The Wheaton Underground (Catholic Church)

Hello all, and sorry for the month long hiatus! 

As the summer ended I was bombarded with weddings and traveling and packing and moving back to college, so, needless to say, updating this blog wasn't the main priority.  But now I am back at Wheaton and plan on resuming where I left off.

Coming to Wheaton is, actually, exactly where I left off.

This time two years ago I was deep into considering the Catholic Church--but I had no desire for it at all and was actually completely afraid of what it would mean if I couldn't find answers to my questions about the Church's relationship to Scripture.  At this point I did not know any Catholics who actually practiced their faith and converting to Catholicism was on par with converting to a completely different religion, as far as I was concerned.  Nevertheless, my understanding of Christianity as a Protestant was slowly beginning to deteriorate, and I knew I either needed to find answers to my questions, convert to Catholicism, or leave Christianity.

It was at this point that I arrived on campus as a freshman at Wheaton College.

I had been praying for months now that God would show me His Church, and I figured that studying Scripture and Church history at the greatest Evangelical school in the nation would be the best way to find answers to my questions.  But to my dismay, being at Wheaton only intensified my questions (more on that in another post).  Now I was stuck—I was hundreds of miles away from home, beginning a new life, surrounded by strangers, and my whole worldview was falling apart.

Enter: my older brother, for a surprise weekend visit.

My older brother, who had converted to Catholicism a few years before, drove all through the night in order to come see me at Wheaton.  While he was there, he got me plugged in with the Catholic community…that was surprisingly all over Wheaton.

We like to call it (playfully, of course) the “Wheaton Catholic Underground” because at a school like Wheaton you would never expect to find so many devout Catholics—and so many converts.  To my utter shock, there were six Wheaton students in RCIA (that’s the name of the initiation process for adults wishing to convert to Catholicism) during my freshman year. Six might not sound like a big number, but from Wheaton College… it is a very big number.  And there was a larger group of students—Catholic, non-Catholic, and not-sure-yets—on Wheaton’s campus going through an independent study of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Also, my brother randomly met and connected me with a group of women in Chicago who were committed to living out their Catholic faith (members of Opus Dei, for those of you to whom that means something). 

So in the course of two days, I went from not knowing any Catholics who understood their faith and loved Jesus through it, to being surrounded by them everywhere I went.  And all of this as a result of my choice to go to Wheaton College in order to find answers to my questions about Christ’s vision for His Church.