Meet Chris, the husband, and Ash his best friend!
I had been studying Catholicism secretly for a number of years before I finally decided to take the plunge. I just so happened to be working in the south of England in full-time evangelical ministry—I was a closet Catholic, I prayed my Rosary every day, read the Church Fathers, prayed to the saints, all while being on the leadership team of a charismatic evangelical church. It didn’t quite add up!
I’d started reading the Church Fathers several years earlier while I attended Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry in California (what a name, right?) Unfortunately, despite my new-found enthusiasm for having found the truth, I had no one to talk to about it. Luckily for me, I’d just befriended a guy named Ash. And so, although I technically shouldn’t have done so because of my job—having noticed Ash was a bit theologically minded—I started to share with him what I’d been learning.
2 years later and we’re now both Catholics and have experienced an exodus up to the north of England. Ash went up north to go to university and to study Theology, whereas I moved back in with my parents as I got over the crisis of having lost my career aspirations because of converting.
Despite our rose-tinted glasses, (sometimes immature) zeal, and supreme thankfulness to God for having led us to the Catholic Church, it didn’t take us long before we noticed the damage that relativism, liberalism and modernism had done for the faith of so many Catholics. Thus, as I sat in a restaurant one evening on the 15th October 2017 (I remember it because it was my 23rd birthday), I decided to start Catholica. My aim was to encourage traditional Catholic life as our culture moves into unprecedented levels of apostasy, sin, and deception. Want to join us? Great! Glad to have you on board.
Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by. Feel free to read our articles, check out our YouTube channel, or visit our Facebook page. Alternatively, if you’d like to contact me for whatever reason you can do so here or via email here.
God bless,
Chris
Meet Bérénice, the wife!
What to say, what to say…
I am Bérénice, a former English teacher, an artist, now reconverting into blogging about lifestyle, faith, and mental health.
Born and raised in France as a cradle-Catholic, I always struggled to bond with God. I’d rather see Him as, you know, a great omnipotent figure up in the sky, watching over us fighting like ants on this great Earth he created for us. For me, being a “daughter of God” was crazy, ridiculous, even offensive. I’d have frequent meltdowns only thinking about it; going to mass was tough, confession was humiliating, my first engagement was a complete disaster, and was broken a few months away from the wedding.
My life was at the lowest of lows.
And then I decided to start a heavy work on myself, to understand why I couldn’t relate to God, why I couldn’t have a spiritual life, why I couldn’t be happy! This is where I started to understand, where I started to piece things together thanks to a very helpful friend who went through similar life experiences.
As an abuse survivor, I understand now that my missing bond with God was a very complex issue. From non-existent, I am carefully growing this painful Father-Daughter relationship deeper with the help of my husband, Chris. Finding Chris at the term of this year of introspection felt like a nudge in the right direction. For once in my life, I felt encouraged and very quickly fell in love.
Today we are happily married. My healing still is not complete. I don’t even think it’ll be fully complete one day, but rather in the next Life. Chris brings me closer to God in his daily commitment, he gives me a crazy amount of strength to push myself out of this thick shell I’ve built.
He encouraged me to start blogging, to start talking about topics I was very familiar with or was very interested in. Prayers, mental health, sexual wounds, how to recover from diverse abuses, bonding with a therapist… These are my—and many other women—life experiences and how I try to deal with it through my slow-growing faith.
This is my Catholic story.
If you are a woman struggling with issues and need a kind nudge in the right direction, feel free to contact us through our blog. Chris and I will be very happy to bring you any help we can.
