Gerald Daly, administrator of Allen Hall, the diocesan seminary of Westminster, was for many years an atheist and a convinced Marxist, very active in municipal politics. In the English magazine GoodNews (www.ccr.org.uk) he recounted his conversion in the first person: that of a cold, rational man who had a striking mystical experience when he least expected it.

“I was born in the 1950s, in the East End of London, into a typical Irish family. My mother was a very devout Catholic, and my father was a practicing Catholic, but his great passion was politics. He was an active trade unionist and union official, so politics was always being discussed at home. I was the eldest of four boys, and my mother, like many mothers in those days, would have loved for me to become a priest, but as I grew up I began to doubt the faith. I found Mass boring, and although I went to a Catholic school, most of my friends were not Catholics, and I saw the whole business of Mass as an imposition I wanted to be rid of at all costs.”

His youth in the 1960s was marked by politics and by questioning everything established.

“We wanted to be free and not be tied down by convention. When I was 17, my girlfriend Helen became pregnant, so instead of continuing my studies I had to go to work. Perhaps I would have preferred not to marry, but I saw how the situation was tearing my mother apart, so in fact, if we ended up getting married when I was 19, it was to make her happy. Later, however, I found out that Helen had actually always wanted to get married and had only pretended not to care, because in those days getting married was considered hopelessly old-fashioned.”

We believed we were going to change society
“At 22 I got a place as a mature student at the University of Lampeter, where I studied philosophy. Our second daughter was also born around that time; those were three fabulous years. Living in the sixties was exciting. We sincerely believed we were part of an age in motion that was going to change society for the better; the university was a hotbed of student radicalism. Every trace of Catholic faith I might have had left disappeared, through my philosophy studies and the people I met. The whole philosophy department, and indeed most of the social science departments in the country, were dominated by Marxism. In fact, you couldn’t even survive there defending other ideas, which in any case was not my situation.”

“At that point I got involved in the IMG (International Marxist Group). Belonging to that group carried a great deal of prestige, while at the same time giving off a certain air of danger, which suited me down to the ground. Meetings would run on into the small hours of the morning, with long discussions about how we would change the world. The leader of the IMG was Tariq Ali, a very charismatic figure at the time.”

Like many others on the Marxist left, Gerald got a job in local government.

“We felt that there we had real possibilities of putting the revolution into practice, and we saw ourselves as vehicles for social change. To be honest, we had no real model we were working toward. It was just the vague dream of a socialist future, which in reality we had never analyzed in depth, but we did have plenty of debates in the pub, went to lots of demonstrations and attended union meetings. We had also infiltrated the Labour Party, and we were looking for ways to take control of it”.

“The real death of the left”
Gerald explains that “the real death of the left was announced by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc, followed by the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour. Although we were aware that the Soviet Union was not a perfect model of a socialist state, at least it existed, and it contained some of the essential elements we were fighting for. Yet the fact that 500 million people rejected what formed the very basis of our beliefs made us lose confidence, and there was a massive collapse within the left. I stayed on for a while, trying to make sense of what was happening, but it was very hard. We went from absolute certainty about the historical development of society to a state of confusion”.

They promised it when they married: to raise their children in the faith
“By that time I was in my late thirties, and my three children were growing up. Although I was an atheist and my wife was not a Catholic, she had taken very seriously the marriage commitment to raise our children in the Catholic faith, and had sent them to Catholic schools, although obviously at home we were hardly encouraging the faith. So we were quite surprised when Kerry, my eldest daughter, began dating Andrew, who was a practicing Catholic; she even began going to Mass with him. And it was through this young man that Christ began to enter our home again, after 20 years, almost without my noticing it. I think his mere physical presence set off an emotional trigger that took me back to my Catholic past”.

Gerald, his family and Andrew, his daughter’s boyfriend, all traveled together on a holiday in Greece. “While we were having dinner in a taverna, sitting at the water’s edge, Andrew and I got into an argument about religious faith. I don’t remember how it started, but I suspect I simply wanted to show off a little. He was a young man with a fairly simple faith, and I, with my philosophical training and my experience of life, had no qualms about humiliating him and his beliefs”, Gerald recalls.

But two days later, still in Greece, came the moment that changed Gerald Daly’s life.

“I went off on my own to climb a nearby mountain that had a monastery at the top, where there was a sort of chapel dedicated to Our Lady. I don’t remember praying there, but I did stop for a while, as a little nun watched me. Afterwards I went back to the beach and began reading a book I was carrying in my backpack on the history of the Balkans. Suddenly I came to a deeply disturbing part of the book, which recounted the massacre of 30,000 Christians at the hands of the Turks. The horrible evil of the act shook me. I began to feel very strange, and I felt an overwhelming sense of futility passing through me. It frightened me quite badly. I looked back over my past life, and how little meaning it had had. And all of it for what, I asked myself”.

“I felt the presence of Christ”
“Of what happened immediately afterward, all I remember is losing my sight. I don’t know how long it lasted – it could have been a few seconds or a few minutes -, but suddenly I felt the presence of Christ. It was strange, but instantly I knew who was there, who was at my side making himself known. I saw nothing, but the Holy Spirit was communicating with me through an inner sense I could not understand. It all revolved around love, and without words, love was shown to me as that which held the universe together, and therein lay the meaning of life. I also knew that the source of this love was Christ. When I turned around, I was in a deep state of shock”.

“I knew that somehow Christ had come to me, but my head wanted to reject that idea. After all, I had been an atheist for 20 years, and that was the basis of a deeply rooted intellectual and secular outlook that was not so easy to let go of.I wondered whether it had been a hallucination, or whether I was going through some kind of crisis, or whether it had something to do with stress. But I could not stop thinking about that experience. I didn’t dare tell anyone about it, so that they wouldn’t think I had gone mad. Over the following months, however, I kept turning it over in my mind, trying to find a human explanation for it. I am a very logical and rational person, but in the end I had to come to the conclusion that what had happened to me was real, and that the supernatural existed, though I wasn’t very sure what I should do about it”.

The power of Christmas Mass… in English!
“I remember that some time later, on Christmas morning, I was making myself a cup of coffee when suddenly I felt the conviction that I ought to go to Mass. I am sure it was an inspiration of the Holy Spirit. My wife was stunned, since she had no idea of the inner struggles I had been through. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, because I was worried that I might be mocked in the same way I had mocked others.”

“Arriving at Mass was a very emotional moment for me. Everything was very different from how I remembered it. To begin with, the Mass was in English, and I didn’t know the responses. The celebrant was a Nigerian priest. I will always remember the moment he stood up to read the Gospel. I couldn’t hear a single word of what he was saying, I could only hear the flowing of water, welling up from him and flowing through me. I broke down and wept inconsolably, because I understood that this was where I belonged. I knew I had come home. All this affected my wife, and she thought I had had a breakdown. In fact, we went through a very difficult time because of it, but in a strange way, the sacramental side of my marriage was stronger than before. It had been enriched and deepened in a completely different way. Kerry ended up marrying Andrew. She now has two children and has become a deeply committed Catholic. She has been a great blessing to me”.

Gerald wrote his testimony 13 years later. During that time he had to make changes, even in his work, because being a Christian and a politician is complicated.

“I worked as a political adviser, for councillors in local government, and in large part this job consisted of finding ways to destroy the reputation of your opponents, in order to promote your own candidate. At times I was asked to do and say things that, as a Christian, I believed were morally wrong, but it was taken for granted that such tasks were part of the job, so it was hard for me to know what I ought to do. I did everything I could not to compromise, but I didn’t entirely succeed. I found that the contrast between what I believed and what I was being asked to do was becoming harder and harder for me. The situation reached a point where I could no longer go on working there, but I wasn’t sure what I would do”.

Finally, he came across an opening to work as administrator at the Westminster seminary. “It was a big pay cut, and it would seriously affect my pension, but as soon as I saw it I realized it was the job God wanted for me”.

“I realize more and more that it is all about trusting God and working with Him, because He can do more than we can imagine. Far from seeing life as meaningless, as I was tempted to think all those years ago on that Greek beach, life has now become an incredible adventure for me. Let us give thanks to God”.

Source: REL