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."
First you spoke of me by name and did not give me the courtesy of a ping.
Secondly, “The conclusion you have reached has led you into asserting that Mary and Christ were the same substance. Read Opus’ description again. It’s outlandish to draw these conclusions.”
A conjecture is not a conclusion. Even you might understand that not even Scripture is against scientific inquiry.
“But it is the same procedure the RCC always follows when it takes a simple truth and explodes it into pagan fiction. Like when the RCC refers to Mary as the “Mother of God,” and then procedes to give her all the offices and qualities of God Himself.”
This is your opinion and your opinions are usually couched in ways to be patently offensive.
That says more about you than about your religion. I have enough respect for other people not to base my opinion on the example of one.
I’m firm in what I believe and what I know to be true.
I won’t tolerate the behavior of a poster who insinuates that what I say is teaching with the full power and authority of the Church.
I do not tolerate people who are so stupidly blind that they cannnot appreciate a discovery.
Give those high - 5’s people. Giggle at your coup.
I’ll be giving thanks to God that this discovery has been made.
“Did Jesus grow in His mother’s womb, and was He nourished by her in the ways we associate physiologically with pregnancy?”
“Just a normal girl, bearing a child in the normal way
Mary was blessed by God to carry the Christ child to term in a most extraordinary, earth-changing way.”
So apparently they view Christ as not following normal human gestation.
Probably.
The problem is that from this simple fact you extrapolate all sorts of anti-Scriptural, Trinity-infringing ideas concerning one of God's creatures, in effect turning Mary into a kind of god herself.
Maybe either of you can just answer this and skip the tangential observations of Catholicism.
It's not we who are taking Christ's birth and using it as a banner for Mary's divinity.
That “normal human gestation” was miraculous, and in no way bequeathed divinity on the mother.
Sorry. I forgot your name.
“That “normal human gestation” was miraculous, and in no way bequeathed divinity on the mother.”
When did I say it did? There isn’t one of my posts that said Mary was bequeathed divinity.
Those exact words are yours, not mine. If you extrapolate that is your problem.
But, do not use your own words and attribute them to me.
Nowhere did I say in any post whatsoever that, “Mary was bequeathed divinity.” Your words, not mine.
Your extrapolation is your own.
You wrote:
Mary is the Ark carrying the Lord in her womb. She is not only nourishing Him with her cells and blood, but he is also creating His cells in her.
He is man and God, the Hypostatic Union so those cells within her are the perfect Hypostatic Union of Him.
God couldn’t allow this Ark to be disposed of like anyone else
Please point us to what you believe to be the "conjecture" in those statements.
I’m not a theologian. It’s conjecture.
Please explain how someone can be a "co-redeemer" and not be divine, by definition.
Are we redeemed with silver and gold?
But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, Who by him do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead, and gave him glory; that your faith and hope might be in God." -- 1 Peter 1:18-21"Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers;
The RCC wants it both ways. They want to venerate the creature to "co-redeemer" while insisting they're not really elevating the creature to the status of the Creator.
It doesn't wash.
"For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." -- Matthew 12:37
They are functionally conceding they have no argument against what we do in fact say. They have to make up something that we did not say, claim (without evidence) that we said it, and THEN they can say we're wrong and pagan and blasphemous and idolatrous and so forth.
Which sugggests that the purpose is not to deal with "what is" but to express outrage at Catholics.
lol. No, "they" are not conceding the argument; "they" are refuting it.
See the above post. I guess I should have pinged you since you're in this discussion and you comment on my posts. I'll try to remember next time to include you.
All better.
Humans are, most of the time able to remain on a topic for, oh, say, more that 60 seconds.
“The conclusion you have reached has led you into asserting that Mary and Christ were the same substance”
In their humanity they are of the same substance, dust. The effects of the birth rendered her ceremonially unclean just like all of the other Jewish mothers and she was required to undergo the purification rites just like the others (luke 2:22-24) “And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord;(As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.”
For all the blessedness, Mary did not understand who Jesus was or really believe what His purpose was as can be seen in her reaction at His adolescent temple experience (Luke 2:49-50) “And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?
50 And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them” and later when she and her sons thought Jesus was insane (Mark 3:21-35) “And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself........ There came then his brethren and his mother, and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him. And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.”
However, God is spirit, (Jhn 4:24) “God [is] a Spirit:”. That’s why Jesus says (John 6:63) “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” When one trusts Christ for salvation one does not become “one flesh” but as Paul states (1 Cor. 6:17) “But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.”
A sentiment is no foundation for an eternal truth.
This is a pathology, Dawg. You are absolutely on point.
“Please explain how someone can be a “co-redeemer” and not be divine, by definition.”
Well, she’s not divine. Live with it.
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