Lucas Koach was driving in Little Rock, Ark., in 2007 when something mysterious happened.
In his third year as an Anglican priest, Koach was on his way to a pastoral visit at a hospital when he had the urge to pull his Pontiac to the curb and stop.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to say a Hail Mary,’ ” he said. “I had been thinking a lot about the Catholic faith so I just stopped and I said it audibly. The clouds didn’t part or anything but it kind of made a mark.”
Koach soon realized that the strange moment occurred on Father Tribou St., near the Catholic High School for Boys, and now it all makes better sense. “I had been including the mystics in some of my sermons,” recalled Koach. “As you study the spiritual masters, you realize that Mary is central, so I remember thinking, ‘Is there anything wrong with saying the Hail Mary prayer?’ ”
Koach, 55, is one of about 700 Anglican priests since 1992 who have converted to Catholicism according to a report. After his experience in Little Rock, he spent two more years as a parish priest in the Anglican Mission in America, but Rome was calling.
“My first parish in Tampa was Anglo-Catholic and that expanded my horizon further in the dynamics of liturgy, church history and the real presence,” he said. “I was realizing evangelicalism only scratches the surface.”
Koach left active parish ministry in 2009 but remained an Anglican while working in Washington as director of public policy for Food for the Hungry. The question of converting was “put on the back burner,” but he was still drawn to daily Mass at Georgetown’s Epiphany Catholic Church.
“I commuted on my bike and would stop for the 7:30 a.m. Mass a few times a week over the course of seven years,” said Koach, an Arlington native who attended Glebe Elementary, Swanson Middle School and Yorktown High School. “I had a friend who was also on the Roman road who was challenging me. More than appreciating the Catholic faith, I was really confronting whether it was true.”
Koach traveled the world with Food for the Hungry, and it was a road trip to the heart of Anglicanism in 2017 where any remaining doubts about the truth of the Catholic Church ended. On assignment in London, he found time to visit The College at Littlemore on the outskirts of Oxford where St. John Henry Newman was received into full communion with the Catholic Church — the most famous Anglican convert of all-time and recently named a doctor of the church by Pope Leo XIV.
“It was late in the afternoon, cold and rainy, and I got there just before it closed,” said Koach. “I was the only person but one of the sisters agreed to give me a tour. She gave me a grand tour and took me to his private library where she looked at me and said, ‘You are standing in the very spot where John Henry Newman offered his first confession to Father Barberi.’ ”
“I said, ‘Right here, on this spot?’ and she told me yes — ‘It was also cold and rainy that day and it happened right here where you are standing.’ And I looked at her and said, ‘Sister, I’m done.’ ”
Koach met with a priest as soon as he returned and made plans to enter the church March 31, 2018, at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Arlington.
“Fulton Sheen said that there’s not a hundred people who actually disagree with the Catholic Church — they disagree due to their perception of the church,” said Koach. “After studying the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that’s exactly what I saw. It is true, so the last step was just to get the blessing of my wife.”
Though not a practicing Catholic herself, his wife generously consented. Their son and daughter enthusiastically entered the church and are students at Christendom College in Front Royal, where Koach is a parishioner of St. John the Baptist Church.
Koach looks back on his journey with gratitude and a special love for the Blessed Mother, who he thinks gave him the nudge to pray the Hail Mary that day in Little Rock. “Devotion to Mary is a big evangelical hangup — it was mine. But as I’ve gone along the way, I’ve never (come across) anybody that has a strong devotion to Mary who is not also profoundly in love with Jesus. She will not allow it otherwise. On the contrary, I discovered Our Lady accelerates and deepens one’s love for Jesus. It’s good to be home.”
