Hello, friends.

One of the assumptions people often make about priests is that we've always believed, that faith came naturally to us, that perhaps from childhood we wanted to be priests, loved prayer, and never had serious doubts about God.

That was not my story.

I'm an adult convert to the faith.

It was a long period of my life when I was convinced that God did not exist.

Not simply that I doubted him, but that belief in him

was irrational. I looked at the state of reality as I understood it, and I concluded that belief in

God was intellectually unsustainable. If you had met me years ago and told me that one day I would be a Catholic

priest, I would have laughed at you. If you had told me that I would spend my life preaching Christ,

handling relics of the saints, speaking about the supernatural realities of the faith, and freeing people

from demons, I would have thought you were

insane. And then one day, I walked into a chapel and everything changed. Today I sit before you

as a Catholic priest because Christ confronted me in a way that I never expected. And I tell you this story today, April 27,

2006, because today is the 30th anniversary of that conversion from atheism. I converted on this day

in 1996. And so before I tell you what happened in that chapel, I need you to

understand how impossible this conversion really was. So mine was not a story of someone drifting

away from faith and then slowly returning or a story of someone who had questions, some doubts about the faith.

Mine is a story of someone who believed that faith itself was foolish.

And so if you're listening right now and feel far from God, intellectually, emotionally, morally, spiritually, I want you to know something. I was once

convinced believing in God was equivalent to believing in fairies or leprechauns. I was wrong.

I grew up in a nominally Catholic family. My parents had my brother and I have baptized when we were infants, but we didn't grow up in a household that practiced the faith. We occasionally went to Mass, Christmas, Easter, and occasionally some other occasion, but not very often.

Now, I was put in Catholic school by my parents, both my brother and I were, and I had some

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