Why one bishop with an unconventional path from agnosticism to God is hopeful for a revival of faith

Bishop James D. Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, did not have the most conventional path to his vocation, going from life as a "happy agnostic" in a rock and roll band to the priesthood and service as a bishop. He spoke with OSV News' Charlie Camosy recently about the beauty that drew him to the Catholic faith and why he is hopeful for more converts despite today's secular society.

--Charlie Camosy: You have a very interesting conversion story. I think the whole thing should be a book, but let's try to get into the broad strokes here. And let's start with your life before your conversion. What was it like?

--Bishop James D. Conley: I was pretty much a typical "baby boomer" kid, born in 1955. My father was a gunner on an aircraft carrier in World War II and he signed a professional baseball contract with the New York Yankees after the war. He was a typical American success story and my hero. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, right out of "Leave it to Beaver." Once my sister and I left the house, she worked at Macy's department store for 25-plus years. My sister and I were raised nominally Christian, although deeply imbued with Christian values in the home.

I had very little formal religious training growing up. I came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My main interests were sports, girls and rock and roll -- not necessarily in that order! It was the 1970s and there was revolution in the air. I experimented with just about everything that was available to teenagers during those years. I was actually in a rock and roll band in high school called: "The Harmonious Confusion" (emphasis on confusion.) I was not a serious student at all, but managed to maintain a "B" average throughout high school. While I was never an atheist, I was more of a happy agnostic.

--Camosy: What prompted your conversion?

--Bishop Conley: After graduating from a large suburban high school in Kansas City (714 in my graduating class), I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Kansas in 1973. KU was known at the time for its anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, its radical campus culture, and basketball -- all of which were an attraction to me.

As a freshman, I had the good fortune and providence to sign up for a two-year, 24 credit-hour "Great Books" program called the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program. This program satisfied all the basic distribution requirements for English, speech and Western civilization -- which was a great incentive! It was team-taught by three extraordinary professors, two English professors and one classics professor. The motto of the program was "Nascantur in Admiratione" (let them be born in wonder).

Far from being an honors program, the IHP, as it came to be called, was more of a propaedeutic or remedial program, teaching the things we should have all learned in elementary school and high school. And it was not just a "Great Books" reading program. We memorized reams and reams of poetry, sang real music, went stargazing and learned the constellations and put on fall country dances and formal spring waltzes each year.

This is why it was called the "integrated" humanities. The professors approached education from a holistic vision, the education of the whole person -- body, mind and soul. Seasoned university professors, they realized that there was not only a crisis of reason in modern education, but also a deeper crisis of the imagination. Students had become flat-souled. We had no poetry. It was the direct experience of an encounter with the true, the good and the beautiful, through literature, poetry, history, art, music, dance, friendship and wonder, that I discovered Jesus and the Catholic Church. I was received into the Catholic Church halfway through my junior year at the age of 20.

--Camosy: How did your values and activism of your previous life transfer over to your pro-life activism?

--Bishop Conley: This is a good question. As I said, during my high school years, I was very much anti-establishment and fancied myself as a hippie. I was very sympathetic with student revolts and the unrest on college campuses. I remember that my senior year government class in high school consisted of watching the Watergate hearings on television. I became very skeptical about the government and the so-called establishment, and the music I was listening to at the time cultivated this spirit of radicalism.

Later on in life, after my conversion to Catholicism and in my early years of priesthood, through the reading of "Humane Vitae" and studying the teachings of St. John Paul II and the theology of the body, I came to understand the meaning of the sanctity and dignity of the human person -- and the absolute necessity to protect human life from the first moment of conception until natural death, and at every stage between. This became a question of justice for me, and prenatal justice became a passion. I was always struck by the words attributed to Gandhi: "the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members."

As a very young priest, I was appointed by my bishop to be the pro-life director for my diocese. I quickly became very involved in advocacy work for the unborn and their moms, as well as peaceful, prayerful, non-violent civil disobedience. In the late 1980s, I became very involved in the movement Operation Rescue, which consisted in peacefully and prayerfully blocking the entrances to abortion facilities, disrupting business and allowing time and space for sidewalk counselors to offer pregnant women alternatives to abortions. I was arrested multiple times and yes, I became a serial loiterer and trespasser! And every time, with the explicit permission of my bishop!

So, it was an easy transition for me to go from a cynical anti-establishment young person, to drawn to what some might consider the more radical elements of the pro life movement. There were times sitting in a jail cell with other pro-lifers -- both Catholic and non-Catholic -- when I felt I had a brief glimpse into what it must have been like for the early Christians living under the Roman persecutions, although the sufferings we endured were nothing compared to the stories of martyrdom of the early Christians.

--Camosy: Lots of people are getting ready to engage with family and friends this Christmas who may have attitudes toward the faith similar to the ones you used to have before your conversion. Especially because there seems to be a new energy around faith right now (and perhaps even the beginnings of a revival?), how would you recommend engaging people this Christmas in ways which can invite them into the faith?

--Bishop Conley: I have never been more hopeful for the future than I am today. We are still basking in the graces of this past summer's National Eucharistic Revival and are only beginning to see the fruits of that historic event. We are on the eve of a Jubilee Year of grace where Pope Francis has called us to be Pilgrims of Hope.

I do sense a new energy in the air, not dissimilar to the radical and heady years of the 1970s, but more focused and purified with the truth, goodness and beauty of grace and justice. I see this particularly in the area of education and health care. Jesus was primarily a teacher and a healer. The Catholic Church has been at the forefront of education and health care since apostolic times. Health and the human flourishing of the body, mind and soul make up the good life -- both here on earth and forever in heaven.

Last Easter Vigil on college campuses across the United States, there was an unprecedented number of conversions to the Catholic Church. In "old" European countries like France and Belgium, radically secularized in recent decades, there was an unprecedented increase of adult baptisms this past year. I think people are looking around at the secular landscape at what the world is offering for happiness, and asking themselves, there has to be more.

With the incarnation and birth of Jesus everything changed. Believers and non-believers alike, all mark their calendars from the birth of this child, truly human and truly divine. This year will mark the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene creed, which settled the question of the true nature of this child. I believe there might be a new awakening to this truth, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. In the words of St. Irenaeus, "the glory of God is man truly alive." Yes, I think there is the beginnings of revival in the air.