At some point, Dirk Bartlett stopped saying he’d never become Catholic and started saying, “Why wouldn’t I convert?” The welcoming community at St. Rita School in Alexandria made all the difference.
Bartlett had been raised in the United Church of Christ but attended church infrequently in his adulthood. After his children were born, his wife, Anna, who was Catholic, wanted them to go to Mass together. Though he didn’t understand everything at Mass, he found he agreed with nearly everything the priests would say. They soon made friends at the parish, too. “I was made to feel welcome even though I wasn’t Catholic,” said Bartlett.
When their daughter got older, they sent her to preschool at St. Rita. “When she first started going to school, she was afraid of a pin drop,” said Bartlett. “By the time she got into kindergarten she was extremely outgoing. I really credit the school with a lot of that, watching how they helped raise her.”
Seeing friends from the St. Rita community find support through tragedy ultimately brought Bartlett to the church. A friend’s son, who was close in age to their own son, died. “To watch them lean on the church and the strength that they got from it, it did it for me,” he said.
As Bartlett prepared to enter the church, he relied on his parish friends to learn more about the faith. The education is ongoing. “My friends and I have conversations about this stuff all the time,” he said. “We try to do first Friday Mass and breakfast; just a group of guys talking.”
Steve Sherman had a special sponsor when he entered the church this year — his preteen son, Jacob. A few years ago, Steve and his wife, Carol, wanted to send Jacob to private school after becoming dissatisfied with public school. After looking into Protestant schools, the couple, who also have a younger son named Caleb, decided St. Thomas Aquinas Regional School in Woodbridge was the best fit for their family.
Soon, Jacob was coming home from school and asking his parents questions about the faith. Steve, a fallen away Presbyterian, tried to learn more to help his son. “He really had this burning desire to get deeper in the faith,” said Sherman. “He was asking me to start taking him to Mass and take him to the chapel to pray.” Soon, Jacob asked his parents if he could become Catholic.
After starting the process for Jacob, Steve, to his own surprise, began looking into entering the church, too. “Deacon Anthony (J. Calderón) said, ‘Look, Jacob has had Catholic instruction and we’re ready to accept him. But I need to know about you, because he’s not going to be able to meet the obligations of the church if that’s not something that you want to do.’ So it kind of caught me off guard. I said, ‘I want to support him in this, so let me find out more about what I have to do (to become Catholic).’ ”
As he attended Mass, Steve was deeply impressed by the reverent way the priests handled the Eucharist. He couldn’t believe it when Deacon Calderón, by sheer happenstance, gave him a book by Catholic author Scott Hahn — who had gone to college in Steve’s hometown and attended Steve’s church. Reading John 6, in which Jesus talks about the Eucharist, sealed the deal.
“I had to read it three or four times, because one of the biggest hurdles for me for joining the Catholic Church was the belief that the Eucharist is the body of Christ,” he said. “How could I have missed it? The Catholics had it right all along.”
At Easter Vigil, Jacob received the sacraments of baptism, first Communion and confirmation. At Pentecost, Steve entered the church. Normally, the sponsor must be 16 years old. But after getting special permission from the bishop, Jacob served as Steve’s sponsor. “I thought, what better way to support each other than for my own son to be my sponsor?” said Steve. “It was such a unique and wonderful experience. Now we share a unique bond that will be with us forever.”
These days, Steve is teaching the parish’s Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, and Carol is in the class. “The school has been the driving force behind it, because if Jacob had never been educated as a Catholic, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” said Steve. “Not at all.”
