Mary Pomeroy was devout Christian for most of her life in charismatic Protestant churches, dedicated to serving the Gospel although knowing almost nothing about the Catholic Church. On the first Sunday of Advent in 2017, at the age of 66, she went to his first catholic mass for one reason only: they had told her they would light an Advent wreath. “I just want to go to a church where there is an advent wreath and see how they light the candle“, she commented to a friend. She felt nostalgic for this gesture that she had not seen for years and reminded her of her childhood.
From there, he began a path that led him to full Catholic faith at the Easter Vigil two years later: 68-year-old Catholic, the only one in her family. This is the story he’s told a CHnetwork.
From Lutheran family to hippies Jesus People
Mary Pomeroy was born in 1951 in Seattle, on the Pacific coast of the United States, into a practicing Lutheran family: she was taken to Sunday school, Bible camps and vacations, and church camps. She was confirmed at age 14 and was part of a Lutheran club in high school. “I had faith in God, but it was more my parents’ religion than mine,” she recalls.
In college he spent a couple of years away from God. But he resumed a relationship with Christ and the Holy Spirit, very much alive, in 1971, through the Jesus People movement.
in the time of flowers and hippies, charismatic spirituality spread among many young people. Music and guitar, love and friendship, communal style, lots of hugs, living with little, preach peace in the Cold War, dress weird and quite utopia… all this mixed with an orthodox morality, a lot of prayer and a lot of Bible. The songs they sang were psalms or complete texts of the Bible. That was the year the musical opened on Broadway. Jesus Christ Superstar.
“I became charismatic. Suddenly, God was no longer just someone I believed in, It wasn’t just going to church on Sunday to give him a little bit of my life. He was integrated into my whole life and I had a living and daily relationship with Him”, he details.
Christian singer Larry Norman at a Jesus People gathering in the 1970s.
Twenty-somethings like Mary fell in love with Jesus, they felt him close, and they did not integrate directly into traditional Protestant congregations but into other movements. she integrated in the California of the hippie era, in YWAM (Youth with a Mission), an international charismatic missionary youth movement, which is still alive and strong and insists on giving an internalized spirituality to young people. She learned a lot as a volunteer, speaking with evangelists from many places.
Alaska: cold but with love
At age 25, he left sunny California and She flew to Alaska on a cold February to attend a friend’s wedding, and stayed there. She found work and, very soon, her husband, Willy. They were married in 1977. Today they have three grown children and 4 grandchildren. While raising children, They attended a church of the Assemblies of God, Pentecostals, that offered praise, Bible and many things for children.
She served in the church choir in the ’90s, singing and playing the piano. Also was responsible for all of Alaska for Aglow, an evangelical Protestant charismatic movement, that was then specifically feminine, present today in 170 countries. With Aglow she visited many Native American locations in Alaska, organized vacations and camps for children, and evangelistic training for adults. She made sincere Christian friends from all over Alaska and across the United States.
Another beat at 60
At 63 years old, some things have changed. The children had grown up and he was no longer in Aglow. Her husband, semi-retired, now worked weekends and couldn’t go to church with her. She would go alone, driving 35 minutes by car, to a church where she had no real friends or a service. Now he was tired of the praise style too loud, music too loud, with dark rooms, flashes and flashes and too much like a rock concert. Y when it snowed a lot it was hard to go to church by car in another city.
In November 2017, already At 66, she felt nostalgic thinking about Advent and Christmas. As a child, in her Lutheran family, “we always had an advent wreath, and candles, and I loved the anticipation of Christmas and celebrating the birth of Jesus. Most churches I went to as an adult didn’t have an Advent wreath.”.
“I just want to go to a church where there is an advent wreath and see how they light the candle”, she told a friend of hers, a Catholic recently arrived in Alaska. Her friend invited her to go to the Catholic parish -which she did not know yet-, where she would undoubtedly have an Advent wreath.
Mary hesitated. “Why go to a boring ritual service with her, dead? I said yes. I couldn’t tell him how I really felt about the Catholic Church.” Mary had only been to two Catholic funerals and one wedding, and for years she had been badmouthed about Catholicism. She didn’t know anything else.
The first mass: the presence of the Father
As a charismatic, Mary was used to calling on and feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit. But on some occasions, for example, visiting a synagogue, she felt the presence of God the Father, “heavy, strong”. And that is what he says he felt when he entered the Catholic parish at the first mass of Advent.
Then the priests arrived, the mass began, and it didn’t seem like a dead ritual. It was a “protocol” that revered the holiness of God, a love with great reverence. The parish took care of the music. “When we started to sing the liturgy I almost melted. I was touched by the beauty of the music and the words moved me and they made me cry. It’s the music one would expect to hear in heaven.”
The kidnapping, explained by an ex-Protestant
She knew something profound had happened to her, but she certainly wasn’t planning on becoming a Catholic. I only thought of continuing to attend the Advent masses. But a couple of weeks later, in the parish, he found a book that caught his attention: The Rapture, The End Times Error That Leaves The Bible Behind, by David Currie.
“The rapture” (the rapture, in English) is actually a very Advent theme: “there will be two men in the field, one will be taken and the other left behind” (Matthew 24,40-42). In the Protestant charismatic circles that Mary knew, there was a lot of talk about it, but her experience is that when he asked pastors and preachers about it, “he ended up with more questions and more confusion.” Mary downloaded Currie’s book onto her tablet, read it carefully, and found it very reasonable.
Later he realized that Currie had been a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister, but was now a Catholic. and read his book Born fundamentalist, born again Catholic. “It was the perfect book to read at that time,” he explains. He presented Catholic doctrine in such a way that a traditional or charismatic Protestant could understand it well.
After that, he went on to read Scott Hahn (another former Presbyterian pastor and Bible scholar, now a Catholic popularizer) and the books of Vinny Flynnstarting by 7 secrets of the Eucharista book that Cardinal Pell declared, informally, “must read for Catholics.”
The sacraments and an experience with the Virgin
And he reflected on the Eucharist. In a missionary congress in Magadan, in Siberia, I had met a missionary priest, a Catholic from Alaska, who has been in Siberia for many years, Father Michael Shields. She had told him about a 5-year-old girl who came to mass alone and she protested because she did not give her communion: “Father Michael, why don’t you give me Jesus? I just want Jesus!” Now Mary thought the same thing: like that girl, she wanted to receive communion.
In September 2018, he began his initiation course in Catholicism. She found her teachers excellent, and she, a veteran evangelizer for so many years, he learned a lot, he says, about the sacraments, the Eucharist and the spiritual riches of the Church, and its relation to holiness and sanctification. He also liked the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and the need for fulfill the imposed penances, even if they were simpleto present themselves worthily before the altar and receive communion.
Regarding Marian devotion, in November 2018 he had a peculiar experience. There had been serious earthquakes in the region, and in her house, as in many others, she slept with her clothes on in case she had to go out with the tremors. She was very nervous and they had taught him the Hail Mary, so he began to repeat Hail Marys, as a repetitive prayer and humble. She fell asleep, “when I heard the voice of a woman saying to me: ‘I love you’. My eyes went wide and I thought, ‘what was that?’ It was not a voice he recognized. I realized that she had been saying Hail Marys… and She came to comfort me.”
At the Easter Vigil in April 2019, Mary was confirmed as a Catholic, at the age of 67. As a confirmation name, she chose Anne, with tradition in her family and for her patron saint of seamstresses, “because I am”.
As a Catholic at Saint Andrew Parish sings in the choir, attends weekly adoration, weekly rosary, and Bible studies where he keeps learning more and more things. Her husband continues to go to a Protestant church, and she accompanies him once a month. “I’m the only Catholic in my Protestant family, and my prayer is that one day others in my family will join me. If they don’t, ok, they are Christians and they accept my choice. But, ‘Father, may we be one’ (John 17).
“I am Catholic because of the Advent Wreath”: a conversion at 68 years of age