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."
She loves to drive. She hopes to become a mechanic in the military, and then have an auto-restoration business. Reminds me that I need to look for an auto-mechanics course for the summer.
Uh oh ... look who got the last laugh!
Do you have any actual sources, like with URLs, which you can adduce to support the allegation that the Cahtolic Church teaches that Mary collaborated with God before the foundation of the world?
Do you have even ONE official Catholic Source which makes that suggestion?
Or is this just another instance of a false and unsubstantiatable charge?
It's so limiting to have to confine oneself to the data, isn't it?
Interesting. To which post are you referring? There are several which claim that we believe what we do not believe. There are others which change the subject when a charge is refuted with evidence. There which one which implies that grammar has nothing to do with what one is saying.
There is at least one "spirit" which encourages false conclusions, bogus argumentation, and statements contrary to easily ascertainable fact. One can speak "spiritually" and even think "spiritually", without any significant involvement of the Spirit of Christ.
Well my daughter is Keeping company with a very fine air force mechanic. I think it would be SO GREAT to have a mechanic in the family. Unfortunately it’s more of a “just friends” thing than anything romantic.
Amen!
In the end if we have Faith and go back to the Scriptures we will see the Truth.
These threads do reveal how important it is to understand what the Five Solas mean and why they are so important.
ah. I can't see you. Are you laughing?
How does someone, in Catholic theology, get joined forever to the HS, to the extent that she is the HS, and is the one standing between mankind and Jesus Christ, and not be divine? Pretty good trick
You get joined forever to the Holy Spirit by the Grace of God. All the blessed (however you pronounce it, it always means those who have received or are receiving a blessing) in Heaven are joined forever to the Holy Spirit.
to the extent that she is the HS,
I'd need to see this fleshed out a little. (or maybe a LOT.) Mary is NOT the Holy Spirit in any normal sense of those words. However, there is a relationship between the saved and the Spirit of Christ which is mentioned (mostly by allusion) by Paul. We are dead and now Christ lives us. When we don't know how to pray (in my case, all the time) the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. That kind o' stuff. In terms of the KIND of relationship with the Holy Spirit, I don't think Mary is or is taught to be essentially different from any of us.
(IN that connection, the assumption is to be understood in an eschatological or temporal way: Mary CURRENTLY enjoys what all the blessed WILL enjoy, NOT something essentially different.)(It is in Marxist thought that a difference in degree is taken to imply a difference in kind, not in our thought.) is the one standing between mankind and Jesus Christ
Again, I'd need to see an official De Fide type statement and discussion of that before I undertook to say anything I was certain of on that topic.
But there is some sense in which Mary brought IHS to Elisabeth and John the Baptist, and was "between" them and Him. There is a sense in which she brought Him to us.
Protracted Analogy Alert:
It is not exactly right, but it is not all wrong either, to consider my daughter a gift of my wife to me. And that is about not just the conception and gestation, but also the nurturing, caring for ... all the parental stuff that the boss-lady did after the 'orrible brat child was born.
And since for a while there, I was the "primary care giver" (beats work!) the boss-lady is not exactly right but not all wrong to consider the 'orrible brat child my gift to her.
Nuance is out friend in these things. Consider: my wife tells my child it's time to get me a birthday present. My child comes to me and asks for some money to buy me a birthday present. My wife takes my child shopping and advises her what can be gotten for my miserly amount of money. She carries it to the counter and hands the money to the clerk. They come home and the little one (this WAS a few years ago) makes a scribble on a piece of paper with a crayon. The boss-lady wraps the gift, puts the scribbled piece of paper on it.
And on "That great and terrible Day" my child presents it to me proudly. SHE knows, with her young mind that it is not all from her. I certainly know it. And what do I do?
I receive the present, make appropriate expressions of delight and gratitude. I hug my child to my breast and make much of her, and looking over her at my wife, I mouth, "Thank you!" to her. And in my heart, and later aloud, I thank God for my gift, my child, my wife -- along with all the other things for which I thank Him.
Knowing that every good gift comes from Him, that my wife's life and love, my child's life and love are all from Him, am I wrong to thank them and love them? To me the gift is unspeakably rich, coming as it does from God. It is even richer, coming as well "from", or possibly "through" my wife and then richer still, coming "through" and "From" my child, who also came "through" my wife (who came from God) and from God.
Heck, when I go out dining, once every five years, a good waiter gets more "Face time"-type thanks from me than the cook and the owner, though as I've matured, I've come to appreciate all the labors and laborers who brought my dinner to me.
Certainly, the "bulk" of my time in prayer is NOT spent on Mary, or "through her" to Jesus, and through Him to the Father. Certainly it is to the Holy Trinity that I turn whenever I begin my prayers, even when I begin a Rosary, which is predominantly, but not only, addressed to Mary.
So it is in a very qualified and even, one might say, attenuated way (compared to the involvement of the Holy Spirit) that my approach (so to speak) to God or the Son is "through" Mary.
Even if I were to agree, which I don't, that Mary was "THE ONLY" way to Christ, I can still see how that is without her being "divine" in the same way that the Three persons of the Trinity are divine.
It helps to "Get into" two things: First, Paul's use of "in" when he's talking about spiritual things. Second, the medieval and Gothic mind with it's delight in portraying things in series and gradations. (This is not an argument in favor, just an explanation of the kind of images one finds.) God, utterly divine, is mediated to mankind though the God-Man, Jesus. Then Jesus is "brought forth" to us through the Human, but very Holy Mary. At the end of the series of givers is, the human but not so holy me, the shepherd or, possibly, a king who receives access to God through all these givers.
Certainly, one Mary is "elected" which after all just means "chosen" to be the God bearer, she is, in a particular, NOT a general, way standing between mankind in Jesus.
When all is said and done, the Salve Regina is a "fulsome" in the old sense -- though I suspect you all may find it fulsome in the modern sense -- wheedling to Mary for permission to see her baby, just as I might ask any mother if I might see and maybe even hold, her child.
Most of the objections voiced here (and elsewhere on FR) about Marian devotion take the matter far further than we do and then insist that ALL our language ONLY describes the view from that barren and deadly outpost. And that's why we spend so much time arguing not for what we believe but against the misstatement of what we believe, because mostly misstatement is what we get.
Now see, we find this idea ridiculous and we see it as such because it flies in the face of everything that God teaches through the written word.
Jesus is not a little child, nor does he need his mother interceeding for us to him. By taking this view, it appears that far from acknowledging the work of the cross, you diminish it. You make her increase and him decrease and to us, this will never fly.
by the way, did you know the Greek goddess "Hera" was also given the title "The Queen of heaven" and, she renewed her perpetual virginity by bathing. Catholic views of Mary, not being biblicaly based, get mixed up with dare we say it -- pagan beliefs.
Hebrews 5:7-10 7Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared;
8Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered;
9And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him;
10Called of God an high priest after the order of Melchisedec
If you go to a Chinese Buddhist temple, as I have done , on the upper West Side of Manhattan and ask the "osho" for a summary of his belief, he will say that mankind is unable to save itself so the Buddha came to earth to save us. Drat! Pagan belief! I guess we have to stop believing or saying that about Jesus, huh?
And as to the Salve Regina, I take it you don't sing Christmas Carols? Is it hour idea that since Jesus' birth is, like, SEW two millennia ago, we should stop with the drummer boy and the Come bring a torch Jeanette, Isabella, and O Little Town of Bethlehem and just get over it? Does the idea of Christian Poetry seem wrong to you? Do you REALLY think it is somehow going to be NEWS to me that Jesus grew up? (I've been asking myself why it isn't the figure of a neonate on those crucifixes. Thanks for clearing that up for me.)
nor does he need his mother interceeding [sic] for us to him
WHERE, show me exactly where I said anything about Jesus NEEDING Mary to intercede.
Okay, I gave you a detailed response and now you reply with "flies in the face of everything God teaches through the written word." Did you READ what I wrote or just look for something with which you could disagree? Then finding nothing substantial, you made up the "need" issue -- which has been addressed several times on FR and maybe even on this thread, and you bring in the way Hera has some vague similarities to our Lady and then make a charge of mingling with paganism.
You asked a question It was based on a fabulous and almost incredible misapprehension of what we in fact teach. I attempted to respond to the question you raised. Now I have to think it wasn't a real question, it wasn't honest, it wasn't the raising of an issue to communicate and to gain understanding. It seems to have been some kind of a trick.
My thesis in a lot of this thread has been that many (not all) Protestant invent stuff to argue against. You are demonstrating that thesis. WHO said "need"? Where? What's the URL? I don't say it. Not only do I not say, and have never said it, but I have also argued against the idea that we "need" Mary's intercession or Jesus "needs" it.
So where did the charge come from?
Is it just possible that at least some of those who argue against us come to the table "knowing" that we're wrong and then pervert what we say and invent stuff (not consciously, mind you) and say we said it because they are just so sure we are wrong that they simply can't read what we in fact write? But this doesn't bother them because they never intended to find out what we really think, since it's so much more fun to argue agasiint what we don't think.
Sorry if this seems angry. But when I take the time to explain something -- NOT to defend it, as such, just to flesh out what it is we in fact believe and how we think of it, it is really frustrating to get back "need" and Hera and sweeping statements.
Does any of you care to understand, not to agree, just to understand, what we in fact believe and think or is, somehow, the WORD Catholic so dreadful and vile that what we actually do and believe is irrelevant? Or are ALL of you Sado-evangelists to whom the assurance of the knowledge that they are right provides permission to ignore what is actually said, believed, and thought by those against whom they pretend to argue because the REAL deal is that Catholics and Orthodox should just be abused and that if ignoring them or twisting their words irritates them why, so much the better! It's just a foretaste of the damnation they are calling down on themselves for not agreeing with whichever of the different Protestant beliefs happens to have the floor at the time.
AMEN!
Men love their "vain imaginings" because they point to the creature and not the Creator.
AMEN! We're supposed to become as little children. Not Christ! Christ is "the rock higher than we."
Yet again the RCC has it all backwards.
by the way, did you know the Greek goddess "Hera" was also given the title "The Queen of heaven" and, she renewed her perpetual virginity by bathing. Catholic views of Mary, not being biblicaly based, get mixed up with dare we say it -- pagan beliefs.
lol. Oh, go ahead and say it.
How did Jesus become Joseph’s son (John 1:45) if he was not married to Mary? I am sure there probably are some great mental gymnastics that explain that, probably along the same line that explains away all the brothers and sisters.
What? You can’t hear the laughter all they way up there in Denver? Your NCAA picks failed you, my friend.
If you study Buddhism, you will find that man must save himself. He must sit in a meditative state until he realizes that all is illusion, and, that he is God, and his reward for realizing this is to be reborn in a lotus petal in a pond somewhere in Nirvana. Not only that but he must be reborn over and over until he gets it right, and the same is more or less true in hinduism
All pagan beliefs at the heart, is man finding God and saving himself.
One God, not a plethora of gods and goddesses and saints and devas and ascended masters and all that jazz.
Right. Wake me up the next time you get them all in the final 4. :-)
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