Posted on 04/01/2008 4:23:02 PM PDT by NYer
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February 16, 2004 - Reported in Spirit Daily.com online newspaper. "In 1992 my life changed dramatically," says Father Donald Calloway. "I had a profound conversion experience after reaching rock bottom."
Rock bottom indeed! Now a 31-year-old priest who serves as assistant rector at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Father Calloway had been a runaway youngster who was immersed in everything from drug abuse to theft.
"I had gone through all a boy could do up to the age of twenty," he says. "My mother had been married three times and we had no religion. The family was very hedonistic. There was a downward spiral in my life."
It started in Virginia Beach -- where his stepfather was based in the military -- and continued when the family moved to California. Drugs, sex, smoking, and drinking -- all by the age 11. "It escalated to the point of getting out of control," he now recounts. "We moved near Los Angeles. Then to Japan. That rocked my world."
Uprooted so continuously from friends and his environment, young Donald Calloway had decided to teach his parents a lesson. As soon as they got to Japan, he became a "living hell" for them. He tied in with the wrong crowd and started doing "unbelievable" quantities of drugs -- opium, heroin, alcohol every day, even inhaling the fumes of gasoline.
That escalated to where he ran away from the military base and fled around the foreign country, committing felonies -- stealing "massive amounts" of money, cars, mopeds. He even got involved running errands for the Japanese "mafia."
"I had no concern about anything or anybody," says Father Calloway, whose mother had a breakdown, ended up consulting a priest, and became a Catholic -- something young Donald knew nothing about. She was also forced to return to the U.S. without him. Police even tapped phones to the military base to try to get the youngster, and finally did apprehend him. When they did, Calloway spat in the face of one of the military cops. By now he was 15 with long hair and a profane mouth -- so wild that he was shackled and deported.
Thrown out of Japan, Calloway returned to the United States, where he told his mother he hated her but agreed to enter a rehabilitation center. In short order he ran away from there too and went back to drugs on an even grander scale. Heroin, crack, LSD, uppers, downers. And there were the girls. "There came a point where I started following the 'Grateful Dead' and living in places like a tree trunk," recounts the priest. "In Louisiana, I ended up in jail. It was an absolute mess."
He was a drop out, his hair down to his belt. He was tattooed. It was "a life cycle of death." There was another attempt at rehabilitation, but of course, that fell short again. In fact, the drug use got even heavier.
"Then one night in 1992 I knew that my life would radically change, that something was going to happen in my life to cause a radical change," he says. "I knew something was going to happen. Something was coming."
It was this peculiar, sudden, and powerful intuition that changed his life -- a feeling so powerful that he turned down the calls from friends to come out to party as he did on a nightly basis. He still has trouble explaining exactly what happened. The prayers of a mother?
For a while Calloway remained in his room waiting for this unknown "something" to arrive, then went to the hall looking for a magazine or book to read as he waited, guided by an amazing internal feeling. "I wanted to look at some kind of magazine with pictures while I was waiting, something like National Geographic, with pictures, and I went out there and there was a book that caught my eye," he says. "On the binding it said, The Queen of Peace Visits Medjugorje."
It was a book about the apparition site in Bosnia-Hercegovina by Father Joseph A. Pelletier and Calloway couldn't comprehend what the words meant. He wondered if his parents had taken up a foreign language! Looking at the pictures, he saw six children staring up into nothing. It was the seers during an apparition -- something he had never even heard about. He read the caption and it said they were looking at the "Blessed Virgin Mary." He was so poorly versed in religion that he didn't know who the Blessed Mother was. "I thought Jesus was like Santa Claus," he recalls. "I was a blank slate." Looking at more of the pictures, he saw other words like the Rosary, Communion, and the Eucharist that he had little idea about.
There was all this Catholic lingo, but he began to avidly read it. He couldn't put it down. "I read that whole book by 3:30 or 4 a.m. in the morning," he says. "I ate that book like it was life. I consumed it. And I said to myself, 'That is true. Everything in that book is true.' She was saying that Jesus was God, and I thought, anything she says is true. She seemed so beautiful and flawless. She captivated my heart. And I said, 'I give myself totally to this woman.'"
The young man went to his mother the next morning and told her he wanted to see a priest. She was shocked. He knew there was a chaplain on the base, and that's where he ended up going -- skipping with joy like a little boy, his long hippie hair flowing past marching Marines.
When Calloway caught up with the Navy chaplain, the priest told him to go to church and sit in the back while he said Mass, and then they would talk to him. Donald did as he was told, waiting as a small group of Filipino women recited a repetitious prayer -- which of course was the Rosary. Then came the moment that changed his life. The priest came out with robes. Calloway thought it was some kind of performance. He had no idea what was going on. "I was amazed. All these ladies were kneeling and standing at the same time."
But it just clicked. All of a sudden, this young man -- this drug abuser, this runaway -- "knew" what was happening, that what was transpiring was a "real" re-presentation of what had happened 2,000 years ago, and that it was being poured out again. "Time ceased," he says. "I saw myself at Calvary with the faithful beholding the sacrifice of the lamb." Everything about it captivated him. He felt the Presence of Christ -- knew He was there -- as the priest held up the "white circle."
He was twenty, going on 21, and "all I knew was that I was madly in love with God and Our Savior."
So touched was he by the Mass that Calloway was ready to go door to door to tell everyone about it. The enthusiasm exploded. After Mass he went home, tore down all his posters, grabbed several big black trash bags, and threw away just about everything in his room -- replacing it all with a picture of the Pope and another of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which the priest had given to him (along with a Crucifix).
"I don't remember ever having said a prayer in my life," he says of his return to his room. "I looked at the book, the six children, who were on their knees with their hands folded, and I did the same thing and just looked. I had no idea how it worked. I didn't know what was supposed to happen next. My eyes focused on the picture of the Sacred Heart and as I looked at that image something within me knew that was the God-Man hanging on the Cross -- and that everything the Blessed Virgin Mary said was for people like me.
"I cried profusely. You could have filled a bucket. I was so remorseful for the things I had done. Everything came on me at once. It was like every fluid in my body was coming out of my eyes. Yet at the same time I knew there was hope, and I was crying tears of joy. I was almost laughing. I knew that this Jesus died for me and loved me.
"After a long time I laid on the bed and for the first time in years I felt free. An unbelievable peace came over me. Something happened to me that I don't know how to explain. Right on the verge of sleep, something came from behind me and knocked me out of my body. My soul or spirit or whatever was leaving my body. I couldn't say anything, I couldn't move. The only person I knew to cry out to was Mary, and I cried out spiritually. I was terrorized with fear. I screamed with everything I had, "Mary' -- and all of a sudden I was pushed back into my body with the force of a universe come crashing down upon me and I heard the most beautiful feminine voice I have ever heard and will ever hear say, 'Donnie, I am so happy.'
"No one called me Donnie but my mother," he notes. "It was unbelievable."
And so was what was to come next:
Instantly, Calloway had lost his craving for all his vices -- from impure thoughts about women to cigarettes. There was no more desire to do anything he had been doing! "God had simply changed me, and it was unbelievable," he says. "Christ just overwhelmed me with His love. I started 'living' in the church, saying the Stations of the Cross until I was worn out, even slept in the pews. I began reciting the Rosary, wearing a scapular, reading everything I could on the saints."
He says he experienced a supernatural "infusion of knowledge" about the faith and became a Catholic within nine months.
Shortly after, he joined the Marians of the Immaculate Conception and discerned a priestly vocation.
Last September, he finally made it to Medjugorje -- where he delivered the homily as forty other priests joined him on the altar. "All I knew was that I loved Jesus," he says. "I loved every minute of Medjugorje. I'm going back in March. It's the edge of Heaven, wonderful." At the seminary, he says, most of his peers had also been there. "Our Lady is building up this army, this whole new generation, layer by layer. Rank by rank they are coming out of seminaries to take their places. There's a whole generation of priests coming, and they're just like me. No nonsense. I always tell people, get ready, because it's coming to a parish near you. We've only known one Pope, and he's a saint. We've been formed by the Blessed Virgin Mary and her apparitions. So many of the guys I knew in the seminary, they loved things like Medjugorje or Betania or Amsterdam or Kibeho. They don't have a problem with it. They bite onto truth like a shark, and they're going to be the guys in the seminaries teaching. They're going to be in the parishes. One cardinal said if it were not for Medjugorje, he would have hardly any seminarians. I compare it to Guadalupe."
Hell broke open in the Church, Calloway opines, due to a lack of emphasis on both Mary and the Blessed Sacrament. "You take away the Eucharist, and you take away a priest's passion, his understanding of who he is," he says. "And when Mary was deconstructed -- made just a sister -- it tore priesthoods apart. I attribute a lot of the problems to feminism. We need to go against that."
Homosexuals in the church are the result, he believes, of "the devil twisting" priests and seminarians. "With no Mary, there is a lack of tenderness and they seek in a new way," he asserts. On the current culture, says Father Calloway: "It's not the kingdom of Heaven. We're going back to Sodom and Gomorrah, and we're there. And we better get ready for the Father's discipline. He loves us, and because He does, He's going to chastise us." With youth, the biggest problem is indifference, he notes -- the attitude of "whatever." Everything is okay.
What is the most important thing parents can do?
"The best thing that a kid can see in the parents is for a man, a father, on his knees," says Father Calloway. "That is strength. When a man is on his knees, that is stability. When a kid sees that, it's a confessional statement. It speaks volumes. And when they see a mom and dad being kind and loving to one another, that's also important -- showing kindness to each other."
As for his conversion, Father Calloway notes: "There are no accidents in life. Everything happens for a reason, because of God the Father's plans." And as for Our Lady of Medjugorje: without her, he says, "I might be dead."
Yes, there is a difference between 'equal' and the 'same', and Christ said all Christians were equal, not the same.
So, how does that distinction help your case?
So in the case of the woman who calls out "Blessed the womb that bore you and the breasts that have you suck," (from memory), I don't know what YOU see, But I see someone who is implicitly distancing herself from the love and holiness (and blessedness -- a word the pronunciation of which some Protestants seem unwilling to reveal) which Jesus offers to all of us in Him.
I didn't use that passage, I used Mk.3:34-35, where Christ said all those 'who do the will of the Father, the same is my brother, my sister and my mother'.
But even in that passage, the Lord corrects the woman (the only time the Lord corrects any woman in the Gospels) and states that blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it (Lk.11:28).
Now, if you want to actually deal with those verses say and not just throw up some smoke, then do so.
There is nothing complicated about them.
Here is a note from the RCC NAB,
.....it emphasizes that attentiveness to God's word is more important than biological relationship to Jesus
Regarding Mark, the note in the NAB states
Against this background, Jesus is informed of the arrival of his mother and brothers [sisters]. He responds by showing that not family ties but doing God's will is decisive in the kingdom.
But, despite the tendentious leaning on the word usually translated as "rather" I do not think this text itself will unequivocally support the notion that all of us are currently equally OR identically blessed. What it will support is that we are all offered blessedness in Christ AND all challenged to avoid distancing ourselves from that call by adopting a kind of "poor little old me attitude, I'd be so much better off if only I were blood kin to Jesus" attitude.
Well, that is a nice little theory, but it doesn't line up with what the passages actually say.
Christ makes it very clear that the issue in the Christian life is following His words and Mary wasn't considered anyone more special than anyone else when it came to that issue.
One of the things I LIKE about hosepipe's disparaging of "denominations", though I think his contention is wrong in the final analysis, is that I think a temptation common to all Xtians is to keep putting something between us and an encounter with Christ, so that a Catholic might be distressed to learn that there was no Mass in heaven (since it is ALL Mass all the time) or Protestant might be upset to find no Bible (since the Word Himself constantly and intimately gives himself to all the blessed).
Well, there is no 'mass' in heaven since Christ only needed to die once and doesn't need to re-crucified over and over again in a non-bloody replication of that sacrifice.(Heb.6:6)
Christ did say that heaven and earth will fade away, but His words never will.(Mk.13:31)
The woman calls out her cry, and Jesus says to her, "You too, Lady. Get a grip. Come to me and I'll SHOW you 'blessed'!"
Well, He could have easily said, yes, lady you are correct, my mother is blessed above all other human beings but...' , but Christ didn't say that, rather He corrected the woman and made her see that it was His words that were the issue, not Mary.
But when you want to avoid what scripture actually says, any reasoning will do.
AS has been said more than once in this protracted conflict as and has been ignored without remission, Mary has nothing in the blessedness department that is not offered to all the blessed. Maybe different degree, maybe different sort of manifestations, but holiness and blessedness nonethe less.
And where do you get the idea that Mary is anymore blessed than any other believer based on her relationship to Christ?
That is what you are basing the special relationship on, the mother-son relationship, which Christ himself stated was no longer relevant once His own ministry started.
“An allegation that our devotions contradict scripture is one that I take seriously and I would like this slander to be substantiated honestly, or retracted. So far, al I get is more calvinist assuptions heaped on, — no substantiation and no retraction.”
You have had the scriptural subtantiation but you just don’t want to believe it, it’s your choice according to your free will. No retraction is necessary; just a difference of interpretation.
“The fact that Mary is chief among the saints comes not from her being simply “blessed”, although that she most certainly is, but filled with grace, “kecharitomene””
Well, Jesus was “full of grace” also, and we have received that fulness of grace from Him.
Jhn 1:14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
Jhn 1:16 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.
Rom 5:15 But not as the offence, so also [is] the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, [which is] by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.
God is no respecter of persons and that has no scriptural exceptions. Even Mary must appear before the judgment seat of Christ and answer for her allotment of grace.
Act 10:34 Then Peter opened [his] mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons:
Gal. 2:6, “(whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me: God accepteth no man’s person:)”
Eph. 6:9, “knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.”
1 Pet. 1:17, “And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear”
2Cr 5:10, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things [done] in [his] body, according to that he hath done, whether [it be] good or bad.”
Explaining Calvinism to me, or giving fantastic interpretation of the scripture is not subtantiating an allegation that there is a contradiction. The former, you did. The latter you did not. If however, you now admit that what we have here is difference of interpretation, then that is exactly what I ask, a retraction. So you understand now that the Catholic mariology and hagiology are consistent with the Catholic understanding of the Holy Scripture?
With the rest of your post I don't have an objection: yes, of course, Christ is the source of all grace and judges, as well as saves, Mary and all the saints.
I do not know what Protestant made such a claim, but it sounds like you are putting up a straw man argument.
What Christians disagree with Roman Catholics and their evaluation is that she was born without sin, and therefore equal to Christ in human perfection.
In fact, her 'immaculate conception' would have been a greater miracle than the Lord's virgin birth, since Mary was born in the normal way and yet without receiving the adamic sin nature which comes through the man.
As has been said, that' shows ZIP>
Why does it show ZIP-because you say it does?
I would think the fact that Christ made it a point never to call her 'mother' and in fact always redirected attention away from her would prove the point that Christ was making an issue of His words, not His family relationships, even with Mary.
And He makes everyone who follows Him equal to her (Mk.3:34-35),It can be argues that that is misreading, over-application, and sloppy thinking about "equal" v. "same".
And you can 'argue' anything you want, the fact is that nowhere in scripture does Christ make Mary anyone special.
That is a Roman Catholic myth built on the traditions of men, not the words of God.
Actually, they do admit, they just won't admit that it is wrong.
They view it as indirectly worshiping God, the same reasoning that they use for praying at the feet of their 'statues' (idols)
Am I "pure"... No I'm just as bad in my own ways.. Its the human condition I believe.. We all see thru a glass darkly.. EVEN YOU.. The way I see it is we all need clothes pins on our nose to stand each other.. "currently"..
They don't proscribe this.. THATS the point..
The Babalu Aye ay.. know an idol when they see one..
The post was aimed at the Bobalu aye ay NOT YOU..
Hands to my head.. with fingers pointing at YOU,,
wiggling..
WHERE? Seriously. Equal in what respect? They could all be, for example, equal in that they are blessed but not the same in that they were blessed differently and/or to different degrees.
Anyway, it would be a help to see where Christ said that, I'm sure I'll slap my head when I see it, ("Duh" moments are good for my humility) but I don't think of "equality" as a biblical "value", off hand. (That's from my Anglican, C.S. Lewis days, not something I picked up with myu Papist deviations.)
I don't see the need for a retraction since I never said your understanding was not consistent with the Roman Catholic interpretation of the scriptures. As far as the scriptures I quoted and the interpretation of them as being “fantastic interpretation of the scripture” please show by the scriptures where the interpretation is “fantastic”? Comparing scripture with scripture, the interpretation seems clear.
Paul in Gal. 4:4 does not even mention Mary by name or venerate her but simply says, “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law”.
Hmmmm...as long as we're listing the people who were "full of grace" don't forget Stephen,
Act 6:8 And Stephen, full of grace and power, was performing great wonders and signs among the people.
It's surprising the Catholic Church doesn't consider him to be "without sin".
Romans 3 is an indictment against all mankind-Mary included. We all need a Savior just as Mary stated.
Ah, OK. This is important to understand: the Catholic practices and the Scripture are not in contradiction. The Catholic practices and the scriptural interpretations of some religious communities, yours apparently among them, are.
the interpretation is “fantastic”?
The idea that Mary and the saints are robots incapable of cooperation with grace is fantastic, for example, and it ignores the scripture that shows her very much as a God-loving, God-fearing, rational, compassionate person, and not a zombified victim of some spiritual rape. There are many others on other topics.
Bump to the rest of the flag list.
... is not the same Greek as in Luke 1.
Romans 3 is an indictment against all mankind-Mary included.
That is your interrpetation, thanks.
We all need a Savior just as Mary stated
Of course. That's Who made her sinless and immaculately conceived.
But she is not the One for whom all things were created, the Firstborn of every creature, and yet this is what Catholic theology claims.
[Emphasis duh]
Now you say :
I do not know what Protestant made such a claim, but it sounds like you are putting up a straw man argument.1000 Silverlings said it. (Mind you, I AM just assuming he is a Protestant. The way he badmouths sheep and goats, I think the evidence is good.)
Have I settled that to your satisfaction? Does it still sound like I am putting up a straw man argument?
Guilty -- in a way. You do not admit the authority which we hold proper to the Bishop of Rome and you ain't no Ort'odox. (Where I come from, that defines Protestant. I keep stumbling over the term being used as virtually synonymous with "more or less Calvinist" or 'Reform'.)
But, yes, you have denied being a Protestant and I slipped. I was wrong.
It's rather hard to argue with, "All have sinned and fallen short..."
Of course. That's Who made her sinless and immaculately conceived.
And that is your non-scriptural interpretation.
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