Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”—Genesis 3:1. In Part 1 of Did God Really Say (Found on the Update section of my site this week) I told my own conversion story, explaining how God initially moved me from a progressive view of Biblical scholarship to a traditional Catholic view. This set the ground for my later conversions on both the moral life and even the liturgical life as a priest. I specifically credited a Hahn tape set on Providentissimus Deus (Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on Scripture.) I explained how that series “radicalized” me long before the Traditional Latin Mass did. But they are tied together. Today, I am going to [...]

Or how I became a "Catholic Fundamentalist." In 2024, I gave a talk at a women's conference at a traditional Catholic parish called My Two Conversions.  I explained how in high school, I was a pretty liberal Catholic who worked at The Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen in the afternoons.  Perhaps in the evening, I might be found at a downtown Denver coffee-shop writing letters against the death penalty for Amnesty International. But, at 16 years old, I had a big conversion and I came to believe that Christ was truly present in the Blessed Sacrament.  Then, another 16 years later (several years after ordination, in fact) I became a traditional Catholic.  It's mostly in the above-linked talk. In between those two conversions, I went to a mainstream Catholic seminary that styled-itself to be one of the most conservative ones in [...]