ARTICLES

I Always Felt That Wall

One Who Returned to the Catholic Church

By Mary Maguire

God draws people into -- and back to -- the Catholic Church often along very circuitous paths. This was true for Phyllis Sweeney. Her "reversion" shows how the providence of God works, despite the weaknesses and failings of Catholics.

Phyllis Sweeney attended Catholic grade and high school in Lincoln, Nebraska. "My Dad was a convert to the Catholic Church." Sweeney met her first husband, an Army intelligence officer, in 1964 while he was attending the University of Omaha. The wedding was postponed twice due to the Vietnam War. "We were being prepared to be married in the Church, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise," said Sweeney. "We had gone through all the preparation, everything was all set up at St. Therese in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I opted out to go to Hawaii and get married at a justice of the peace."

In 1972, after leaving the Army and moving to California, Phyllis and her first husband had their first child, Roy. When Roy was six months, they moved to Chicago for one year. "We had been so unused to the winter, we returned to California and settled in Del Mar for two years." Then it was up to Los Alamitos, where Phyllis and her husband had their second child, Courtney, in 1975. "Courtney only lived six months and five days."

Phyllis turned to the charismatic prayer meetings at St. Hedwig's in Orange County "With all of that pain, I was drawing closer to God," she said. One year after her daughter's death, Phyllis gave birth to their second daughter, Christen Brooke, on December 12, 1976. On December 23, she said, "I had the awareness of my husband's having an affair." Shortly after that, the marriage ended.

Phyllis continued with the prayer meetings for about a year, and then discovered a non-denominational Bible ministry. Pastor Leon DeVoid from Lennox, Massachusetts had come to California to start up a Bible college. She met the minister and started having a Bible study in her home. Phyllis says, "this was with the approval of Monsignor Quinn from St. Hedwig's. People had great concern because it was not a Catholic priest or deacon leading the Bible study, but I thoroughly discussed it with Monsignor Quinn, and because I was so active at St. Hedwig's, he knew me and knew where I was coming from. I got very involved with this Bible ministry. I was a sponge and this is where my conversion started. Even though I had gone through a 'Life in the Spirit' seminar, and received the Holy Spirit, there was still that lack of warmth to me. That I didn't feel a part of, felt as though I was on the outside of the window looking in."

Sweeney noted her difficulties with her parish, "These people [at St. Hedwig's] knew that my daughter had died, that my husband had left, but I was being fed by this non-denominational Bible study, called the Bible Speaks. Several times after my daughter had died, my pastor from St. Hedwig's would ask me to go and be with couples who had just lost a child to death. I could see the Lord already using my pain to help others. Monsignor had asked me to continue, to follow through with the families."

Sweeney decided to move to Lake Elsinore to be closer to where DeVoid was trying to buy property for a Bible college. She participated in ministries to the homeless, and jail ministry. "It was a blessed time in my life from around 1978 to 1980."

DeVoid gave a teaching on Job one evening and Phyllis knew that he had just spoken about her life. "And that was only the beginning of the Job experience," she said. "The fact that Job always said, 'blessed be the name of the Lord,' and he didn't understand; I didn't understand a lot of the things that were going on in my life, but I knew that I was hanging on to the hem of the Lord's garment."

The Bible college didn't work out, and another pastor came to work in the area. Phyllis did not "receive from him the meat and the life like I did from Pastor DeVoid. I would have to say that my point of real conversion came with Pastor DeVoid in my own home, with the Bible study. Even though I had said the prayer at St. Hedwig's, with the Life in the Spirit Seminar, and accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I wasn't really accepted. And I always felt that wall, so to speak. It was actually when Pastor Leon was doing the Bible Study in my home that I felt as other people were being invited in, and the team from back east came out here, the love and acceptance and caring for my two living children was just phenomenal."

The non-denominational Bible church brought new leaders out, and Phyllis had to decide whether to stay in Lake Elsinore, move back to Lincoln, where she had family and support, or to stay elsewhere in California so her children could maintain a relationship with their father. After a summer of praying and visiting with her parents in Lincoln, Phyllis decided to move to Fallbrook which she had discovered on the way to the jail ministry in downtown San Diego. She says, "I didn't know one soul. I'm still kind of amazed that with two little children in tow, I moved out to a place where I didn't know one person. Roy was seven and Christen Brooke was three-and-a-half by this time. She enrolled Roy in Rawhide Christian School and tried to put down roots. "That's when I went to St. Peter's [Catholic church] for the first time."

"I attempted to go [to St. Peter's], knowing that the hospitality and welcoming ministry was void in the Catholic Church at that time," said Phyllis. "And it's still not real vibrant. But, going there and attempting to return to the Catholic Church, I still would occasionally go over to the Catholic parish in Lake Elsinore -- it just shows the roots of what you really have deep within you, and what you're so desirous of ... and so I would go over there. And sometimes it would seem that my two little children were in church a lot. It was okay when they were little, however, as they got older, they weren't real crazy about it."

Through one of the mothers at her son Roy's school, Phyllis began attending the Assembly of God church. "It was a lot like I had left at Lake Elsinore. Some people were welcoming, and so I stayed for a few months, and joined the choir. As I came to realize, being a divorced woman, a lot of the women think you are trying to take their husbands, or you're a threat to them for whatever reason."

Phyllis continued her search for another church and became a member of First Christian Church. She notes, "there, the people, the majority of them, were seniors, 60 and above, so loving, so welcoming, so caring, with my children. They invited us over for dinner after church, made sure if I needed a babysitter, whatever; or, sometimes, they just had the children over, to give me a break.... They interviewed me and asked me if I would consider becoming one of their first women deaconesses. The pastor's wife was the other deaconess. I felt very honored that the elders of the church would even consider me for that. Again, I went back to my knees, and my prayer closet to seek the Lord's face, and said, yes."

Being a deaconess involved sitting on the board of elders and helping to run the Church: making decisions on money, functions, and personnel, according to Sweeney. She stayed with the church for about three years in this capacity, but when a split in leadership occurred, she felt the Lord calling her away once again.

During her time with the First Christian church, Phyllis married for the second time. She had her second son in this marriage, Kyle. She remarried in 1984, but was divorced in 1993.

Phyllis said that when the split in leadership happened at First Christian, and she had made the decision to leave, it was back to, "okay Lord, now what? I'm traveling around, now what? It really broke my children's hearts, too, when that happened because they had felt very welcomed and very loved and to just see that happen, affected their lives as well. So, going back to my prayer closet, on my knees, I sought God's face: now where, Lord?"

According to Sweeney, in the back of her head, God "kept saying, St. Peter's. And I had said, at one point, that I would never be back in the Catholic Church, because I had felt the warmth and acceptance at other places that I had never felt there. And, so I went back [to St. Peter's], totally out of obedience to God." This was in 1991. By 1994-95, Phyllis was president of the Women's Guild and active at St. Peters. That was also the year she met James Sweeney, a retired emergency medical technician from New York and a widower. After dating for two years, Phyllis married Sweeney. By this time, her parents had been married for over fifty years. She wore her mother's wedding dress and her dad walked her down the aisle. All of her kids were in the wedding. While dating, sometimes they would sit in the car and say the Rosary.

Phyllis facilitates a grief recovery program at Fallbrook Hospital and has opened the Encouragement Gallery in the Fallbrook Town Center. She says, "It's aim is to encourage those with disabilities, ranging from physical to emotional challenges and offers an opportunity to discover their artfulness that could then be shared with others."

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