Jerry Parker

Hi Jerry, thanks for your replies. I was one of those Catholics who grew up in a marginally religious home. My family moved to Africa based on my father's work and to get me in an american school I ended going to a protestant missionary boarding school. While there I became a "born again" christian and based on the instruction I received felt the need to leave the Catholic Church. Almost 30 years later after much debate, study of scripture, I began to ask the not so convient questions of protestant faith and read obsessively the ECF and historical Christian accounts and realized I had left the very Church the Jesus Christ established through the Apostles and maintains by the Holy Spirit. More simply I absented myself from the Eucharist and I needed to repent and come home. However, as you can see I'm very familiar with baptist, and Pentecostals though there is another story there.

Thank you for y our insightful views with regard to Reformed Theology. Its begining to "round out" my understanding of both Reformed Theology and our Catholic Position. I rarely get beyond "simplistic" answers from my baptist friends and want to get at the heart of the matter. Again Thank you.

Moen has been trying to help me to use this group discussion, and despite all her efforts to explain this, it was not till I tried once again that I finally saw the meaning of her cyber-instructions! Anyway, here I am, Moen and others!

Things have been advancing towards conversion. Be patient with me; I am getting elderly (65 years old and feeling that and more) and have limited mobility and energy. I have started to attend Mass regularly at a French convent (Soeurs de Marie-Auxilliaire, I think is the name of their religious order), whose chapel is rather large and amazingly well attended, especially for Rouyn-Noranda where almost everybody is Catholic (Roman or some Ukrainian) but mostly nominally so. The main priest who serves the Sisters is 105 years old, but healthy; it is just a bit difficult, without a missalette, to make out all of the words from his audible but croaking throat; also, I am far more familiar with the 1962 and 1965 (basically, Tridentine) liturgy of the Mass (so much more beautiful and extended) than with the 1970s Novus Ordo, which makes me feel adrift a bit. (I sang in a Gregorian choir in my early 20s.) There is one Anglophone parish in all of Rouyn-Noranda, but it is hard for me to find the opportunity to go there, and, the priest also is rather elderly. I guess this sort of thing makes for extreme examples of "the greying of the clergy"!

I have found, I hope, where I can obtain the help of a priest who is not severely aged in coping with conversion. I am doing what I can as I can.

Thanks Moen (also Athanasius, Manfred, Ambrose SJ, others) who have been encouraging me!

Jerry Parker

Cranch,

In case this correction can get to you! I think that in my message this evening (16.III) I used the word "syncretistic" when I really meant "synergistic". That is a boo-boo that is so easy to make, even if I do well know the difference! -- Jerry Parker