Two told stories of conversion at Men's Conference

By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press

VIEW THE PHOTO ALBUM

Reports of Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, factored powerfully into the conversion stories of two of the Worcester Diocesan Catholic Men’s Conference speakers – Marian Father Donald Calloway and Arthur “Artie” Boyle, a husband, and father of 13. And, by their accounts, they desperately needed heavenly help.

Father Calloway, vicar provincial of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, started with these snapshots of his early years.

He said his mother conceived him at age 17 and his father, whom he never knew, chased other women.

“Dad #2 was worse than Dad #1,” he said. “I got my third father before I was 10 years old,” a nominal Episcopalian who had him baptized at the grandparents’ insistence, but “we never went back to church.”

In school, he was misguided about religion, especially Christianity.

At age 12 he began drinking and smoking marijuana. His family moved to Japan, where he started “hanging out” with troubled youth.

“I was snorting, inhaling, drinking cough syrup,” he said. “But I liked it.” He dropped out of school, went surfing and got involved with the  Japanese Mafia, which had him carrying around $10-15,000 at a time.

“I was causing an international scene,” he said. “It was a nightmare.” A Catholic Filipina insisted his mother talk to a priest.

“That priest changed my mom’s life,” Father Calloway said. “He told my mom about the Eucharist,” confession, Mary, and the prayerful St. Monica and her once-wayward son St. Augustine. The priest told Father Calloway’s mother, “You can be like Monica. This is the answer … it’s in the Catholic Church.”

Young Donald was handcuffed, escorted out of Japan and let off in California. He was sent to a rehabilitation facility, where he got worse instead of better, he said.

When he got out, his mother told him, “We have found the truth – it’s in the Catholic Church.” She and his father had become Catholics.

Appalled, their son left, stayed under the influence of drugs or alcohol and ended up in jail and another rehabilitation facility. Upon returning to his mother’s house, he learned, “My parents are going to church every day” and thought, “They’re nuts.” He even considered suicide.

Looking for a National Geographic magazine one day, he found the book, “The Queen of Peace Visits Medugorje,” about reported apparitions of the Blessed Mother.

“This is what suckered my parents in,” he thought. He read about “a beautiful woman” – which got his attention – telling young people about God.

“I was so fascinated by this woman I kept reading the book” all night and learned, “If you want happiness you’ve got to go to a Catholic priest and confess your sins,” he said.

In the morning he told his mother, “I’ve got to talk to a Catholic priest!”

“Yeah, right,” she responded.

After he showed her the book, she tried unsuccessfully to get a priest. So, he went to the chaplains’ office by the Naval chapel where a man introduced himself as Father John.

“You do God?” asked the boy, and, with embarrassment, confessed his sins to the scared, shocked priest.

Learning Donald wasn’t Catholic, and needing to celebrate Mass, Father John sent him to the church.

“Don’t bust me, man,” the youth pleaded. “If I leave here and you call the cops …”
At Mass, the priest said, “This is my Body.”

“You’re a nut!” the youth thought.

Then, Father Calloway continued, “I heard a voice. … The voice says, ‘Worship.’ I knew what that man had was God. ... My life changed. ... I started to go to church every day. ... I started to fast on bread and water on Wednesday and Friday. … I eventually became Catholic. … Catholicism has the truth. … You need to surrender your life to it. … Heaven and hell are real. … And there is a God – only one.”

“I’m very interested in his life in Japan,” conference attendee and Japanese native Francis Wada, of St. Cecilia Parish in Leominster, said of Father Calloway. “He was such a bad boy. … How did God bring him out from there to become a priest, inspiring us to become stronger Christians to share God’s love?”

Mr. Boyle tries to do the same, through his very different journey.

“At the age of 44 I got cancer,” he said in his talk. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me – it brought me back to God.”

The cradle Catholic decided he could beat kidney cancer, initially not thinking about God.

Then his wife put his name on an area novena and they went to healing services.

Redemptorist Father Edward McDonough prayed over him, his skin color changed to normal and “I prayed [with my heart] for the first time in my life,” Mr. Boyle said.

The day before his Dec. 9, 1999 surgery, his church, Resurrection Parish in Hingham, held an all-night prayer vigil for him. After the surgery, the doctor said, “We got [all the cancer] – you will live a normal life.”

Eight months later Mr. Boyle was told the cancer had returned and spread, and at least part of his lung would be removed on Sept. 14, 2000.

From Sept. 4-10 two friends took him to Medjugorje. They learned that the visionary Vicka Ivankovic, tasked with praying for the sick, couldn’t pray over him; she was scheduled to be away, he said. Later he saw her; she had missed her plane.

“She put her little hand on my head to pray,” his friends laid hands on him and “the heat that went through my body caused them to sweat.”

In confession the priest said the Eucharist is the most powerful medicine. Leaving the confessional, Mr. Boyle found that the depression he’d felt at being told he had less than a five percent chance of survival was lifted. He believed people can be healed of anything if healed spiritually through confession and by forgiving others.

When he and his friends climbed a mountain in Medjugorje and prayed together, he called his wife, said something was happening to him and asked her to schedule another CT scan.

The doctor did not believe his cancer had gone away. His wife found another doctor, who cancelled the surgery because the large tumor had disappeared and the other two had shrunk to insignificant size. On Sept. 14, instead of going into surgery, Mr. Boyle played golf!

“Jesus Christ, through the intercession of his mother, Mary, had healed me,” he said. “To this day, I have a perfectly normal right lung.” But the ultimate healing is spiritual, he said.