"When I was a young Jehovah's Witness, I always used to say, 'I'm going to marry a nice Catholic girl.' I don't know why I said it, but you know what they always say: 'Be careful what you wish for, you're likely to get it,'" says Sean, 50, from Portland, Oregon.
When Sean was 30, he converted to Catholicism but fell away. He returned to the Church in May of 2013.
On July 4, 2014, he signed onto CatholicMatch to see if he could make his childhood dream a reality. He was struck by the honesty of Anne Marie's profile. "She didn't pretend to have it all together, she acknowledged having ups and downs in her life, but the focus of her profile was her faith and how important that was to her."
He sent her a emotigram along with a brief message of gratitude for an honest story. Anne Marie didn't respond to Sean's message, but she did view his profile.
"For some reason, I felt very strongly that I wanted to meet her, and so I followed up my first message with a brief note, expressing more detailed appreciation for points in her profile and sharing a few more things about myself. I acknowledged to her that I understood she might not be interested—there are a few years between us in age—but that I wanted her to know that I earnestly desired to meet her," he recalls.
Anne Marie, who was 39 at the time, responded suggesting that the two of them should write and get to know each other to discern God's will for them. The next few days were spent writing back and forth in a flurry of interest, honesty, faith-sharing, and self-disclosure.
"Four days later, she concluded the last email of the night with the phrase: 'Maybe St. Raphael will let us meet soon.' I knew then that it was serious: when a nice Catholic girl starts bringing up St. Raphael in conversation, you might as well face that you're on a serious road."
Prayer Date
For their first date, Sean drove the two-hours to visit Anne Marie in Washington state. "On the feast of Blessed Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux, we agreed ahead of time to pray a Rosary at the same time asking for a blessing on our new friendship. We also prayed to these soon to be canonized saints. This first prayer date was held in the silence of our hearts because we waited to actually speak to one another until our first face-to-face date. Before then, our correspondence consisted entirely of emotigrams, CatholicMatch notes, and emails."
Sean drove to the Byzantine church Anne Marie attended and joined her for the Divine Liturgy. After the liturgy, they sat on a bench for three hours by Our Lady of Perpetual Help Shrine, located behind her church, and talked. Then they went to a concert at a park and ate a picnic dinner Anne Marie had prepared.
"It may seem strange to have waited to speak to one another before we met, but there are both reasons and benefits. First, I'm horribly uncomfortable speaking on the phone; I prefer face-to-face conversations. Secondly, it was good early practice for a chaste relationship—to voluntarily give up a good for the sake of strengthening our relationship. It gave us a chance to get to know one another in a place of silence and prayer. It also gave us the chance to
truly experience a fresh discovery when we did finally meet."
Two weeks later, they went on weekend-long pilgrimage at the same shrine. They camped in their separate tents and attended all the liturgies together.
"The first night, we sat out under the moonlight by the shrine and read the Book of Tobit. Anne Marie had a key to the church and both nights we quietly walked to the church at three in the morning to say a chaplet of Divine Mercy together and make a holy hour."
Since their first meeting, they had talked and prayed on the phone both morning and night, so that they could start and end their day praying together.
It didn't take Sean long to know that he wanted to marry this nice, Catholic girl. He also knew that in order for this to work, he had to be a nice, Catholic boy. "God has been preparing me my whole life to be worthy of this woman. She really needs a man who is a man of prayer, who understands how important and central the Catholic faith is in her life, and how important and central it will have to be in any life we share together."
Four months to the day after their first date, at midnight on Thanksgiving, they prayed in her church for three hours. Afterwards, he took Anne Marie out to the shrine. In front of the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, he got down on one knee, and he asked her to be his wife. "God willing, we will be married at that same shrine in August, at the end of the annual pilgrimage to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, our second one together."
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