Originally published at Ignatian Spirituality
A friend of mine recently converted to Catholicism. Like me, she was once a card-carrying Protestant. “What made you convert?” I asked, knowing for me, there were reasons that surprised me.
“I convert because the Catholic Church is apostolic. We can trace Pope Francis all the way to St. Peter and all the Apostles; I want to be a part of that.” She was absolutely beaming when she told me this. As someone who grew up in a church founded in the 1970s, I understood. To be part of something with all that history made me feel connected to the panorama of the Church throughout time.
In the book, First Belong to God, Austen Ivereigh quotes Pope Francis when he writes, “Joy is apostolic. It is ‘a clear indictor of grace.’”
Thinking about how joy connects us to those first Apostles thrills me. It places the Apostles in a new light. Rarely do I think of them as joyful. Serious? Focused? Yes. But why do I not think of them as joyful? Of course, they were!
As St. Paul writes in Galatians 5:22–23, joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit. We will
