A Poor White Rural Mississippi Protestant Boy Becomes A Catholic Priest

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP has one of the more interesting Catholic blogs on the net at Domine, da mihi hanc aquam!

I have always been interested in his conversion story because I was aware he was from some sort of Baptist/Methodist background. ALSO HE WAS FROM MISSISSIPPI. He was not from the more Catholic area of Southern Mississippi on the Coast but from the DELTA. The Mississippi Delta region has been sort of a romantic place for me. There is something about the land and the people that strike me. Even though if one were traveling up Highway 61 one might think this must the most boring place on earth. But if you stop to think of it a whole hell of a lot of Americana came out of that little part of the world.

I find the people of the Delta some of the most interesting I have ever met.

Father, as you can read in his conversion story, is typical of what I find interesting or what others might call peculiar or eccentric in the people of this region. Delta folks , despite the efforts of countless Fundamentalist and Evangelical preachers to tame them, in life don't seem to to apt to moderation which sort of turns up in the history good and bad of the area. No doubt William Faulkner or perhaps Willie Morris got into words much better what I am trying to get across.

Catholics of course exist in the Delta , largely along the river, and strangely in many places it is very Italian. My Uncle farms rice in the Delta in a little town called Merigold which is the located by the "big city" of Cleveland. I picked up a book on the Rice farmers of the Delta at his home and it was striking how many were Italian and how many of these families came from stock that migrated from Louisiana to farm.

Regardless I was always interested in his conversion story and I noticed on his blog he posted it today at Fr. Philip's Vocation Story . It is interesting as man himself.

One excerpt out of a very interesting story.

As you can read in his post he had a encounter with the Catholic Faith in High School that changed him. However he did not go to Rome right off the bat:

When my parents found out that I wanted to be a priest, they were a little upset. They put up some resistance at first but eventually gave way. By this time I had gone off to college and joined the Episcopal Church. Why the Episcopal Church and not the Catholic? The E.C. in my college town was an old-fashioned brick building built in the 1830's. Stained glass. Brass fixtures. Beautiful hangings. The priests there wore their clerics. The music was thundering, beautifully sung. The services were "churchy." The Catholic Church in town was easily confused with a dentist office. Built in the late 70's, it was a box with those 7-11 glass doors and the whole "stripped bare" vibe. No statues. No tabernacle. No stained glass. No nothing that identified this building as a Catholic Church. The services were informal to the point of being just slightly more organized than a Baptist picnic. The music was folksy guitar, hand-clapping, tamborine banging. The priest wore ugly, ugly, ugly vestments. There was absolutely nothing solemn, nothing transcendent, nothing attractive about any of it. The choice to become Episcopalian was too easy.

Sigh!!!! oh how I can relate. My first experience that sent me to the Catholic Faith was at a wonderful Episcopal Church in North Louisiana that is much like the Church Father describes. Sadly some of my first experiences in Catholic Churches were also what Father describes. It still boggles my mind that Southern Catholics of all people so fell for a lot of that nonsense.

It gets more interesting as he finds his "call" to the Priesthood in E.C rejected and starts dabbling with Marxism. How he became a Catholic Priest and then of all things a Dominican is a interesting read. It truly is amazing how God works through events