I’m a convert and perhaps a bit of an unusual one at that. I was born and raised right here – pronounced “Ri cheer” in this part of the country. I was raised United Methodist and even served two years as a licensed United Methodist pastor. I married a northern girl who wasn’t Catholic. And I was ordained a deacon two years ago.
So naturally I get asked, regularly and often, how in the world did a southerner who lives in an area where there are more Protestants than people, was a Methodist preacher, and married a northern Protestant ever become Catholic in the first place. Much less become a self-proclaimed right-wing, evangelical, snake-handling Roman Catholic.
My conversion actually began quite subtly, when I was in the fourth grade. My parents had enrolled me at Sacred Heart Grade School in Belmont, which was a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy. Having had no contact with the Catholic Church to this point in my life, I had no idea there was a difference between them and us Methodists until they called me a Protestant, which confused me some because I wasn’t protesting anything. Except going to school.
The only nun I’d ever seen was the flying one on TV.
But I was intrigued by all that I saw. The crucifix that hung in every room. The sisters in their habits who lived together in the convent next door. Their devotion to God and their devout way of life. And the Mass which we attended every Friday morning. I fell in love with the Mass long before I knew what it was. Especially the Eucharist, which I didn’t understand at all but knew was so different that I wasn’t allowed to have it.
During my childhood and youth, I was active in the Methodist Church. After high school, I attended Belmont Abbey College and encountered the monks. They also wore habits and lived their lives devoted to Christ in their abbey. I was struck by those in the religious life and the priesthood who loved Christ to the extent they gave up married life so they could completely devote their lives to Him.
During my time at the Abbey, I discerned a vocation as a United Methodist pastor, but after graduation I discerned out and began a career as a police officer. Two years after graduation I married Laurie Bogardus, a girl from Meadville, Penn., who was raised Methodist. She came south while we were in high school, and we attended Belmont Abbey College together. After we were married, she followed me to the Methodist church where I grew up.
Two years later the Holy Spirit began pointing me away from Methodism. On the way to the beach in the summer of ’92, I stopped at a Catholic bookstore and bought a book on the Catholic faith. I read it at the beach and enrolled in RCIA when I got home. Laurie wasn’t at all keen on the idea of me becoming Catholic and flatly said she would not follow me. So I ended up going to RCIA for two years and finally came into the Church during the Easter Vigil Mass in 1994. And Laurie became Catholic several years later!
My dear mother also wasn’t happy about my becoming Catholic, to say the least. She was raised Southern Baptist, and her word on the subject went like this: She said the worst thing she ever did was send me to that Catholic school where the seeds of all this nonsense were sown.”
And she was right. For a fact that is where the seeds of my Catholic faith were sown. Oddly enough, one evening some 25 years later, my mother, by this time 85 years old, said to me, “Bill, I need to talk to you about joining the Catholic Church.” And she did several months later. It seems some of those seeds of “nonsense” must have fallen on her as well!
For us as Catholics, all of this is the perfect illustration of the Parable of the Sower. We are the sowers of the seeds of our Christian Catholic faith. It is our job to sow the seeds of the Gospel everywhere we go and to everyone we see by how we live our lives in Christ by our words and our deeds – sowing the seeds of a
Gospel that St. Paul tells us is “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God!”
Deacon W.S. “Bill” Melton Jr. serves at St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Gastonia.