LOBEZNO Meneses has walked through many doors in life, the most recent being the door into the Catholic Church.
On October 27, the former atheist-to-evangelical Protestant was received into the Church at St Cecilia’s Church, Hamilton, by Fr Morgan Batt and received the sacraments of Baptism, Holy Communion and Confirmation.
Lobezno, 19, said his journey began at birth, “in the context of the family and broader culture”.
Born in England, Lobezno and his family have lived in areas of southern England, Chile, Spain, and now Australia.
“My family are not anti-religious per se, though between their agnosticism and practical atheism (“if God exists, he won’t much care what I do”) I was certainly not brought up Christian,” he said.
Having been surrounded by the “cultural Catholicism” infused in South America and Spain, Lobezno “became very much the atheist and particularly distasteful of the Catholic Church”.
There were two reasons why he did not like the Church. “First, the Catholics I knew were not really different to me,” he said.
“One might call them nominally Catholic, but whatever labels are used, I hardly see the point in something which changes nothing.
“The second was, on the surface, that I had no reason to believe God existed.”
A journal entry from November 2009 explains his deep-seated hold on atheism: “God. The idea of god is as old as mankind. Since the beginning, God or gods have been used to explain things without explanation.”
“That is, I viewed God as an explanation that humans needed in their cultural and evolutionary history which was no longer necessary with our advancement,” he said.
Two years later, in 2011, Lobezno had a profound encounter with Christ that convinced him “God did indeed exist”.
“Now the saints, our great role models in the faith, have had a variety of conversions,” he said. Some, like St Augustine and Blessed John Henry Newman, have long and highly intellectual conversions.
“Others, like St Paul the Apostle and St Francis of Assisi, have powerful encounters with Christ that confound and transform instantaneously, at least in the perspective of many.
“I have been graciously granted parts of both.”
In late 2011 and early 2012, he became convinced of two things: that God did indeed exist and that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth happened.
Lobezno became a “zealous Protestant” who leaned closely to a “theology that borrowed heavily from Presbyterian and Baptist traditions”.
What convinced Lobezno to like, and to enter, the Church was it was “the only Church that can reasonably claim to have existed since Jesus Christ”.
He said “after much intellectual toil and struggle”, he was ready to “make my way home to Holy Mother Church”.
Lobezno is ready to tackle his “divine call” – his vocation. He thinks he might be called to religious life as a Jesuit.
“Jesus is saying to me in this particular manner ‘come follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men’,” he said.
“Certainly this is the mystery of God from atheist to Catholic and hopefully one day to Jesuit priest – all this in under two years.”
