I recently received an email from a reader, and it was one of the most inspiring, hopeful things I’ve seen in a long time.
“My name is Cameron,” the reader writes. “I’m a recent college graduate and a rural grade school teacher. I wanted to offer my heartfelt thanks to you, Mr. Skojec, for building my faith and helping make my conversion to Tradition possible.”
Cameron relates that he was raised in a “nominally Christian but practically secular family in California” for the first 19 years of his life.
He continues:
Before I went to college, I’d never met a Catholic priest or been inside a Catholic Church. In fact, I did not know anyone in my first 19 years who went to any form of religious services. This was despite the fact both of my parents were baptized Catholics.
I was already looking for God when I went to school, but the fullness, reality, and beauty of the Church and her Tradition was unknown to me until I discovered 1P5 on the recommendation of my mentor, Dr. Grant, in August of 2018.
I say my encounter with Tradition was a second conversion because my experience immediately following my baptism and confirmation within Francis’ church was segregated from any knowledge that the Church before the 1960’s had been different than it is today.
In the 13 months I’ve been reading 1P5 — and the 10 months since my first Latin Mass — my faith has become serious in a way it would have never developed without you. I hope that my long story short offers you some consolation in these dark times for our holy Church. Please be assured of my prayers, and know that you ARE making a difference in my life, and the lives of many others. It is not an exaggeration for me to say that God has converted me through 1P5. What I’ve learned from you is the catechesis and Catholic inheritance I should have received from my parents, parish, and Church. I owe you so much, but all I can offer you are my prayers and this message. God bless you. You have my sincerest, most heartfelt thanks. Please keep fighting! Noli timere.
Saint James the Greater, pray for us.
Yesterday, I shared Stefanie Nicholas’s recent talk about her totally unexpected conversion at the Fatima Conference, in which our work also played a role.
These are the stories that keep us going. These are the testimonies that cut through the darkness of a Church in crisis and show that God is active through all of the chaos, often unseen, leading people home by unexpected means.
These are the people — and others just like them — you are supporting when you support the work we do here at 1P5.
“If I am one day a saint,” Cameron told me, “I know that my journey out of indifference began with you.”
With just less than two weeks remaining in the month of October, we still need to raise about $12,000 to meet our fundraising goal. Your contribution makes it possible for us to reach people like Cameron at no cost to them — people who are often unable to pay subscription fees for publications like ours but are eager to make sense out of what is happening in the Church today while learning as much as they can about Catholicism and its theology, liturgy, devotions, and traditions.
It also makes it possible for us to bring you the work of writers like Stefanie, Eric Sammons, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, Hilary White, Meghan Greenfield, Nishant Xavier, Julia Meloni, Dr. Mark Nowakowski, and others, and continue to grow our team of the best and brightest voices in the Catholic Church today.
When I hear that I played some part in bringing people like Stefanie or Cameron into the Church, I am deeply moved and humbled.
When you support 1P5, making it possible to reach our global audience, you play a vital role, too.
If you’d like to make a financial contribution to our efforts, just click the button below. You can also always send a donation by mail. We ask that you please consider making your donation a recurring transaction, which helps us to stabilize our revenue and know how much we can afford to grow.
The synod is only halfway over, and we’ve got a big fight on our hands. Let’s do this together.
In Christ,
Steve Skojec
Publisher & Executive Director
OnePeterFive
