A remarkable testimony of conversion.
My name is Alejandro Olvera Moya and I was born in Ciudad Netzahualcóyotl, Mexico, into a family of what could be called “mediocre Catholics” (that is, people who do not live out their faith or receive the sacraments). We were very poor. As the years went by, my 8 siblings and I grew up while my father sank ever deeper into alcoholism. As we grew, the problems multiplied. We never lacked for pain or cause of hardship at home. It will be understood, then, why I lost my faith as soon as I entered adolescence.
When I entered the CCH (upper secondary school) I joined left-wing groups and began to devour with avidity the books of Marxist authors: The Manifesto…, Wages, Price and Profit, Mao’s Five Theses, What Is to Be Done, etc. All that Marxist-Leninist garbage. But to me, in those years, it was not garbage; I was 15 years old when for the first time I uttered the words “I do not believe in God.” And I drank in the whole Marxist doctrine, which was for me like a religion, or even more than that; Stalinist morality is a thousand times more rigid and implacable than Christian morality could ever be, which is in reality very bearable (however much the libertines may complain). I took part in demonstrations, put up posters at night, and so on; I did it all… because I wanted to change the world, to make the world better, to eliminate poverty, misery and ignorance. And, of course, for this it was necessary to attack the “opium of the people” and its chief representative, the Catholic Church. I hated the Church and above all the Pope, the declared enemy of our project to liberate those who “had nothing to lose but their chains.”
One morning, a friend of mine, Eduardo Luis Osorio Cortes—may God keep him, for he has already passed away—timidly admitted that he was in fact a believer. He told me, “the truth is that I do believe in God,” and I was left stunned: what kind of communist, what kind of organic intellectual, what kind of theoretical representative of the oppressed masses could say something like that? But he was my friend and I paid it no mind.
In 1989-1991 the whole communist farce collapsed and the full truth about the dictatorship of the proletariat came to light. I remember that year explaining to our comrades the dimensions of our tragedy: “Marxism is made up of three fundamental parts, of three pillars that hold it up: the first is dialectical materialism, which is nothing but Hegel’s materialism, but transposed, and its application to historical analysis, historical materialism. The second is the Critique of Political Economy, which is nothing but the critique of classical economic theory (Smith, Ricardo, Stuart Mill, etc.), and the third is the dictatorship of the proletariat (because the theory of the ‘class struggle’ was not in fact a contribution of Marx). Once the only contribution of Marxism, namely the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, has turned out to be a failure, gentlemen, all is lost; it is time to return to our studies to explain why everything failed.” And we did so: I earned my degree in economics, others devoted themselves to their families, and yet another became an outcast whom no one knows in what corner of history he ended up.
Orphaned in thought, I joined a humanist group that finally turned out to be a religious sect. What drew my attention to them was the atmosphere of camaraderie, the youth of most of its members. The naivety of their ideas always bothered me, but in any case, since I was already an “ideologue,” my presence quickly became conspicuous and I was a more or less important member of the sect until my departure in 1998 to return to the Catholic Church.
It was on one occasion, when I had an indoctrination session with them one Sunday afternoon, that I discovered that, like all the best that sects have, their ideas were a plagiarism of Catholic doctrine. For that morning I had gone (a rare thing) to Mass, and in his homily the Father had spoken something about “placing oneself in the presence of God,” and it turned out that several of the things our Coordinator was talking about were related to that interpretation. I immediately spotted the plagiarism, but I kept quiet, because I was an important member of the Sector.
In reality the turnaround had begun 2 years earlier, when I entered the School of Pastoral Ministry, in 1996. I was a “spiritual orphan” and lived in a continual search. So once, as I was leaving Mass, a young man intercepted me and invited me to attend the courses of the School of Pastoral Ministry. An encounter that, to tell the truth, I was already seeking, for one thing intrigued me. Marxism was an impressive theoretical edifice, with its own political theory, its own philosophy, its own interpretation of history—in short, it was in itself a byproduct of the best of modern thought, and yet, it did not last…, it was all a fiasco, and more than 60 million lives were lost (according to the latest estimates) only to prove that it was all a fraud. And yet, there came a man named Jesus, a native of Palestine, a peasant with no education, who founded a current of thought (let us remember that I conceived everything in Marxist terms) that survives to our own day, embodied principally in the Catholic Church. How can this happen? Even the most atheist of atheists will not hesitate to grant me the point: this is a rather interesting problem, a wise man who crumbles and a carpenter who triumphs.
And so I began once more to enter into the Catholic Church and its spiritual riches, so vast and countless. And I began to discover an open Treasure that had always been before me and that I never came to value. People cannot imagine what those who abandon the Catholic faith lose; they cannot quantify their losses. And even for Catholics themselves who have never lost the faith, it is hard for them to appreciate the spiritual inheritance of which they are the custodians. I had it and I lost it, but I recovered it again. Christian values, precious pearls that the world does not hold in esteem. The very rich intellectual tradition of the Church’s thought, the teacher of 2000 years—how much she must have to teach me. Faith… May God give me back the faith I once had as a child, when death caused me no fear, when I did not dread the future or the darkness. The Virgin of Guadalupe… I knew nothing of theology or of philosophy when, through her sweet face, I understood that there was a God in the universe, a good and merciful God.
I have said it a thousand times: I did not fall in love with a Catholic woman, no relative of mine died, I do not believe I have any psychological deficiency to remedy; I returned to our Holy Mother the Catholic Church, passing from the intellectual to the spiritual, from knowing to feeling. No one made an effort to convince me; I came back practically alone, that is to say, God alone enlightened me.
I sum up my experience by saying that, at times, when it falls to me to read one of the readings at the 8:00 PM Mass, I always begin to think. Here I am, I, the one who did not believe in God, and people see me, and those who know me perhaps laugh at me, at the words I spoke when I lived in confusion, at the pride I had, at my former self-sufficiency, at my lack of humility. In any sect I would be a prominent member, and here I am nothing more than any other brother; I am not even the one who is going to give the homily. I am just one more member of the School of Pastoral Ministry, not even a teacher or pastor. Those who knew me mock me, they call me “mocho” or “persinado.” And that is what I have become for the world, an object of mockery. No one respects my reasoning any longer, no one listens to my words; when I spoke nonsense everyone listened to me, and now that for the first time I am telling them something worth hearing, no one wants to listen to me—perhaps that is why I have written too much.
And here I will remain for as long as God grants me life; I will be an object of mockery for all the world. I do not deserve to be here, because I have been a sinner; God alone knows how many souls were lost because of my words, God alone, who sees through our hearts, knows why I am now making a fool of myself, but I have returned, I will not leave again, because I now know what it is to wander in the darkness among sects and ideologies, because I now know that the mind and the eye deceive, because I know that it is humility and not pride that is needed in order to have wisdom. The Cross, the sublime meaning of the Cross. In short, I thank you for your attention. And may God bless you for the work you do, pulling out of the gutter proud men like me.
Author: Alejandro Olvera Moya
Source: Apologetica.org
