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March 11, 2022BY TANYA CONNOR
THE CATHOLIC FREE PRESS
Things didn’t seem to be right, as he looked within himself and at the world around him. After much searching, he found a remedy in the Catholic Church.
This is the story told by Douglas Bowen, 28, who is preparing to be baptized and receive his first Communion and confirmation at the Easter Vigil, April 16, at St. Denis Parish in Douglas. He spoke with The Catholic Free Press Sunday at St. Paul Cathedral, as he awaited the Rite of Election, which moved him forward in this journey.
“He came to me over a year ago,” said Deacon Patrick Stewart, who works with Mr. Bowen in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at St. Denis. “We started inquiry and we went from there.”
“It wasn’t a single ‘come-to-God’ moment for me,” Mr. Bowen said. But, looking inward and outward, he’d sensed that things were not right morally; he described it as brokenness. He saw much needless suffering in the way people treated each other and a lack of response to that.
“Now I can sum it up,” he said. “We have a sinful nature and we need a remedy.”
Among influences that brought him to finding that remedy in the Catholic Church was information posted online, under the name “Classical Theist,” which he said made arguments for the faith from the perspective of St. Thomas Aquinas.
From a spiritual and aesthetic perspective, Mr. Bowen found that “Catholicism really is beautiful.” He said he believes that’s because it’s “coming from the sacred.” He pointed to St. Paul Cathedral as an example of that beauty.
Seeing beauty in the Church brought him hope, since his searching was due to ugliness in the world. He said Catholicism proclaims Christ’s victory over ugliness, sin and death.
“There is a completeness to Catholicism that I’ve connected with … the personal connection to God,” he said. That completeness includes the sacrament of marriage, family, the marriage of the Church to Christ, how we organize society, Catholic social teaching, how we treat one another – the full instruction coming from God, he said.
In the chaos of the world “we’ve got this gift that orders things,” (God’s instruction) he said, and he was attracted to that.
Mr. Bowen said he has studied many spiritual, religious and philosophical schools of thought.
“The only satisfying or complete answer I’ve found is within the Catholic Church,” he said. “That kind of searching began …when I was about 14,” triggered by his conscience, “which I now identify as a call” from God.
His parents were born-again Christians and when he was growing up the family attended a Congregational church, he said.
“They do good work,” he said of that church. But “they didn’t speak from any authority.”
“They don’t have the dogma … so I never felt spiritually connected to what they were doing. It was just something we did on Sundays,” he said.
As he learned about Catholicism, in part through a Twitter account with excerpts from the writings of English author G.K. Chesterton, “there was definitely an intervention” by God, he said. “I was being called” to the Catholic Church.
Mr. Bowen said he was homeschooled throughout his childhood and teenage years, and got his associate’s degree from Quinsigamond Community College. He studied philosophy on his own and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he got his bachelor’s in biochemistry and molecular biology.
Mr. Bowen said he hopes to marry one day and have children.
“I would certainly want my children to be raised Catholic and have access to that spiritual war chest,” the Church’s moral instruction, so needed in an inhumane world, he said.
As he waited for the Rite of Election to start he said, “It’s exciting, just being in full communion with God and the Church.”
