Jewish convert Roy Schoeman recently recounted his conversion story to two groups in the Arlington Diocese. He was the keynote speaker at the Brent Society’s opening breakfast at St. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls on Sept. 18, and he was part of Christendom College’s Major Speakers Program on Sept. 19 in Front Royal.

Schoeman was born in a suburb of New York City of "conservative" Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany. His Jewish education and formation was received under some of the most prominent Rabbis in contemporary American Jewry.

Midway through a career of teaching and consulting he experienced an unexpected and instantaneous conversion to Christianity. Since then he has pursued theological studies at several seminaries, helped produce and host a Catholic television talk show, and edited and written for several Catholic books and reviews.

"Growing up I was unusually devout and passionate about God and Judaism although the suburban conservative context I was in did not really support a life of piety, faith and prayer," Schoeman said. "Although I tried to maintain my religious orientation, there was a fatal flaw in it which soon led me astray. I had no understanding of the relationship between religion and morality, particularly sexual morality. My religiosity soon became mixed up in the drug and ‘free love’ culture which was rampant, and soon degenerated into the immoral, vague hippie ‘spirituality’ of the time. My thirst for God became, for a long while, satiated by the false consolations and delusional spirituality of that environment."

For much of his young adult life, Schoeman lived with tremendous inner tension. He had a yearning for transcendent meaning and a refusal to let go of that yearning for more than short periods, but had no knowledge of what that yearning was truly for, and hence no sense of which direction to go. His life changed forever in 1987 while on vacation in Cape Cod.

"As I was walking, lost in my thoughts, I found myself in the immediate presence of God," he recalled. "It is as though I ‘fell into heaven.’ Everything changed from one moment to the next, but in such a smooth and subtle way that I was not aware of any discontinuity. I felt myself in the immediate presence of God. I was aware of His infinite exaltedness and of His infinite and personal love for me."

Schoeman would have to wait a while before getting his answer. Every night before going to sleep, he recited a short prayer to know the name of his Lord and Master and God whom he had met in Cape Cod.

He was baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church in 1992. After first discerning a vocation to the religious life, Schoeman realized that he had another vocation, although still a vocation to holiness and to service to Christ.

"Although I have no religious or priestly vocation, there is nothing in my life which is not for Him and around Him," he said. "In a number of small ways I am active in the Church, with daily Mass and prayer being at the center of my life — writing, teaching or speaking whenever asked, producing and hosting a Catholic TV talk show. I will never know, this side of heaven, whose prayers and sacrifices purchased the graces for my entirely unsought after and undeserved conversion, but I can only thank them profoundly, and exhort others, too, to pray for the conversion of the Jews; that the people to whom Jesus first made Himself known may come into the truth and into the fullness of their relationship to Him in the Catholic Church. How tragic that we to whom God first revealed Himself as Man should be among the last to recognize Him."

The Brent Society also honored four pro-life women connected with Hope in Northern Virginia, a crisis pregnancy and counseling center in Falls Church.