Book on Mary turns runaway youngster immersed in drugs and crime into a priest

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.'

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.

"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."

AB: That's a 10-4.

ftD: Those who use argument to learn rather than to control and irritate will easily find that no Catholic on this thread said:
Christ needs Mary in order to elevate Him to the Godhead.

As discussed here the actual words used, if that matters, were

On the contrary, referring to Mary as "Mother of God" elevates Jesus Christ.
(here.)

I guess this needs some parsing: The subject is the verbal phrase "referring to Mary". the verb is "elevates". (And, to be complete, nobody is claiming that the way WE SPEAK about Mary or Jesus elevates Him to Godhead. It's a shame that the quality of argument requires that that obvious point be explicitly made.)

Mere grammar makes it obvious that perverting this into 'Christ needs Mary to elevate Him', is not about reasonable disagreement or about seeking the truth. You have to wonder what might be the point of basing an argument against us not on what we actually say, but on a perversion of it.

(For the elventy-twelfth time, to give the 'title' "theotokos" to Mary is to make a Christological statement, specifically one about the union (at conception) of two natures in one person. The child whom Mary bore and birthed was Jesus, and Jesus is Lord.)

If that was the case why didn't Christ ever call Mary His mother, He always used the term 'woman'.

Well I hope I've shown that no one says "that was the case." But would you like to consider a rephrasing of your assertion? Before my second cup of coffee I can only recollect three things IHS said to Mary. Are you claiming that He only spoke to her three times between His Nativity and His Crucifixion? Or is it your argument that we are to take these three things as sufficiently representative of everything He said to her in thirty some years that we can say he "always" called her Woman and "didn't ever" call her Mother? That's a lot of conclusion to balance on the top of so few data.

He always used the term 'woman'.

Well, in approximately 67% of the recorded times (that I can remember) that He spoke To her, he addressed her as "Gynai." But in referring to her in John 19:26-27 the Evangelist calls her he meter autou and when Jesus 'gives' her to "the disciple whom He loved" He, Jesus, refers to her as "he meter sou". So we are left with no record of His calling His own mother, "Mother," but He calls her John's mother.

And I do not know enough about the colloquial Aramaic of the 1st century (because I know NOTHING about it) to know whether ANY son addressed his mother as "mother" OR to say, with every single scholar whom I have read on the matter (gotta be at least 5) that "Gynai" was an at least respectful and possibly affectionate manner of address.

So we have

a blatant mischaracterization of something a Catholic said;
A crippling paucity of data on how Jesus addressed Mary;
An instance of His referring to her as a "mother";and
Not enough info on colloquial 1st century Aramaic to know how sons addressed their mothers.

I wouldn't try to build much of an argument on so shaky a foundation.

Thank you for this long and challenging post. I join the others in complaining that the URL is not given. Specifically this makes not only hard but too demanding on my time to check each reference)

(1) Immaculate Conception
<1a)Those who read the discussion of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception will understand that Mary's sinlessness results from a saving act of God in Christ. Consequently the Dogma in no way negates Her need for a savior.

(You give us quotes from a site; those quotes have footnotes, you do note offer the notes and conceal form us the URL. This makes examining the claims difficult.)

(1b)Since you deny us the needed data, I must sometimes argue generally. A heretic in some things is not necessarily a heretic in all things. So that someone who "introduced" a doctrine was later declared a heretic does not bear on the doctrine.(3)That there was disagreement about the doctrine argues neither one way nor the other.

(2)All Holy
(2a)To take Paul's comment or that of the psalms or from he song of praise in Revelation as mathematically comprehensive runs contrary to good sense and to the plain sense of Scripture: For example: If only God is holy then we should root out every mention of "the saints" (which is merely a conventional translation of "hoi hagioi" = "the holy ones") in Paul's writings. God is the source of Holiness, but He makes those whom he saves and "sanctifies" (= "makes holy") holy.

(2b)Sinless people do not need a Savior.

Well this is redundant. There are two ways you can save me from falling: (A)You can pick me up and dust me off AFTER I fall. (B)You can grab my arm and keep me from falling at all. In both cases I need someone to save me from falling. Jesus saved Mary in a manner analogous to the second.

(2c))The worthy to open the scroll problem: As already stated, the holiness of God, of the three persons of the Trinity is different because it is original. The holiness of all the creatures whom we call holy (and man and angels are called holy) is derivative. This accounts for the difference.

(3)Perpetual Virginity
(3a)“Till” (until) means that after that point, Joseph did “know” (have sexual relations with) Mary. (See Genesis 4:1 where Adam “knew” Eve and she conceived and had a son.)

Sez who? The (or one) obvious point of the verse is to make plain that there was no way that Joseph could have been the father of IHS.

(3b)The "brothers" of IHS. This is your strongest argument because there is not very much authority (but there is some) for "adelphos" meaning something other than "brother" as we use the word. However for this argument to be conclusive we'd have to be able to show that Joseph did not have children by a former marriage and that he had not adopted children of his kin. Still this is the strongest argument on linguistic grounds.

(4)Theotokos
It is hard to take seriously the arguments against theotokos because they seem proudly to refute something we do not say.(a)The mother is not the source of everything that her child is, but only of part of it - her genetic material joins with that of the Father. The genetic material of the father may predate even the life of the mother, but that does not make her any less the mother of the child. (Example: My father was born in 1904, my mother in 1920, but she is still my mother, even though my father was likely producing sperm before my mother was born.) The mother then bears the conceived child in her womb, though, as was said, much of what the child IS is alien and certainly not dependent on the mother. Then parturition occurs; the mother gives birth.

We do not claim in the title Theotokos, that Mary is the source of everything that Jesus is, any more than my mother is the source of everything that I am. Consequently, to those who have thought about what motherhood is, the arguments that God predated Mary, the Mary was created by God, are simply irrelevant to what we mean by theotokos.

(5)Mother of the Church.
It's a similar problem. I read what you write and think,"So? What does that have to do with it?"

(6)The Assumption.
As to the lack of Biblical reference, the maxim "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" applies. The writers of the NT had different fish to fry, and none was giving an encyclopedia of Christian Doctrine.

The phrase "At the end of her life" is unclear. It could mean before or after her death. If after, then it is easily imagined that it might also have been less spectacular than Elijah's assumption, which was seen, I believe, by only one person.

The slam about "'infallible' popes" is misleading and generally meretricious. It is hard to believe that anti-Catholics still think that we think that everything a Pope says, even officially, is infallible.

And again we have the footnote numbers but with no footnotes. After reading DiLorenzo's work on Lincoln and discovering that what the text giveth research on the footnotes taketh away, I am no longer snowed by footnotes.

(7)Co-Mediator
This is wearisome. Again with the "need" argument. I wish our opponents would argue against what we say, not against what we don't say (and would refrain from taking the enthusiastic statements of some partisans as official and formal theological declarations.

As discussed before, there seems to be a duty we have to intercede "for all men". But, of course, no man NEEDS our intercession. Why the duty then?

As to "one mediator" either we have to make an artificial distinction between mediation and intercession or we have to say that our Lord's being the ONE mediator does not preclude mediation by others.

Christ reconciles the world to himself, and yet we are given a ministry of reconciliation. Is Jesus not the ONE reconciler?

Two large thoughts might be useful here. If I may assume that you are a Trinitarian, I ask you to consider that "one" when applied to God doesn't mean exactly what we thought it does, since it seems to somehow include a plurality. This should prompt some wonderment about the word "one".

Also (and I got this from C.S. Lewis) there is some Pauline language about being "IN Christ", an generally Paul seems to have some intersting notions about "in": cf: I Cor 7 "the unbelieivng husband is made holy in his wife and the unbelieving wife is made holy in her husband," where 'made holy' is 'hegiastai' and 'in' is 'en'.

(This also serves to address again the complaint about calling Mary "Panagia". There's a lot of derivative holiness in the NT.)

As the statements elsewhere in this thread make clear, Mary's mediationis entirely derivative, is, as Paul might say "in" Christ.

(8)Queen of Heaven

Leaving aside the question as to whether Revelation provides a comprehensive and sufficient description of heaven, I will just say that the pattern of arguments given here is so similar to that presented for the other points that it should be easy to work out the counter arguments.

I must add that I have done my own work on this post and have not referred to any concealed sources. The books I used were:

the RSV Bible,
the Fourth Revised Edition of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament and
Volume I of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Edited by Gerhard Kittel, who is no Catholic.

I mention this to address the commonly held notion that Catholics cannot and do not think for themselves. It is interesting that the "vibe" around us pertains to secrecy and robot-like obedience, while my post is transparent and original. The arguments offered against us however are almost by rote, not a new one in a cartload.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.