After return to Church, woman invites others to rediscover their faith

"I just had this very strong sense that my son was protected by his guardian angel," said Mrs. Hogle, a parishioner of St. Madeleine Sophie Church in Guilderland. "That's when I realized I had to acknowledge this with others."

She did just that by returning to the Church through Coming Home Ministries and becoming a team member who reached out to other inactive Catholics to welcome them back.

Coming back

"There's an awful lot of pain associated with the Church and individual situations like mine," she said. "It was a privilege for me to be able to be with other people and heal hurt."

Born and raised in Colonie, Mrs. Hogle attended Our Lady of Mercy Church and was involved in the parish folk group. Since there was no youth group, she joined one at St. Francis de Sales Church in Loudonville. She also had devout parents who taught religious education and brought her up in the Catholic faith.

"I had an upbringing that was very rich, and my parents were firm believers in Vatican Council II," she said.

Questioning

BY 1983, she had married and was attending Mass sporadically; three years later, she was pregnant with her first child and felt so "overwhelmed with the miracle of life" that she started going to church regularly near her home.

But a meeting with the pastor about having her son baptized led to her quickly becoming an inactive Catholic once again. She still gets a bit emotional talking about it.

"He came down hard on me because I had only been going to church for three months," Mrs. Hogle said. "I thought I'd be welcomed back with open arms, and I wasn't. It was total rejection. He told me to make a commitment, come back in a couple of months, and then we'll talk."

Instead, Mrs. Hogle had her son, Chuck, baptized elsewhere but stopped going to church.

Key moment

She soon began attending Mass at St. Madeleine Sophie and found parishioners to be friendly and accepting. Rev. Frank Gilchrist was pastor at the time, and Mrs. Hogle "got so much from his sermons, his personality."

Then, she noticed a brochure promoting Coming Home Ministries, which offered support for inactive Catholics who wanted to reconsider their relationship with the Church. She went to her first meeting and expected to be among other inactive Catholics; instead, she had inadvertently come to a meeting for team leaders, but she still felt welcome and began her own process of "Coming Home" to the Church.

Helping others

"It helped to clarify my own beliefs and to see God in other people, Christ in all of us," Mrs. Hogle said. She also designed the Coming Home Ministries logo and edited its quarterly newsletter.

She found that divorce was the biggest issue by far for alienated Catholics, but people also had become inactive because of the Church's teachings on birth control, homosexuality and pre-marital sex, and due to Vatican Council II changes. For some, a bad experience with a priest, as Mrs. Hogle had, kept them from going to church.

Reaching out

"So many people ended up returning to the Church because there was someone saying, 'We're sorry. The Church wants you,'" Mrs. Hogle pointed out.

She still considers the people she met through Coming Home Ministries as her friends. "I feel that I could go to them at any time, and they'd be there," she said. "What I get back is ten-fold what I've given."

Involved in Church

Returning to the Church has taught her that God is always with her, just as He was when Chuck fell from the slide and didn't get hurt.

"My faith is strong, and I will never question God's existence or the role faith has had in my life," she said.

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