The problems in the Church

HT The Anchoress and her friend
Fr James Reynolds, STL, of the Catholic Jedi Acadmey.

No Turning Back: A Witness to Mercy

Father Donald H. Calloway, MIC, has written an autobiographical book about his conversion from a drug-addicted teenager with a criminal record to a well-spoken priest responsible for helping to form young men for the priesthood. He now travels quite extensively bringing the moving and inspiring story of “No Turning Back: A Witness to Mercy” far and wide.

This book has an important message for a wide audience, both worldly and religious, but I will tell about reading it from a mother’s perspective. Father Calloway and I don’t have much in common except for being born in 1972 and loving the beach. I don’t as a general rule read autobiographies, books by priests, or conversion stories, and yet this narrative had me from page one.

Father Calloway introduces himself as a priest with an important testimony about the Divine Mercy and the radical changes it has brought into his own life. Then he dives into the midst of his teenage drama as he is being caught by the military police in Japan. He is a migrant military-child-brat who loves surfing, girls, and drugs; he will steal without compunction to get what he wants. The story is unbelievably captivating. As I read this I was thinking to myself that here is this now-very-educated, spiritual, and well-spoken man telling this story, relating the thoughts of his younger self that was so ignorant, worldly, and unsocial; and I was wondering how on earth this was possible.

As he relates the details of his upbringing, it is obvious that the constant uprooting from place to place and step-father to step-father has a great deal to do with his rebellion from his parents. Yet he never blames his mother for the hard decisions she had to make, and gives her credit for always taking him back with open loving arms, and patiently waiting for him to come back both to her and to God. He compares her to Saint Monica, who prayed endlessly for her son Augustine; he was a great sinner who eventually became one of the most esteemed of the Church’s scholarly saints. His mother’s present husband he compares to Joseph, who quietly and loyally supported Mary and Jesus.

About three-fifths through, after reading how he went from one rock bottom to another and wondering how low he has to go before he changes, the reader is hit by the same “Divine two-by-four” that hit Father Calloway in the head. One night he stays in his parents’ home alone and reads a book about Mary that they had in their bookshelves. He reads all night and then in the morning tells his mother he needs to speak to a Catholic priest. Seeing the extraordinary event that has happened to him, she tells him to RUN to the military priest. When he goes to Mass he miraculously understands the mystery of the Eucharist and that day is converted.

When I read this part, I was sitting on the beach watching my three-year-old play on the playground, surrounded by other moms and children. The way his conversion happens is so beautiful and amazing it was all I could do to not freak everybody out by crying right there. He makes it clear how a Catholic conversion through Mary and Jesus is fundamentally different from what is understood as the Evangelical-defined “born-again” experience. From that point, Father Calloway details the journey from his calling to the priesthood to where he is now.

The whole story was so compelling and insightful. I would recommend it to any teen or adult.

For more information see the author's website at http://www.fathercalloway.com/books/ntbbk.php

Father Calloway sent me this book in exchange for my honest review.

Book Review of "The Thrill of the Chaste"

What non-fiction book can rivet your attention so that you suspend normal activities until you have finished it without the 'obligatory sex scenes'?"The Thrill of the Chaste" of course!

Dawn Eden, former agnostic, NYU graduate, Sex in the City practitioner, writer for Rolling Stone, The New York Post and the Daily News was the least likely candidate to become a pro-life, chaste Catholic single woman.

"The Thrill of the Chaste" takes the reader back into her past when she was a typical professional urban woman looking for lasting love in a series of sexual encounters where each found herself lonelier than the last. She found herself holding back more and more of her herself as a relationship became more sexually intimate, in order to prepare for the inevitable emotional wreckage of the breakup. Dawn shares with the reader the poignant details of the emotional cost of the lifestyle which fails to satisfy, and her painful, yet steady climb out of it. Her evocative storytelling ability makes the story a great read as well as a valuable guide to those who are leaving sexual immorality behind for something far better. Her book draws from the wellspring of Pope John Paul's Theology of the Body as she

discovers her true vocation as a single woman and her renewed hopes for a future of true intimacy in married life.

This book should be on the bookshelf of every high school. So many young women today are suffering the painful loneliness inherent in unchaste lifestyles and fear that there is no starting over. Dawn's intimate testimony is proof that God's merciful grace is always sufficient to begin anew, and has awakened hope in thousands who have had the experience of reading it, or attending one of her talks.

I first met Dawn when I lived on Long Island, and she gave a Faith on Tap talk on her book. Because of her 'coming out' as a pro-lifer while working at the New York Post, and subsequently losing her job, I summoned up the courage to come out as a pro-life writer at Suffolk County Community College where I was an adjunct professor. We next met in 2007, as we gave presentations on the Catholic blogosphere at the Annual Meeting of the Catholic Society of Social Scientists at St John's Law School. Dawn has an engaging humility about her, she never acts like the celebrity, no matter when we meet, she warmly remembers me as a fellow blogger, further evidence of her profound conversion. She is a wonderful role model for single Catholic women striving to live a life of grace in a hostile, pornographic society.

Last fall Dawn spent some time in Baltic, my hometown in Eastern CT and was interviewed by Friar Roderick on AIR MARIA. We just met in Washington DC in January in the John Paul II Cultural Center where she was conducting a chastity workshop, and I promised to review her book here. Dawn recently held her own on The Today Show where the Sex and the City practitioners gave her a run for her money.

She blogs at The Dawn Patrol.

No one is beyond the grace of God

This powerful conversion story of the writer who wrote the script for "Basic Instinct"(known for pushing the envelope with it's sexual content) and "Showgirls" proves that it's not too late to convert anyone in Hollywood.
In his book, Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith, the former senior editor of the Rolling Stone, Joe Eszterhas, explains his conversion.
Eszterhas grew up in refugee camps in Hungary during World War II before living in the back alleys of Cleveland. It was there that he worked as a police reporter racing to cover “countless shootings” and “urban riots,” he told the Toledo Blade.
At the time, his life was very dark—one filled with death, murder, crime and chaos. He describes his writing as equally dark and also “sexually graphic.”
And then he had a 'road to Damascus' conversion. Someone was praying for him. Now he is in love with the Holy Eucharist. It's such a powerful story, and one that can be repeated.
We all need to pray for Hollywood.
Read the entire article at CNA