April 2025

Eric Fuselier

     Growing up in Lafayette Louisiana I was heavily surrounded by the Catholic influence. My parents worked a lot, mom was brought up Mormon and my father was brought up Catholic. Religion wasn’t discouraged at home, but with dad working out of town as much as he did and mom doing the best she could raising two boys and my parents being raised with different religions, church went to the wayside. 
As I got older and graduated college, I became heavily career-focused. I am a person who likes to figure things out, understand how things work, and be able to explain why things are the way they are. This is a big reason why I pursued a career as a mechanical engineer. I was good at my job. I traveled all over the country, solving problems, figuring out things which I really enjoy doing, but there was no consistency. My life was very chaotic. I was good at my job but that’s all I did; I felt something was missing.
       
     It wasn’t until I met my wife that I started to slow down. She was the person who was able to make me stop and smell the roses. Probably the reason I married her. She was raised Catholic, and those qualities were a part of our relationship, and I was just fine with that. Everything in life made sense. I was able to answer any questions I had on my own, but I still felt something was missing. I was going through life with no direction, thinking I had all the answers.      
     Fast forward a few years to the birth of our daughter Virginia, that is when it hit home. This little miracle made me ask a big question which led to many other questions. The major question was “how could someone so small and defenseless have survived without help?” This led to questions of, “how could we all be here without help of some sort, where did we all begin?” etc. The questions kept coming but I couldn’t figure them out.

     This is about the time when my wife encouraged me again to look to Catholicism. We talked about it in the past, before we got married, and I toyed with the idea. But being ignorant and thinking I had all the answers, I dismissed the idea of becoming Catholic. As soon as we had Virginia and all these new questions came up, I knew I was in over my head and needed help and direction. Realizing that I truly don’t have all the answers is when I decided that perhaps I should take another look at Catholicism with an open mind. I have been around it my whole life, my wife and several of my friends and family are Catholic, so I figured it was worth checking out.
                  
     I began the OCIA journey when Virginia was only a few months old.  Better than giving me answers, it has brought me peace, faith and understanding. I now realize that some answers are far larger than we can understand or even wrap our heads around, and that is calming to say. The journey of becoming Catholic has brought me peace in many aspects of life, both personal and professional. I realize Catholicism is something that you truly get what you put into it. Everyone’s journey is different. I came to Catholicism looking for answers and what I got is a new, more understanding outlook on life.

Greta Gieseke

     I was baptized and confirmed in the ELCA Lutheran church but while my
faith never wavered, I fell out of the habit of regularly attending church during
high school and college. After college, I moved to Dallas for law school and
sought to make church part of my routine again. I was surprised, however, to find
that the ELCA Lutheran church had changed significantly over the past decade. I
found particularly unsettling that these changes seemed to reflect a greater
fidelity to the current political whim than to the Bible and the truth. This discovery
led me to explore different protestant churches: other Lutheran denominations,
Presbyterian, Methodist, and even non-denominational. None felt quite right.
While researching the differences between the protestant denominations, I found
myself questioning how I could ever know which one professed the truth. After
all, why should I believe that this one person who split off from this other
denomination was so much wiser than all who came before (or after) him? Again,
I felt unsettled.

     Then in 2022, after graduating law school, I visited the Vatican and thePope’s vacation estate (shown in my picture) while in Italy with a Catholic friend(who is now my sponsor). The thought of converting to Catholicism never once
crossed my mind during my search for a new church. But this visit to the Vatican
made me realize that I had been fed a false narrative of what Catholicism was.
Learning that Peter was the first Pope especially gave me pause; this was the
first time I found a persuasive answer to “why should I believe this church’s
teachings over the others’?” Converting to Catholicism still was not on my radar,
but I left Italy Catholic-curious.

     Over the next two years, this curiosity grew. I became intellectually
fascinated by the Catholic church and its history. And as I pursued this
intellectual interest and learned more about the church, I inadvertently became
convinced that I had found the truth that I had looked for—but did not
find—elsewhere. I also seemed to find signs everywhere I looked (or I should
say, even where I was not looking) that converting was the right decision. In the
span of a couple months, I had several friends—many who I had never even
discussed religion with, let alone Catholicism—tell me that they had recently
converted, were actively converting, or were contemplating conversion. These
signs gave me the final nudge I needed to make the jump. Last August, I moved
to New Orleans for the year to clerk for a federal judge at the U.S. Court of
Appeals. My timing correlated perfectly with the OCIA calendar, and becoming
Catholic while living in New Orleans for a year just seemed fitting. And that is
how I ended up here at St. Catherine today!

Interested in becoming Catholic or learning more about OCIA at SCS? Contact Kurt Garcia, 504-835-9343 ext. 1558