BRYCE Kathage was walking the sandstone halls of Australian Catholic University’s Banyo campus, going from his regular class to the library, when he saw Mass being celebrated in the university chapel.
He stopped to have a look.
“I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to (go inside), I wasn’t Catholic,” he said.
He now believes the Holy Spirit called him inside.
Sitting in the back pew, he tried not to draw attention to himself, but he was spotted by Franciscan Father Harry Chan who was then chaplain on campus.
Fr Chan approached him, sparking a conversation that would change Bryce’s life.
The friar invited Bryce to learn more about the Catholic faith and connected him with the Springfield parish, which was in his local area.
Bryce had been investigating his faith for a while at this point.
He had a “normal” upbringing.
He was raised in Mackay and moved to Brisbane when he was in high school.
He worked as a “glassy” at the Victory Hotel after high school and, after a year in hospitality, he joined the Australian Army as a rifleman.
“I had this really romanticised idea (of the army) like … I got to travel and adventure,” he said.
He spent four years in the army, where he learned about leadership and teamwork, but never found the adventure he had wanted and was not deployed overseas.
“I discovered during that time I really wanted to help people, so nursing seemed like the natural choice,” he said.
After his service, he finished a health science degree at Queensland University of Technology.
Alcohol and cigarettes had started to take up more of his life in the post-service years.
“I had all these vices,” he said.
It was at his lowest point that he made a choice to pray for the first time in years.
“I basically asked God for a sign,” he said.
“Straight after prayer, I got the sign and I thought, ‘I must be onto something here’.
“If it’s just happened right after I simply asked for it then I’m going to take this as some sort of proof that there must be a God out there.”
He decided to pursue God and God started to reveal Himself more and more in his life.
“It was like I was a sponge full of these bad things … bad habits,” he said.
“Faith allowed me to squeeze all that out and put myself into this clean water – the Holy Spirit – and I found having God in your heart, you don’t really feel the need to fill that with other things like alcohol or tobacco.”
Looking back at that time, Bryce sometimes had second thoughts because pursuing God earnestly meant he was no longer “free” to choose his old habits.
But life without any rules or guidance was more dangerous, he said.
“For me at least, it did lead to me digging a bit of a deep hole for myself, and before I knew it, that hole was so deep and I had no idea how to get out of it,” he said.
Having every option available also meant he was not free, he said, because following God’s rules helped him to flourish in ways he could never have imagined.
Bryce also had to overcome a lot of the stigma associated with becoming Christian in today’s world.
He said he remembers having to summon some courage to go out and buy a Bible, and then to defend his decision to become Christian when people in his life questioned his choice.
That was part of the reason he decided to pursue his nursing degree at ACU.
He chose ACU because it was his “best chance” to learn more about Christianity and Catholic social teaching in a familiar university environment.
He said already at ACU he was glad the curriculum focused more on the holistic person when treating a patient.
“I think it makes for more effective practitioners when there’s more of an emphasis on things like empathy and compassion,” he said.
It was also at ACU where he met Fr Harry and participated in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults program.
He said RCIA was an eye-opening experience.
He had been concerned about some of the scriptural interpretations he had read online before being part of the RCIA program, many of which took every story in its most literal sense.
He found comfort in the Catholic Church’s rich history of interpreting Scripture, which provided greater clarity on biblical texts beyond its face-value.
Bryce said the incredible part about Scripture was how “endless” it was.
He said “the beauty of it” was that you could read the same passage twice in a row and extract entirely new ideas each time.
Reflecting on his faith journey, Bryce could see the presence of the Holy Spirit in his life; seemingly random events and encounters were part of a greater plan orchestrated by God to get him to ACU where he ultimately undertook his sacraments of initiation last Easter.
He was received into the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil in the chapel at ACU Banyo in front of family and friends.
“Of course it was very nerve wracking to stand up and receive your sacraments in front of all those people,” he said.
“It is nerve wracking doing it, but after you do it, you feel a sense of accomplishment afterwards.
“It’s really awesome when, after the service is over and all the formalities were done, everyone started going outside the chapel and they started welcoming me into the family.
“And that was, I have to say, one of the best moments of my life, just feeling that welcoming warmth.”
Now, he is preparing to head to Lisbon for World Youth Day 2023 this month (August 2-6).
A campus minister had told him about how transformative the WYD experience could be, and he was eager to go.
Bryce said he was excited to travel there and “walk where the saints walked”.
“I find the history about the saints in general in the Catholic Church to be really interesting,” he said.
“The saints were these people who dedicated themselves wholly in their entire lives to bringing themselves closer to God and to connect God’s teachings.
“Just to walk where they walked is a great significance, to have the honour of being there.
“I’m really looking forward to it. I think it will be a really good experience.”
