Rome Sweet Home

by Kimberly Hahn

  I’d committed to giving up me for Lent and yet, as is always true with God, what have I given up but what I didn’t want to hold onto Your love has broken through, O God. Yes, Scott was right. Why were you doing this to me? To demonstrate your love for me.

  In Grove City I remember the day I began to feel I didn’t know who you were: the God of the Protestants or of the Catholics. Were you just rooting for Scott and angry at me? I wondered. But I wouldn’t budge. I would not read or study or even pray—it was too painful. I didn’t want to die—to dreams, to visions, to my M.A., to my understanding of the truth. I had it down pat. To redefine theological terms or risk losing friendships or hurting my family—it just couldn’t be. It was a nightmare from which I was sure I would awaken.

  But now, Lord, I can sense your love for me throughout. You don’t just love me now that I’ve come to this truth. You’ve loved me every step of the way—for who I was, not just for what I would become.

  Please teach me all over again, I want to be pliable, I’ve been broken. Pour on the oil of your joy to take the broken pieces of clay and make them moldable. My heart sings anew the goodness of the Lord.

  The crosses you have given me through Scott and from myself these last seven years are gifts. Suffering is having its way.

  During a prayer time the week before Easter, I was amazed by how much the monstrance seemed to symbolize the Catholic Church. Like many Protestants, I had been concerned that Mary, the saints and the sacraments were roadblocks between believers and God so that, to get to God, one would have to go around them. They seemed to complicate life with God unnecessarily—like accretions on the sides of sunken treasures, they had to be discarded to get to what was important.

  But now I could see that the opposite was true. Catholicism was not a distant religion, but a presence-oriented one. Catholics were the ones who had Jesus physically present in churches and saw themselves as living tabernacles after receiving the Eucharist. And because Jesus is the Eucharist, keeping him in the center allows all of the rich doctrines of the Church to emanate from him, just as the beautiful gold rays stream forth from the Host in the monstrance.

  My Easter Vigil was to hold a joy mixed with sorrow similar to Scott’s. My parents had decided to attend the Mass, since I was making a major, life-changing decision they believed they should witness. I was glad they had come, because it seemed to me that I should feel their pain at the separation I was causing, even while I was experiencing the joy of being received into the Church.

  They came in love to be with us. We went out to dinner the night before, and I had a wonderful chance to share from my heart why I was becoming Catholic. I wanted them to know this was my decision, and it had been hard won through much prayer and study. In fact, I said that if Scott were to die the Monday after Easter, I would not consider dating a Protestant again because my faith had come at too dear a price.

  I also wanted to tell them that I was not the primary cause of their pain but that the Lord was the One behind it all. For me, it had been so much easier to blame Scott for causing me pain or the Catholic Church for intruding into my life rather than to see the Lord’s hand at work. But now I could see that God in his mercy had been meddling in my life because he loved me that much.

  Easter Vigil morning Barb, a dear friend, brought three Easter lilies from a group of which our family had become a part. This group, Catholic Families and Friends, were planning a special party that night to celebrate with us. They wanted the house to be filled all day with a fragrance of joy. Next my sponsors, Dr. and Mrs. Al Szews, came from Milwaukee with special gifts. In preparation for the service, my parents prayed with me at home, and then my sponsors prayed with me at the church.

  Following first confession, I prayed alone to prepare my heart for the Vigil Mass. I scrawled a note to Scott, “Dearest Scott, I am so thankful for you and for your forging this path for us. I love you. K.” I didn’t know how to express the abundant gratitude I felt in my heart for Scott’s faithfulness to God.

  In the pew behind me sat Scott, who wept with joy to see me come into the fullness of the Faith and receive the Lord in the Eucharist with him, and my parents, who wept with sorrow to see me join myself to a Church they would never have chosen for me, which now separated us at the table of the Lord. I thought I could hardly bear the joy or the pain at the giving of the sign of peace.

  Shortly after the service, the celebration began. My parents slipped away after a brief stay. The joy expressed for me was overwhelming. Easter Sunday, after the glorious morning Mass, our family went to Milwaukee, where we celebrated our becoming a Catholic family with dear friends in the Wolfe’s home (Scott’s sponsors). What indescribable joy! In my spiritual walk, “summer” had arrived.

  Easter Vigil, 1990. The night Kimberly was received into the Church. Here with Scott and Fr. Memenas, St. Patrick’s Church, Joliet, Illinois.

  9

  Catholic Family Life

  Scott:

  When evangelical Protestants convert to the Catholic Church, they often enter into a kind of “ecclesiastical culture shock”. They leave robust congregational singing, practical biblical preaching, a conservative pro-family political voice in the pulpit and a vital sense of community, with various prayer meetings, fellowships and Bible studies to choose from each week. In contrast, the average Catholic parish usually finds itself lacking in these areas. While these converts typically feel that they have “come home” by becoming Catholics, they do not always feel “at home” in their new parish families. Kimberly and I both experienced this.

  Places like Franciscan University of Steubenville prove that this need not be so. What has impressed us the most from our time in Steubenville is precisely the way it combines the evangelical and the Catholic. I am talking about the way in which the Catholic Faith unites what other religions tend to separate: personal piety and liturgical ritual; evangelistic outreach and social action; spiritual fervor and intellectual rigor; academic freedom and dynamic orthodoxy; enthusiastic worship and reverent contemplation; powerful preaching and sacramental devotion; Scripture and Tradition; body and soul; the individual and the corporate.

  Since Kimberly’s conversion, we now share all of this as a family. We make an effort to attend daily Mass as a family at the University. With the Eucharist at the center of our lives, we are able to show our children how the Bible and the liturgy go together, the menu and the meal. Our kids see dozens of priests and hundreds of students who are living out the gospel in practical ways.

  Teaching such students has proven to be one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. They have a passion to study Scripture, to learn theology and to ask hundreds of challenging questions. (I affectionately refer to the students as my “holy brainsuckers”.) When class is over, they seek to apply the lessons they’ve learned in their work and relationships. I am convinced that God is raising up many of the future leaders of the Catholic Church here at the University.

  Besides my work at the University, the Lord has given Kimberly and me numerous opportunities to minister across the country. With several hundred of my talks on audio and video cassettes, the message is reaching far beyond our limited range of travel. These tapes are now circulating in many countries. People have written and called from Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, Holland, Poland, Lithuania, Belgium, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Ghana, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and others; and to think that we feared we might never be able to minister together again!

  All of this has been made possible through our partnership with Terry Barber and Saint Joseph Communications. Within one year’s time, “The Tape”, which recorded the talk that I gave to only thirty-five people back in 1989, had been purchased by more than thirty-five thousand. That number has climbed to the hundreds of thousands in the last few years. Besides the tape of my conversion story, Terry has released over two hundred of my tapes touching on a wide variety of subjects, explaining various aspects of the Catholic Faith.

&nbs
p; My father was right after all—and he never let me forget it. He made sure that I knew how proud he was of his youngest son, the nonjeweler theologian.

  After a long illness, he passed away in December 1991. It was one of the most difficult and yet most blessed experiences of my life. For many years he had been an agnostic, but through his suffering, he recovered a personal faith in Christ. During the last few weeks of his life, we were able to spend meaningful time together praying, reading Scripture and talking about his life and the Lord. I will never forget the privilege of holding his hand and closing his eyes when his heavenly Father called him to himself; nor will I ever stop thanking God for giving me an earthly father who made it so easy to love my heavenly Father.

  One week later, my father-in-law, Dr. Jerry Kirk, called to invite me to accompany him to Rome the following month to meet with Pope John Paul II. Talk about the grace of God.

  As the founder of R.A.A.P. (the Religious Alliance against Pornography), Jerry had been invited by members of the Roman hierarchy to conduct a three-day session in the Vatican with a group of a dozen major religious leaders from America. Cardinal Bernardin had organized the meetings in order to coordinate strategies with Vatican officials for combatting hardcore pornography worldwide. At the end of our deliberations, we were to have a private audience with the Holy Father to present our conclusions and to discuss them with him more closely.

  So I went to Rome for the first time. In between meetings, I was able to visit Saint Peter’s and a few other sacred sites—not as a tourist but as a pilgrim. It was overwhelming.

  At the end of the three days, on a Thursday afternoon, we were taken through a labyrinth of corridors and ushered into a meeting room. As we sat there waiting for the Pope’s arrival, I prayed intently. After he entered the room, the proceedings seemed to go by in a flash.

  When they were over, Jerry had the privilege of introducing each of us to the Pope. When it came my turn, I heard my father-in-law say to my spiritual father, “Your Holiness, I’d like to introduce you to Scott Hahn, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville.”

  I shook his hand, and that was it—on to the next religious leader in line. Afterward, I stood there rejoicing and thanking God for the privilege of meeting my spiritual father in Christ, even if it was for just a few seconds. Still, I got to squeeze the hand of the Vicar of Christ, the successor to Peter—no small thrill for this former anti-Catholic.

  One hour later the leaders were regathering in the Vatican chamber where we had been meeting all week. When I walked in, I heard gales of laughter coming from the direction of my mother-in-law, who was standing at a table staring at a photograph, I went to investigate. Standing next to her, I looked down and beheld a picture of her husband introducing her son-in-law to the Pope. “Can you believe it?! After all these years, your father-in-law gets to introduce you to the Pope.” As she laughed more heartily, she hugged me warmly. What an awesome mother-in-law!

  A few minutes later the phone rang in an office down the hall. An older man came into the meeting room and asked, “Is Professor Scott Hahn here?”

  I waved my hand to identify myself.

  “A telephone call for you.”

  As I walked down the hall, I wondered, Who could it be? I picked up the phone and heard a heavily accented voice.

  “Are you able to join His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, tomorrow morning at 7 A.M. for Mass in his private chapel?”

  At first I thought it was a joke. Then I remembered a meeting earlier that week with Professor Rocco Buttiglione, who offered to use his influence with the Pope’s private secretary to get me into the Pope’s morning Mass.

  “Yes, I can make it.” But I was so nervous that I forgot to ask for the details.

  Fortunately, Cardinal Cassidy, one of the Vatican officials in the meeting room, explained to me the procedure. I was to be at a certain gate by 6:30 A.M., where a Swiss guard would meet me.

  The next morning, I got up after a futile struggle to sleep and took a taxi down to Saint Peter’s. I got there more than an hour ahead of time. Pacing around Saint Peter’s square, I prayed a Rosary and prepared myself for the privilege of a lifetime.

  Sure enough, at the appointed time, someone came out to meet me. He led me down some stairs and through a series of corridors until I was standing amidst several bishops and priests who were vesting to concelebrate Mass with the Pope.

  I stood there nervously, when suddenly the Pope’s personal secretary stuck his head through the doorway and looked around the room. Finally, he spoke up. “Vare eese dee tay-ologee professor frum Stubbenveel Ooniversitee?”

  I could barely piece together the question through his thick accent. Then it finally dawned that he was asking for me.

  I waved my hand rather sheepishly and said, “Here I am.”

  He looked over and nodded his head. “Gute, I vill tell heem.”

  I had no idea what that was all about, but I got a kick out of all the foreign prelates looking my way and wondering, “Who is this guy and how does he rate?”

  Moments later we were led down the hall and into a small private chapel. Upon entering, I noticed that Pope John Paul II was already there on his kneeler praying before the tabernacle. As I knelt a few feet away, I asked the Lord for a special grace to unite my heart with that of my spiritual father as he renewed the covenant and celebrated the sacrifice of Christ in the Mass.

  What reverence and love were shown by the Pope at every point in the eucharistic liturgy. I recall how never before had I felt so vividly the reality of Christ’s presence.

  When Mass was over, the people were led out of the chapel while the Holy Father remained on his kneeler in thanksgiving. I was the last to leave. I couldn’t resist the temptation. I stopped and knelt a few feet behind him and prayed—there alone with the Pope for maybe half a minute—until I heard footsteps scurrying down the hall to the chapel. Just as I suspected, they had taken a count and had found that someone was missing. I got up to go just as the Pope’s personal secretary reentered the chapel. He guided me, firmly but gently, back into the room where the Pope would meet with us in a few minutes.

  While waiting, I prayed and then rehearsed what I was to do—when suddenly the Pope walked into the room. What struck me almost immediately was how much more alert and energetic he appeared now, right after Mass, compared to the look of exhaustion I had seen on his face the day before during our private audience with him in the afternoon.

  He seemed intensely interested in each one he spoke with as he walked around. He seemed to treat each person as though he were the only one in the room. He looked him right in the eyes and listened intently before speaking. Then my turn came.

  He stepped up to greet me, and as I reached out with both arms, we embraced. I then handed him a beautifully packaged set of my tape series on “Answering Common Objections”, along with an envelope that contained a personal letter and two checks as tokens of love and appreciation from the Barber and Hahn families.

  He looked me right in the eyes and said, “God bless you. Are you the theology professor from Steubenville University?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Please send my greetings and blessings to the community there in Steubenville.”

  “Holy Father, my own natural father just died last month, and now my heavenly Father has blessed me with the privilege of meeting you, my spiritual father.” With that, we embraced a second time.

  He stared intently and said, “I’m sorry to hear that your father died. God bless him. I’ll pray for him.”

  My heart leapt as I immediately recalled a certain line of Scripture: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. . .”

  Then I briefly explained, in about a minute’s time, all about my pilgrimage of faith as an anti-Catholic Presbyterian minister who had become a Catholic just six years before.

  He listened carefully before giving me one more handshake, a blessing and a Rosary. As I left the presence of Pope John Paul
II—the one anointed by my heavenly Father and eldest Brother to shepherd the covenant family of God on earth—I had a strong sense that God was saying, “Scott, the best is yet to come.”

  Kimberly:

  Six weeks after I was received into the Church, our eldest son, Michael, made his First Communion. I had been a Catholic only a short time, and I felt that my heart was going to burst. I could not imagine what it felt like for those parents who as cradle Catholics had dreamt of the time they would get married, have a child and bring him to the table of the Lord for First Communion. (We have now had the opportunity to bring Gabriel to First Communion and are eagerly awaiting that special time with Hannah.)

  The concerns on my heart each time have been these: first, I hoped the feast of the Passover Lamb from heaven was more important than the feast of the party afterward; and second, I hoped that the focus was on the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist rather than the presents the children would receive later.

  Once, at the consecration of the Mass, Scott leaned over to me and said, “Can you imagine what the angels must think?”

  His question led me to think about realities I’d not considered before. Certainly the angels are present for the liturgy, but they do not receive the Lord. They must peer down in wonder and awe at the incredible love our heavenly Father had for us in sending Jesus to earth to take on lowly human nature, to lay down that life in sacrifice for us and, finally, to feed us with that resurrected and glorified offering of his Body and Blood. What a glorious mystery!

  Fasting for the hour beforehand has been a good experience, too, because it has been a small mortification (of which there are all too few in my life) to point to my need to hunger for souls.

  Our move to Steubenville has been such a blessing. We have all made many wonderful friends at the University and in the community. There are more than forty families in our Heart of Mary Homeschool Support Group. And the college students have been a great reinforcement to our children of our own commitment to the Lord.