Roman Catholicism Finds Converts Even During Current Time of Crisis

Megan Denell’s search for a spiritual home brought her to the doors of the Roman Catholic Church, where she found a strength of community like nothing she had experienced.

It wasn’t long before she learned that her new fellowship came with pain as well as joy.

The sex-abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese--in which some church officials have admitted they did little to stop priests accused of molesting minors--erupted just as Denell took steps to become a Catholic.

Yet despite a stomach-churning reaction to the crisis, Denell and hundreds of others in Boston still feel the strong pull of faith and plan to convert to Catholicism during an Easter vigil service tonight.

They’ll be baptized, confirmed and receive the Eucharist, the culmination of months of study for the Rite of Catholic Initiation of Adults, which prepares non-Catholics to become members of the church. The program includes education about the church’s history, its rituals and the principles behind the faith.

Denell, a 26-year-old administrator for a local arts foundation, said she’s come to realize that the church is much greater than some flawed people who have helped run it. Those tainted leaders include Cardinal Bernard Law, who has faced calls for his resignation in the wake of the scandal.

“The cardinal is not the essence of the church,” she said. “The essence of the church is Christ. The essence of the church are the people who are there.”

Church officials say participation in the adult initiation program has remained steady even during the sex-abuse scandal. This spring, 713 people are taking part.

Don Schroeder, 33, grew up surrounded by the Catholic Church. Raised a Presbyterian, he attended a Jesuit high school while growing up in Lyndhurst, N.J., and then went to Holy Cross College in Worcester, where he was on that Jesuit school’s executive board of campus ministry.

After college, the strictures of the Catholic Church and his own ambitions as an attorney turned his focus away from religion. But the birth of his first child, combined with the death of a friend in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, sparked reflection that led him to Catholicism. Last fall, he started a Catholic initiation program at Boston College.

Schroeder was disgusted by revelations of how church officials shuttled defrocked priest John Geoghan from parish to parish, even though he’d been accused of sexually abusing children. And he believes Law should resign for his role in the Geoghan transfers and his handling of the crisis.

But Schroeder has not wavered in his decision to become a Catholic.

“These aren’t things that are going to dissuade me from following through,” he said. “The ties I’ve formed through my upbringing and my adulthood are just too strong.”

The Rev. Bob VerEecke, who leads the initiation class at St. Ignatius in Newton, Mass., said the commitment of the new converts has been valuable to him at a time when he and other priests feel pain and discouragement.

“There are a lot of people who are just so angry, they don’t want anything to do with the official church, and that’s hard,” he said. “To have people who are affirming of the process and who I am as a priest is very comforting.”

Catholicism has survived other dark times over the centuries, and the people who join the church this weekend are a sign of its continuing perseverance, said Tammy Liddell, a lay campus minister at Boston College.

“I think it makes a statement that our faith is bigger than anything that can happen and anything that can go wrong,” she said.

People joining the church now have few illusions about its problems, Denell said. She’s learned that the church and its leaders are not infallible. But she’s been impressed by the honest soul-searching she’s seen in the leaders in her Catholic community, she said.

In a way, Denell said, this is a good time to join the church because it is on the cusp of change that can make it stronger. And she can be part of it.

“While it’s a painful time, it’s a really exciting time,” Denell said. “I feel as though the people are going to go forward and say, ‘We need change.’ I feel hopeful about the future.”