Shaun Blanchard

I was raised in a very devout Protestant home in a small town in North Carolina. We attended a Calvinist church, which taught predestination and emphasized rigorous scripture study and the harshness of God’s justice and judgment. I received from a young age a knowledge and love of Christ, the gospel, and the Bible, but became disenchanted with Calvinism when my family (for various good reasons) left the church I was raised in.

Disillusioned with the process of “church-hopping,” which I saw as a shallow search for the best preacher or coolest worship service, I turned to reading history and theology books to search for the “original” Christian church – one that I knew was not denominational. Inevitably, my reading of the Church Fathers forced me to reexamine Catholicism, a faith that I had been taught as a child was centered around a blasphemous ritual – the Mass – and an antichrist leader – the Pope.

However, what opened my mind to reading about the Catholic Church at all was the evangelical efforts of a few Catholics that crossed my path. I attended a conference in San Diego the summer before my senior year of high school where I met several pious, evangelical, and (most importantly for a Calvinist) scripturally literate Catholics who clearly loved Christ and were on fire for him. One of them, a famous Catholic author named Joseph Pearce, told me his dramatic conversion story from hateful neo-Nazi to devout Catholic. We spent an evening talking, laughing, and debating in which he challenged me to consider Catholic arguments from scripture and the Fathers, especially about the Eucharist and the Papacy.

After many months of struggle, debate, and prayer, I was baptized into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil of 2006, my freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill. It was a time of great grace, joy, and immense relief, but an even more daunting struggle lay ahead.

I had lost a sense of Christian community during the “church-hopping” of my high school years and thus was without strong friendships built on Christ. I started to put my desire to be popular and have fun above what I knew was right. When I got to college, I joined a sports team right away. I found instant acceptance and a fun group of friends, but when we weren’t playing or working out, the focus was exclusively on drinking – and not a social, healthy kind, but an excessive and debauched amount. I was also in and out of relationships with girls that were unhealthy and not founded on chastity or mutual faith. But, I suppressed my conscience because I was having a great time. I knew it was wrong, but I guess I was a lot like Augustine in that famous prayer – “Lord, make me pure, but not yet.”

I remember very vividly Holy Thursday my freshman year, experiencing the beautiful liturgy that marks the beginning of the Triduum for the first time and being profoundly moved by seeing the Host upon the altar, the light dimmed like twilight in the garden, the incense, the candles, and the beautiful refrain – “stay with me, remain with me, watch and pray…” But I did not stay very long that night, because the other guys on the team had planned a big party and I didn’t want to disappoint them. I awoke on Good Friday after noon, hung over and ashamed. I could relate perfectly to Matthew 26:41 now: “Watch and pray, so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Another defining moment for me was going to confession my sophomore year during a visit to St. Peter’s. I had become very lackadaisical about confession and had a relaxed attitude toward the way I was living. The priest had me in the confessional for almost an hour! He exhorted me to live a life of holiness now, reminded me that all who follow Christ (not just priests!) are called to “deny themselves and take up their cross,” and cautioned me that problems with drinking and sexual morality don’t just magically disappear when you get married. I didn’t like hearing that stuff, but I knew it was true. I knew it wasn’t enough just to profess a certain set of doctrines, or believe Christ was my savior even I didn’t turn my life over to Him completely.
I realized slowly that changing a lifestyle is usually a long and somewhat painful process. Getting a constant confessor, my local parish priest at the Newman Center, was a big step for me. Having that accountability with someone who loved me and was constantly praying for me was invaluable.

Finding Catholic friends who encouraged me to follow Christ was also vital. I slowly was able to change my crowd from one that pressured me to get really drunk and thrived on debauchery into one that could influence me to do what was right while also picking me up when I fell. There was no “one” moment – but rather it was a daily struggle to conform my will to Christ’s will.
We experienced a sort of revival among the youth at our Newman Center (aided in a very large way by Jason Simon and the Evangelical Catholic, by the way) and having the fellowship I now have makes walking with Christ inexpressibly easier. The culture that was created actively seeks to disciple others, prays together before the Sacrament, sings Praise and Worship, and has fun together on the weekends. One of the things keeping me back from giving everything in my life over to Christ was fear that I was missing out, but now that I am standing on the other side, I see that I have actually increased my fun and joy as I have surrendered to Christ.

It is an amazing thing that God can take sinful addictions and ways of living and that, if you open the door, He can change your desire from sin to righteousness – in the way you talk, the way you think about girls, the way you relate to those that anger you, anything. My knowledge of Christ and the gospel as a young man was beautiful and potentially salvific. Through the testimony of Catholics committed to evangelization I was inaugurated into the full banquet of Christ’s Church. Fulfillment came not only in accepting doctrines about Christ but also living them and letting Him live in me, and it was only then that I experienced a new horizon of grace, peace, and joy and fully realized that although Jesus commands that we deny ourselves and take up our crosses, He also says “come to me all you who are weary, and heavy laden, and I will give you rest…for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”