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.

I had always been interested in the Church but I wanted to experience life first so the years went by and I “lived” my life but it got to a point a year and a half ago where I wasn’t happy and the Church seemed to be calling me.

What had really happened - to paraphrase G K Chesterton - was that, when I stopped believing in something, I didn't believe in nothing, I believed in anything. My philosophy was a mish-mash of eastern religious thought, magical and divinatory techniques, and relativism. In other words, I very much subscribed to a philosophy known as the New Age.