I was born in 1959 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My father was a man of many talents and, unfortunately, I think this kept him from the humility necessary to accept the need for God. My mother was what I called a “baptized unbeliever.” Argentina is a Catholic country like the Kennedys are a Catholic family, and I was not even baptized.
When I was five, my father started to suffer from depression after a surgery during which the anesthesia was botched. That was the beginning of a difficult childhood. My father never fully recovered, and his periods of depression intensified and lengthened. The last three years of his life he was in a clinic. I remember seeing him only once there.
Since my mother was consumed dealing with his illness, I pretty much raised myself. I did well in school. When I was fifteen years old I had an older friend who was discerning a vocation to the priesthood. I asked him about the death of my father, and he told me that God needed my father. “I needed my father more than God did,” I replied. That was my last attempt to reach God for many years. Looking back, I see that my friend should have directed me to someone with more theological preparation and more experience in dealing with people in pain.
When I finished high school, I took a year off to play and teach tennis. I went to the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, where I studied business. After two years, I put my education on hold and with a friend started a tennis academy that became one of the biggest such schools in Buenos Aires. After two more years, I decided to go back and finish my education. Upon graduation, I took a job as the CEO in an entertainment company and a money manager for a private bank. All this time, I was teaching at a prestigious club in Buenos Aires on weekends, where I remained the tennis pro even while I held the other two jobs. At that time, when anybody asked me if I believed in God, my standard answer was, “Of course—you’re looking at him.”
Two things that would change my life occurred in 1987. The first and most important was that I was baptized, received my First Holy Communion, and was confirmed. Of course, following family tradition, I immediately became a baptized unbeliever. Some of it could be blamed on lack of catechesis, but I was 27 years old, and I believed in personal responsibility and autonomy.
I don’t know why I became a Catholic. By that I mean I don’t know why the gift of faith was given to me and not to my father or mother. But I do know why I remain a Catholic today: Because Catholicism is true, and it is a reasonable religion.
The other important thing that happened in 1987 was that I met my wife Pam. We dated for two years and were married in 1989. I tell people that I was so far gone that seven sacraments were not enough, so Jesus gave me my “eighth sacrament” in the person of my beautiful and patient wife. When we started dating I went to Mass with her because I saw it was important to her.
One of the few things I like about Buenos Aires is the sense of reverence and tradition present in many of the old Catholic churches there. The churches speak of the beauty and majesty of God. They gave me a real sense of the distance between God and man that helped me to appreciate and recognize the necessity for Christ in order to bridge that chasm. In California, where we now live, too many Catholic churches are made in the image of man, and perhaps that explains the lack of reverence we encounter too often.
We had the blessing of having a priest celebrate our nuptial Mass who told us when we were engaged that he was not going to perform the ceremony unless we stopped having premarital sex. He set us on the way to a beautiful marriage because, not only were we not in mortal sin when we were married, but I had to start using words to express my love for Pam rather than using my body.
Since the beginning of my marriage, I saw my purpose in life was to love Pam. At first I did not see the connection between loving my wife and loving God. Today I believe that I have been “ordained,” consecrated, set apart to love my wife as God loves her. Loving her also has allowed me to grow closer to God the Father.
For example, she helped organize a one-day weekend retreat for married couples. I told her that I didn’t want to go because I thought it wasn’t going to be worth my time. Even though I had hurt her feelings, she told me I didn’t need to go; she was going alone, and I could come after I finished giving my tennis lessons that Saturday.
A few days before the retreat, I was praying when I realized suddenly that not only is God my Father, he is also Pam’s Father, and that makes him my Father-in-law. Since I have daughters, I know that, as a father, I would do anything within reason for a son-in-law if it made my daughter happy. So I prayed to God, “You are my Father, but also my Father-in-law. I will make your daughter happy, and you will bless me.” I went to the retreat. (Afterward, she told me I had been right: It wasn’t any good.)
In January 1989, after working like a madman for ten years, I had a stress breakdown. Christ gave me the grace to quit business and concentrate on being a tennis pro, which allowed me to focus more on him and on my family. Pam and I left Argentina in May of that year and, after a month-long stop in Brazil, came to the United States.
We traveled around the country a bit and decided to settle in San Marcos, a growing town in California’s North San Diego County. We joined the only parish in town, St. Mark’s, and have been members ever since. The beginnings are always hard in a foreign country, even in this, the best country on earth with some of the best people on earth, but we had each other. We became active in the parish as Hispanic youth ministers and members of the RCIA team, and I was elected to the parish council representing the Hispanic community.
From the start our marriage was very good in most areas. The problem was in the spiritual area. We were committing grave sin, even though we always were present at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on Sundays. The problem was, I had a long list of excuses not to be open to life, and we were practicing contraception. (Of course, neither of us ever heard a homily on the subject, even though it is a grave sin that affects countless marriages negatively and is the front door for abortion.) In retrospect, due to our ignorance of Church teaching, I am unsure of our degree of culpability, but I fear we were not in the state of grace. Still, we were happy, never suspecting the spiritual mess we were in. Every Sunday we said, “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life” and then went right on and rejecting him every time we renewed physically our marriage covenant.
I have always tried to make my wife happy, and she wanted to go in a Celebrate Love weekend, a retreat focused on spirituality and sexuality. It was there that we first became aware that something was wrong. One of the leader couples, Ed and Sybilla Alexander, made a big impression on us. I always say that my first son, Thomas, was born because of them. Around the same time we were approached to be a presenting team for Engaged Encounter. We accepted and started to become familiar with those teachings of Holy Mother Church that nobody seems to want to talk about, like the fact that practicing contraception is objectively a mortal sin.
Soon after that we found we were expecting our first child. Our sexual life was now properly ordered and because of that I believe at that point that the grace Jesus died on the cross to give us flowed freely into our lives. This was my second conversion and, in my never-to-be-humble opinion, the slow beginning of the real metanoia that is still going on.
Right here I want to stop and pray for and thank Scott Hahn for this change. He was the instrument Jesus used to open our minds to the truths taught by Mother Church. I remember him saying (I am sure it was in a taped talk) that Catholics are spiritual Rockefellers living in the ghetto not knowing how to write checks.
These two things, not longer using artificial birth control and listening to Hahn, changed our lives. We started to go to daily Mass every chance we got. Soon every chance we got was almost every day. We join the Militia Immaculata, and we started praying the rosary every day. I believe that I could not be the husband, father, or teacher that I am apart from the Eucharist and the rosary. And while some times it is difficult to see the effects of these devotions, I can only imagine how bad things might be without them.
I started buying tapes and books and spending between two and three hours a night studying Scripture with Dr. Hahn’s tapes. I started getting up on Tuesdays earlier than usual to meet with a few other men to study Scripture with Scott Butler (a local resident who is co-author of a fine apologetic book, Jesus, Peter, and the Keys).
My family and friends in Argentina could neither believe nor understand what was happening to me. Most of my friends remembered the tennis pro who had tooled around in a fast red sports car and at the ripe old age of twenty-four had become the manager of “New York City,” the hottest discotheque in Buenos Aires (and possibly in South America). One of my friends called my mother to find out if I was “caught” in some cult. Marcelo going to daily Mass and praying the rosary? Come on!
After Thomas, now nine years old, came Victoria, then Joseph, then John Paul, then Regina. As of this writing, our sixth child is not yet born, but is due in October 2003, and so will be with us, God willing, as you read this. These days, after everyone is in bed and if I am not too tired, I am pursuing a master’s degree in theology through the Distance Education program of the Franciscan University of Steubenville. My spiritual director, a priest at a nearby Benedictine abbey, has warned me that our Lord may call me in the future to teach something other than tennis.
Today I understand what every marriage is supposed to be. We are made in the image and likeness of God; we are created male and female. Within the Godhead there is fatherhood, sonship, and love. My wife and I reflect this reality when, in the same way that the Father gives himself unconditionally to the Son and the Son returns that love to the Father and from that love the Holy Spirit proceeds, we give ourselves to each other unconditionally and nine months latter a new person comes into being. We can be also like God in the fact that we can love unconditionally and we can hate sin.
I could love my wife with a merely human love, as many men do, but through the Eucharist I receive the gift of human love and divine love from Christ, and I can give this gift to Pam. I can love her as Jesus loves not only with the love that I am capable of as a man but also with the love that I receive from Christ.
This is why I believe that marriage is always holy, but in the Catholic Church it is holier. I also believe that, while God can act outside the sacraments, in general the love that he wants us to experience—the marriages he wants us to have—can be had in its fullness only in the bosom of Mother Church.
Today I am the pastoral associate in a nearby parish, Saint Stephen’s. One of my responsibilities is to help with the preparation for matrimony and the convalidation process. I find that most people are hungry for the beauty and truth of marriage, and I cannot understand why it is not given to them more often.
As I tell my students, I am a tennis pro with an agenda: to bring people to Christ through loving my wife and children. I want to make the sign of the sacrament of matrimony, the love between Pam and me, evident to everyone who wants to see it. I pray that when people see how much I love my wife, they will see how Christ loves the Church. Please pray for me.