In contemplating how I became an ardent disciple of Christ in his one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, I am struck by how stealthily God works and how marvelous are his ways. My conversion was accomplished not by an event or two but through the continual ebb and flow of an intimate courtship with God driven by the ceaseless work of his grace.
Most personal histories begin at birth. Mine starts a bit earlier.
My parents were second-generation Italians with dreams of having a large family. But in the sixteen years separating my older sister and me, my mother delivered three stillborn babies at term and miscarried three others. All were boys. With determination they continued to try, and in 1965 my mother again became pregnant.
That December, while my father was on a business trip to Quebec, Canada, my mother miscarried another son. But upon examining her, the doctor was surprised to detect a second heartbeat: there had been twins, and my mother still carried a baby within her womb.
When my father got word of what had happened, he was encouraged to make a pilgrimage to a local shrine, St. Anne de Beaupré. In one of the shrine’s original buildings, a set of stairs was built in 1891 as a monument to the Scala Santa, the staircase Jesus ascended to Pilate’s Praetorium. Pious belief holds that if you climb these twenty-eight steps on your knees and pray for your intention, it will be granted. On his knees my father climbed, begging God to let his child survive.
On June 1, 1966, in Providence, Rhode Island, my mother, age 40, delivered me. They dubbed me their “miracle” child. Twenty-two months later, she delivered another girl, and my sister Anne was added to our family.
A “cultural” Catholic home
It was in Moon Township, just outside of Pittsburgh, that I attended CCD classes with the nuns at St. Margaret Mary Church and made my First Communion. But we were more of what you’d call a “cultural” Catholic family—we attended Mass infrequently, did not say grace before meals, did not celebrate any feast days, and did not pray together. My parents mentioned God only when imparting a guilt trip.
My mother seldom spoke of Jesus, but hers was the face of Christ. She loved the broken and the troubled and sought to bring out the best in them because she believed their negative actions were a result of feeling unloved. She taught me to look beyond the façade and see the hearts of others, instilling in me a desire to help people see and achieve their potential.
From my father I learned how to work hard, to persevere through trials and deal with people in the business sense. It was he who, during the summer of my thirteenth year after we had moved to Richmond, Virginia, lined up the neighborhood boys in our backyard on Saturday mornings and taught me how to cut hair.
That was also the summer I was exposed to explicit publications that weren’t healthy for anyone, let alone a young teen girl. This material opened a Pandora’s box of fantasy and desire, leading me into a compulsion that distorted my understanding of love and sexuality. Had I not been exposed to this material at such a young age, I likely would have avoided years of guilt and agony in fighting the demons that lurk in the recesses of the mind even after years of healing.
Upon graduating from high school, I began working in salons. Blessed with creative talent and a genuine desire to make people feel good, I quickly built up a clientele. With success came traveling to beauty industry tradeshows in New York, Boston, and Baltimore. This flashy lifestyle whetted my appetite for reveling in the glitz and glamour of the party scene.
Since I looked and acted mature for my age, I had no problem getting into clubs and being served alcohol. I also was warmly received into crowds older than myself, which provided increased opportunities to experience the ways of the world. My mother used to wait up, sitting on the sofa in the living room praying her rosary, until I came in late. “If you’re praying those beads for me, you’re wasting your time,” I would tell her. “It won’t work.”
Dark times lead to faith
In 1987 my father lost his job then became bedridden for nine months. At the same time my mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. At the age of twenty-one, I became the sole breadwinner for my family. I was angry and frustrated and, to ease the pain, partied as hard at night as I worked during the day. It was one of the darkest periods of my life.
I hated my circumstances, and I hated God for destroying our happy family. Despite how hard I worked, I was not able to sustain the income needed to maintain our home, and the following year we lost it. We relocated to Hampton with the help of some friends and went from living in comfort to having nothing.
I ended up moving in with the guy I was dating to escape my depressing situation, leaving my parents hurt and ashamed. I didn’t care—I could see only my own pain. Besides, I thought I would eventually marry him. My mother told me she would bless the marriage only if I would go back to church and make my confirmation. And so, placating my dying mother, I contacted the closest Catholic parish and made plans to begin RCIA. There was nothing spiritual in about it.
In the fall of 1989, my mother died. One of the last things I asked her was, when she got to the other side, to give me some sign that she was still with me.
Two weeks after her death, I showed up reluctantly for RCIA class. A woman greeted me with a smile and said, “Robin, this is Eva, your sponsor. She’s here to help you on your journey.”
My knees buckled and my stomach lurched. Before me stood a woman who could have been my mother’s identical twin! Same height, hair, smile, sparkle in her brown eyes, and, I was to find, many of my mother’s mannerisms. She even wore my mother’s fragrance.
One evening after RCIA, feeling hopeless, I pulled out my mother’s Bible and randomly opened it, hoping God would speak to me. I closed my eyes and put down my index finger. The passage read:
For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes (Jer. 29:11-14).
Emotion welled in me; I clutched my pillow to my chest and sobbed. Could there be a God who really loved me, who really cared enough to send me this message? Could I hope against hope that there was something bigger out there, an all-powerful Father like I was told about in second-grade CCD class who could change my lot but whom I had chosen to ignore for so long?
Eva helped me through RCIA, and I came through on fire for my Catholic Faith. I learned a lot and felt the Holy Spirit working in me. Had I gone through confirmation as a teen, I most likely would have not retained anything and probably would have left the Faith for good. God knew what he was doing.
Led astray by a Jehovah’s Witness
Shortly after I was confirmed at the Easter Vigil in 1990, I loaded my car and set off across the country to begin a new life in Southern California working for one of the manufacturers for whom I represented in our family business. I was soon caught up in the whirlwind of being on my own, discovering the nightlife and meeting new people, and I chose to separate religion from my social life. Reveling in the cesspool of sin, still searching for the void of love to be filled, I ignored much of what I learned in RCIA and slipped back into old bad habits.
Not completely putting God to the side (he was still there in my nicely compartmentalized life), I began to meet with a man at work who said he used to teach Bible studies and offered to instruct me. What I didn’t know was that Bob was a Jehovah’s Witness. After three months of Bob’s Bible study, I became convinced that the Catholic Church was the whore of Babylon and that anyone associated with this cult was doomed to hell.
I spent the next nine months determined to prove that the Catholic Church was wrong in all its teachings. Gathering information in those pre-internet days was more difficult, but between late nights partying and days spent working, I sought out what I could. And yet the more I looked, the more confused I became; the things I was finding seemed to prove the Church’s teachings are actually true.
Late one afternoon on the way home from work, on impulse I stopped at a Christian bookstore. As I poked around, the sales clerk approached me and saw my name badge.
“DiGiacomo—you’re Italian,” she said. “I’m Italian, too.” Her accent was thick. “My name is Annamaria.” I turned toward her, and, as at that first RCIA class, an image of my mother was before me. Not only did this woman resemble my mother, she bore her name.
I recovered quickly. “I’m looking for something to prove that the Catholic Church’s teaching on Communion is wrong,” I said.
Her hearty laugh filled the space. “That might be hard to find here,” she said. “We are a Catholic bookstore. Tell me, how is it that you are Italian and not Catholic?” I told her how my mother had died, how I had been confirmed and had come to California, and how Bob had proved to me that the Church was wrong. Again she laughed and invited me to her nearby home for dinner and a video.
As Annamaria prepared one of my mother’s simple favorites, spaghetti aglio e olio, I sat in her den watching Bob and Penny Lord’s Miracles of the Eucharist. A lump swelled in my throat, and a sense of shame overtook me. It was as though I awoke from a coma. How could I have doubted all the beauty and truth shown to me during my time in RCIA? How could I have been so easily brainwashed? Then—how could God forgive me? Driving back to my apartment, I asked God for forgiveness and begged for the grace to seek him out once more.
I began to attend Mass again and joined a Small Christian Community group. It was there that I was received in the state of worldly brokenness, loved unconditionally, and saw Christ in action. These people were nothing like the Christians I encountered in the past who condescendingly bombarded me with Scripture, hoping to guilt me into changing my sinful ways.
The couples in the SCC group were a testimony to marriage and family. They were witnesses of the kind of love for which I thirsted but didn’t know how to obtain. Little by little, their example taught me what it meant to be Christ-like. The faith born in my intellect finally moved its way to my heart. I began to understand that God really does want us to enjoy life and be happy and that his laws are not meant to oppress us but to give us freedom and peace.
True love at last
Through an answer to prayer, I met my future husband, Mike, and for the first time—with support and guidance from my SCC group—was able to experience a relationship the way God intended. It was liberating to have someone want me for all of who I was—the good, bad, and ugly—instead of what I could do for him. For two years we tried hard to do things God’s way by building a foundation based on mutual friendship sans physical intimacy.
In May 1994 we were married. That day at the altar we invited God to be at the center of our marriage, because it was only through his love that our love for one another was stirred up—no barriers, nothing held back, total trust and commitment, open to life and without any guilt in passionately enjoying one of the greatest gifts bestowed on a man and woman.
After six months of Natural Family Planning charting and no signs of fertility, coupled with the fact that two doctors told me I most likely would not be able to conceive, we were resigned to not having children. We ended up having six in nine years, three boys and three girls. They all were our “miracle babies.”
Pierced by a novel
In ebb and flow in my spiritual growth, one happening in particular was paramount in the advancement of my faith. It began with a novel someone gave me while I was pregnant with our first child—Pierced by a Sword by Bud Macfarlane Jr. There is a scene where the main character has a car accident and is given a vision of his whole life—the good things he had done and the bad, including how his actions had affected others.
Up until then I hadn’t thought much about my past. Yes, I confessed my current, obvious sins, but my past sins had affected many others’ lives, for which I was going to be held accountable and for which I needed to seek reconciliation.
That was a painful night. I began to write down all the recollections the story stirred: people I had hurt, things I didn’t do that I should have. God used the novel to pierce my heart. He removed the scales from my eyes to reveal just how much I had hurt him and others. I felt sick; my head spun in anguish at all those things—things I did to the One who had loved me with such intensity and who tenaciously kept after me.
In tears, I called a close friend and told her what I had experienced. She gave me an examination of conscience to prepare for a general confession and said she would take me to a good confessor.
We went to an evening of recollection given by a priest, and as I waited my turn for confession, I began to sweat. For the first time I was about to lay everything on the table, with nothing held back. The cancerous vestiges of my darkest, deepest sins would soon be cut out by the gentle hand of one of God’s trusted surgeons, and I’d leave with a clean bill of health to begin life anew.
When I exited the confessional, I could scarcely feel my feet against the floor. I floated down the center aisle of the church to sit in front of our Lord exposed on the altar and thanked him for his immense mercy. Complete serenity engulfing, pure love penetrating, immeasurable joy surging through every cell! I knew the indescribable peace of having been entirely honest and having been reconciled with God.
The work of God
That evening opened a new chapter in my life. In the talks I was introduced to Josemaría Escríva and the prelature he founded, Opus Dei (“the work of God”). His way of sanctification through fulfilling ordinary, daily duties made becoming a saint look desirable and doable. I continued attending the monthly evenings of recollection and within a year became a cooperator and began to see a spiritual director on a regular basis. It was through the formation received in Opus Dei that I came to love the richness of doctrine in the Catholic Church and appreciate to beauty of truth.
I am often humbled as I sit in thanksgiving after receiving our Lord in Holy Communion by how he loves me, never giving up on me, no matter how far I stray. In this Year of Mercy, my desire is to share this love with others. I may not be an eloquent theologian, but I’ve learned the way to attract people to Christ is by first being an example of his love and mercy.
Our world is thirsty for love. People are looking for it in all the wrong places. They need to see the face of Christ and experience his love so that they can develop a trust in why he asks us to live within the laws he has established. Had I not been loved into my Catholic Faith in my most broken state, I would never have understood its beauty or been filled by its depth. I am so grateful that God knew how to draw me home.
This past June, Mike and I celebrated my fiftieth birthday by making the first of hopefully more pilgrimages to the place where my father had pleaded for my tiny life. Words cannot describe the feeling of kneeling in front of the relics of St. Anne and feeling an overwhelming supernatural presence. Time stood still, and tears came in waves as I sat there in awe of what God has done in my life.
I prayed for my father—who has lived with us our entire married life, now 88 and suffering from dementia—as well as the many other people who entrusted their prayers to my care. The results may not be as dramatic as a perilous pregnancy brought to fruition, but I’ve already seen healing sparks of answered prayer glowing in many places around me. Thank you, St. Anne, for your intimate concern for my family.
Thank you, Anna Marie DiGiacomo, for praying those rosaries when I was far from God and for showing me that you are always with me, even from the other aide.
And thank you, heavenly Father, for never giving up on me.