Without Our Lady Father Donald might be dead

"In 1992 my life changed dramatically," said Father Donald Calloway MIC. "I had a profound conversion experience after reaching rock bottom." Rock bottom indeed! Now a young priest who serves as assistant rector at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Father Donald had been a runaway youngster who was immersed in everything from drug abuse to theft.

"I had gone through all a boy could do up to the age of twenty. My mother had been married three times and we had no religion. The family was very hedonistic. There was a downward spiral in my life. One night in 1992 I knew that my life would radically change, that something was going to happen in my life to cause a radical change. I knew something was going to happen. Something was coming," he said.

For a while Donald remained in his room waiting for this unknown "something" to arrive, then went to the hall looking for a magazine or book to read as he waited, guided by an amazing internal feeling. "I wanted to look at some kind of magazine with pictures while I was waiting, something like National Geographic, and I went out there and there was a book that caught my eye," he said. "On the binding it said, The Queen of Peace Visits Medjugorje."

It was a book about the apparition site in Bosnia-Hercegovina by Father Joseph Pelletier and Donald couldn't comprehend what the words meant. He wondered if his parents had taken up a foreign language! Looking at the pictures, he saw six children staring up into nothing. It was the seers during an apparition—something he had never even heard about. He read the caption and it said they were looking at the "Blessed Virgin Mary." He was so poorly versed in religion that he didn't know who the Blessed Mother was. "I thought Jesus was like Santa Claus," he recalled. "I was a blank slate." Looking at more of the pictures, he saw other words like the Rosary, Communion, and the Eucharist that he had little idea about.

There was all this Catholic lingo, but he began to avidly read it. He couldn't put it down. "I read that whole book by 3:30 or 4 a.m. in the morning," he said. "I ate that book like it was life. I consumed it. And I said to myself, 'That is true. Everything in that book is true.' She was saying that Jesus was God, and I thought, anything she says is true. She seemed so beautiful and flawless. She captivated my heart. And I said, 'I give myself totally to this woman.'"

Donald was twenty, going on 21, and "all I knew was that I was madly in love with God and Our Savior… I don't remember ever having said a prayer in my life," he said of his return to his room. "I looked at the book, the six children, who were on their knees with their hands folded, and I did the same thing and just looked. I had no idea how it worked. I didn't know what was supposed to happen next. My eyes focused on the picture of the Sacred Heart and as I looked at that image something within me knew that was the God-Man hanging on the Cross—and that everything the Blessed Virgin said was for people like me.

Instantly, Donald had lost his craving for all his vices—from impure thoughts about women to cigarettes. There was no more desire to do anything he had been doing! "God had simply changed me, and it was unbelievable," he said. "Christ just overwhelmed me with His love. I started 'living' in the church, saying the Stations of the Cross until I was worn out, even slept in the pews. I began reciting the Rosary, wearing a scapular, reading everything I could on the saints." He experienced a supernatural "infusion of knowledge" about the faith and became a Catholic within nine months. Shortly after, he joined the Marians of the Immaculate Conception and discerned a priestly vocation.

Last September, he finally made it to Medjugorje—where he delivered the homily as forty other priests joined him on the altar. "All I knew was that I loved Jesus," he said. "I loved every minute of Medjugorje... It's the edge of Heaven, wonderful." At the seminary most of his peers had also been there. "Our Lady is building up this army, this whole new generation, layer by layer." And as for Our Lady of Medjugorje: without her, he admitted, "I might be dead."

Originally reported in 2004 in Spirit Daily online

Adapted from: Fr Donald Calloway MIC