My Journey to Conversion and Catholicism

My name is Cory Wendal Roan. I was born in 1974 to Evangelical missionary parents in Bangkok, Thailand. My family (of six) stayed there until 1986 at which point we moved permanently to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. My parents church-hopped for several years until my mother finally decided to stay at a Northern Baptist Fellowship assembly.

My father was raised by a lapsed Irish-Catholic man and an agnostic mother. He experienced conversion to Christ in his early twenties with the help of a Plymouth Brethren gentleman. He entered missionary training school two years later and met my mother there. My mother was raised by devout Calvinist parents who were lay-missionaries to Central America. She attended Bible School after high-school and then met my father. They spent thirteen years on the mission-field in Thailand before coming back to Canada.

I remember the night my mother sat me on the edge of my bed and told me about Christ’s death on the cross, my sins and my need to repent and ask Jesus to come into my heart. I was six years old. I was taught that as of that point, I was ‘saved’ and merited heaven no matter what I might do in my life. As time went on, what I learned of Christianity came from Bible stories I read and the example of my parents and other missionary families. All in all I had a wholesome upbringing with lots of neat experiences of being an M.K. (missionary kid).

In Canada my sense of Christianity was seriously challenged from just about every spectrum of the sociological scale. I wavered in my commitment to Christ, and eventually came to a crossroads. In 1996 at the age of 23, I decided to move away from the group of non-Christians I had associated with and search for the Truth. With a sense of God in my heart and a longing to find Him, I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. It was while attending college there that I met the man who would be my help into the Catholic Church. His name was John.

It was truly a miraculous encounter because I had seen John in a vision when I was still a young boy in Thailand. The vision suggested that a man would confront me in my early manhood to give my life to Christ. True to the vision, John, a former Southern Baptist, and I became friends at school, and he began inviting me to consider the Catholic Church. I attended pro-life conferences, charismatic prayer meetings, adoration nights, Holy Masses and other Catholic events with him. I slowly began to see unraveling before my very eyes the whole story of Catholicism from Abraham to David, from David to Jesus and from Jesus to the Father through the Holy Spirit. I believe that faith infused into me through my openness to the Truth and Love and by praying the Rosary. It was the graces of the Rosary that softened my heart to accept the Catholic Faith.

I joined the R.C.I.A. and began working through all the Protestant errors that pose an obstacle to intellectual acceptance of the Catholic Faith. It was actually the first time I studied Protestant theology. I had always simply assumed Protestants to be ‘right’ and Catholics to be ‘wrong’. This was of course due to my upbringing. After studying justification, authority in the Church, Jesus Christ and His Atonement, the role of Scripture in the Church, the Mass, the Sacraments, Tradition and tradition and of course, Mary, I decided that only the Catholic Church provided adequate teaching on all of these areas. It was entirely scary for me to discover this and I half feared and half longed to tell my family of this new discovery. When I did, I received a cool response. My family has stated that they will not become Catholic. It is painful to not be united spiritually with my family who of course are spiritual in a different tradition. However, I have faith in God that one day all pains will cease and we will be together praising the Lord, whether on this earth or in heaven.

I was baptized during the Easter Vigil in 1997. I am currently in seminary studying to be a priest. I have joined a Society of Apostolic Life called the Companions of the Cross. I have seven more years to go before ordination. Please pray for me and for the Companions. You can visit the Companions at www.companionscross.ca.