A day before Ed's ordination, and two days before Christ the King was to be received into the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a reporter from the Baltimore Sun called to interview him. After speaking with the reporter for about an hour, Ed said with a big smile on his face, "She wants to talk with you now."
One evening in 1977, Ed read an article in the Catholic Review about The St. Vincent de Paul Infant Home in Dulaney Valley, MD. The infant home was run by Catholic Charities, and they had recently made the decision to close it. The plan was to place the babies in homes where they would receive one-on-one care from loving families while the administrative details were being finalized for their adoptions. The purpose of the article was to recruit foster parents who would be willing to bring the pre-adoptive infants into their homes for about 6 to 8 weeks. Ed and I had volunteered at St. Vincent's before we were married so of course this article got our attention, and within no time, we were on the phone.
Within a week after the first baby left, the next baby came, and two months later, Katie arrived. When she was four months old, a close friend gave us a teaching tape by an Irish Catholic nun, Sr. Briege McKenna, who had (and still does have), a healing ministry within the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Sister's message was simple: Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. She spoke of the necessity of committing ourselves totally to Him.
When the tape was over, my heart was bursting. What had been missing in my life was Jesus, flesh and blood and divinity! How had I not seen Him before? He was there in the liturgy and the scriptures at Mass, in the Eucharist, in all of the sacraments, in my own soul, and yet I had failed to respond personally to Him, and thus had failed to really know Him.
I had been like the blind man in the Gospel who, after Jesus placed spit on his eyes, saw men, but they looked like trees walking. And now, through the words of Sister Briege, Jesus touched my eyes a second time, and I could see everything clearly.
That night I did respond to Him, I made a total commitment of my life to Jesus, and then I prayed for us to be able to adopt Katie.
For various administrative reasons, Katie's stay with us was extended many months beyond the norm. The mutual bond between our family and Katie was immeasurable. As far as we were concerned, she was our daughter, and as far as she was concerned, we were the only parents she had ever known.
There are some who might call what happened to me, and subsequently to Ed, a "born again" experience, but having already been born again by Baptism, we refer to it as a personal conversion. It was that powerful, and our lives have never been the same since. After much prayer and waiting, we approached Catholic Charities and made a formal petition to adopt Katie who was then about seven months old.
As these gifts flourished in his life, a sense of longing for the Eucharist and the Sacramental life of the Church began to grow. Ed took a sabbatical from church ministry to sort this out and worked as an executive for a company that manages retirement communities.
There were a few twists and turns along the way, but by 2008, we affiliated ourselves and our parish with the Traditional Anglican Communion because of their serious desire for unity with the Catholic Church. In October 2009 Pope Benedict issued a generous response to those Anglicans seeking full communion with the Church in the form of the Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, which would allow Anglican parishes along with their clergy to become Catholic.
There was great rejoicing among most of us who had been yearning for this news. For Ed and me, there was a lot of joy, but also anxiety. Not only were we former Catholics, but Ed had spent a number of years in a Catholic seminary though he left several years before ordination.