New priest relates tale of conversion at Dinner and Discourse
Monica Tomutsa/News Editor
Issue date: 9/21/05 Section: News
- Page 1 of 4 next >
|
"When you grow up in rural Mississippi it usually means one thing about your religious upbringing: it means you're southern Baptist, and a particular kind of southern Baptist-you're a fundamentalist Southern Baptist.
"My family wasn't particularly religious, and my father had the notion that 'the ox was always in the ditch'. I would complain on Sundays that we really shouldn't be working; we should be in church. Of course I could care less about church, I just didn't want to be cutting firewood," he said.
During high school, Powell was often asked by his Southern Baptist teachers and friends if he had "accepted Jesus Christ into his heart as his personal Lord and Savior?"
"I was always scared since I hadn't had that experience as far as I knew, but I would always say yes, absolutely," he said.
Until a trip to Mexico with his high school junior Spanish class, Powell knew nothing about the Catholic Church. On the trip, they visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadeloupe and the National Cathedral.
"We stepped off the tour bus into the piazza in 1981 and the very first thing I saw was this sea of black mantillas of all the abuelitas with their rosaries on their knees crawling. Their knees were bloody and they were leaving trails of blood on the piazza and I turned to my teacher, who was Catholic, and asked, 'What was that? What is going on?'" he said.
"The first thing that attracted me to this was that this was a physical expression of the faith that I had never seen before, and it absolutely shocked the living day lights out of me," he continued.
Even though Powell had never been inside of a Catholic Church, everything seemed familiar.
"I came back from Mexico with what I consider a mystical experience in the cathedral," he said.
He started to research the Catholic Church and discovered he felt more and more at home there. At 17, he decided he wanted to convert, but shortly after things changed.
When he went to his college orientation fair, the Catholic table was empty. It had some flyers but no campus minister or priest.