exclusively on the negatives. Duly chastened, it therefore gives me great pleasure to alert you to some very cheering research that I came across just yesterday.

For several years now, I have been hearing a "fact" stated with the utmost confidence: that a large proportion of adults entering the Church through the RCIA end up lapsing within the space of a year or two. I have even heard some depressingly precise figures quoted - 50 per cent, 75 per cent, even 90 per cent - along with authoritative, albeit non-specific, appeals to "a study from the United States".

You have probably heard something similar yourself. Perhaps it flashed through your mind recently, briefly souring the joyful moment as you clapped those white-clad, beaming-faced "world's newest Catholics" at your parish's Easter Vigil.

Well, let me tell something. This week I was in Washington DC, among other things visiting the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). This is Georgetown University's crack team of social scientists, who have been providing empirically rigorous yet pastorally useful answers to all manner of Catholic questions for over 50 years. (They have also partly inspired the creation of at least one other research centre, likewise based at a leading Catholic University in a major capital city.) Continue reading

• Stephen Bullivant is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at St Mary's University, Twickenham. This opinion piece is from The Catholic Herald.

It didn't take me long to discover how the two world views collide at the mention of just one word: Confession.

Picture me not so very long ago on the naughty step at Westminster Cathedral for my first Confession following nine months of the RCIA.

I was about tenth in an ever-lengthening queue and wondering if the Catholic Church might want to change its mind about having me at this late stage.

I recall feeling uncomfortable and a little bit vulnerable about being so visible. Do I really have to do this? I asked myself. I'm not such a bad person, am I?

That day I was still (just) an Anglican, part of a particular church's family, a regular worshipper infused with all the cultural certainties of being a certain kind of Christian as defined by the English Church.

And yet, when I look back on the extent to which I have become assimilated into a new spiritual environment since then - over and above its rituals, worshipping norms and dogma - I truly believe that the strongest affirmation that I was right to take the plunge came when I first encountered the Sacrament of Reconciliation, only to realise what I had been missing before.

Oddly enough, it is Anglican friends who have prompted me to try to articulate why this might be so. So thanks, you Anglican sceptics, for pointing me towards far greater revelations than I could have imagined were about to come my way.

Some friends said: "It seems strange to ask a priest for forgiveness when you've already apologised to God, don't you think?"

Others asked: "Doesn't receiving an arbitrary absolution when you are free to repeat your misdemeanour seem like a cop-out?"

Others still said: "Isn't it unhealthy and bad for your self-esteem to dwell on what you might have done wrong?" Continue reading

• Jane Taylor is the author of the novel Over Here. The above article is from the Catholic Herald.

One involved his being mugged by a hitchhiker to whom he had offered a ride. I think my mom related this tale as a warning against good-natured but borderline foolish benevolence.

The second dealt with him calling my mother his favorite granddaughter named Sheila.

The third was that he converted to Catholicism. I cannot remember the religion from which he shifted.

For some reason, I always saw stories one and two as byproducts of story three, as though his changing religions somehow informed the way he went about all other activities in life.

My mom liked to say her grandfather had the faith of a convert.

She also used this expression to describe my paternal grandfather, who converted from the Baptist faith to the Lutheran church.

The implication was that there was something richer, even holier, about a convert's spirituality, whatever that spirituality may be.

I was always intrigued by this idea of a convert's religious ideology being definably distinct from someone else's. Continue reading.

Brian Harper is a writer, musician and community outreach coordinator for a small business. He has lived and worked in Peru, South Africa, Italy, and the United States.

Source: National Catholic Reporter

Image: Brian Harper Music