Over the following months - before we started dating - I did all I could to get myself in order.

I know that a husband and wife are called to bring each other to God. This was a desire I saw in her and something I wanted to be for her. I knew that I needed a woman like her to help me be the best man I could be, and I wouldn't be the best man I could be if I couldn’t help her to be the best woman she could be.

There were the good men, like my parish priest and my Dad (the spiritual and biological fathers!) as well as other priests, who are not ashamed of their faith and boldly live it out in their everyday life. It is the good men who have made the strongest impression on me.

Confession wasn’t something that I did, but I did want change! So I said, “Yeah, ok, let’s do it!” I just put everything on the table, just laid it all out. No more safe bets. Something’s got to change.

I met again with Fr Pius several times. Each time, he urged me to ask as many questions as possible, seemingly with a humble radiance of cheerful confidence in the creed of the Catholic faith. Each of his answers provided what seemed like a large chunk of mental closure on topics of life I had been trying to make sense of by myself for the past few years.

The more I researched Humanism as a movement that arose in response to the perceived shortfalls of Christianity, the more I came to realise I didn’t actually understand what it was that Humanism was responding to. This was what prompted me to show up one day in January 2018 for a church service at my nearest Catholic church.

Everything we’ve been taught about what it means to be a successful man, about achieving status, authority and riches is turned on its head by this otherworldly defendant: “If my kingship were of this world”, he says, “my servants would fight that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world”.