Saturday, August 13, 2011

"Are You A Christian?"

I'd like to share something that happened less than a year after
my conversion to Catholicism.
I was on the train one afternoon when a girl in her mid-to-late teens walked into the car with some tracts, or pamphlets. She approached the woman sitting right across from me and said,
"I hope you don't mind my asking, but are you a Christian?"
"No," said the woman, "I'm a Catholic."
I didn't know whether to cry, or throw up! I wanted to say something, but I wasn't sure I had the right words. While I waited for the girl to reach me, I prayed for the right words, and for the guts to speak them.
After awhile, the girl came to me, and asked me the same question.
I answered, "Yes, I am a Christian. I'm a Catholic." It was just a little thing, but
I'll always be glad I spoke up.
You can be a Christian without being a Catholic, but you can't be a
Catholic without being a Christian.

5 comments:

kkollwitz said...

"No," said the woman, "I'm a Catholic."

Oh dear.

You did the right thing.

Carol@simple_catholic said...

Oh my. Good for you for speaking up.

Moonshadow said...

I probably would have answered just as you did, because usually the next question is, "Oh, what church do you attend?" I would head off such small talk right away.

But, in a perfect world, it would be enough to identify as Christian without naming churches.

Anonymous said...

But what did *she* say????? :)

Rochelle said...

@ Kathleen:
She didn't say anything. She just went on to the next person.
My guess is that she had been instructed not to "waste time" with
people who didn't want to take a tract.

Encouraging news about EWTN's Fr. Anthony

Fr. Anthony hopes to be back on the air in the near future.  Oh, HOW I'm praying for that to happen! https://franciscanmissionaries.c...