What happens when the hunger for truth meets poor teaching?
When Ted and I left Texas A&M for graduate school, we carried more than engineering degrees and newly begun careers. We also carried the intellectual hunger that St. Mary’s had awakened. For the first time I understood that the Catholic faith invited a lifetime of serious study, and I expected that hunger would continue to be nourished wherever we went.
Graduate school took us to Southern California. Our parish was All Hallows, perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a beautiful setting, and at first we expected it would become another place of growth. In one respect it did. An associate pastor quickly recognized the intellectual and theological hunger Ted and I brought with us. He had received a rigorous Jesuit education and seemed delighted to find two young people eager to study. He challenged us, answered questions thoughtfully, and encouraged us to continue reading and learning. I remain grateful for him.
Unfortunately that was only part of the story. The pastor himself embraced the liturgical experimentation that had become increasingly common in some places during those years. Liturgical dance, continual novelty, and an approach that often seemed more interested in innovation than inheritance gradually became familiar. For the first time in my Catholic life I experienced a parish where fidelity to the tradition no longer seemed to be the guiding principle.
Until then my experience of the Church had been remarkably positive. My parents had given me a faithful Catholic education. St. Mary’s had deepened that foundation. Suddenly I found myself asking questions I had never expected to ask. How could the same Church produce such different experiences? How could one parish lead people more deeply into the riches of the tradition while another seemed uncertain whether those riches were worth preserving? Those questions were unsettling, not because they weakened my faith, but because they forced me to distinguish between the perennial teaching of the Church and the changing strengths and weaknesses of those who served within her.
Looking back now I realize that All Hallows introduced me to exactly the tensions Scott Hahn would later describe when reflecting on the dominance of historical criticism and the tendency to explain away the supernatural character of Scripture. At the time I could not have articulated those issues so clearly. I simply knew something important was missing. The disappointment was real. It left Ted and me shaken.
Providence, however, was already preparing the next chapter. When graduate school ended we moved to the Washington, D.C. area, into the Archdiocese of Washington under Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Even then, long before the scandals became public, something about his leadership left both of us uneasy. We could not have explained why. We simply sensed that something was not quite sound. Years later many of the concerns that troubled Catholic families, including the increasingly explicit approach to sex education being promoted in some Catholic schools despite sustained parental objections, would become impossible for us to ignore. Those concerns eventually led us to withdraw our own children from the parochial school and enroll them in an Opus Dei school, another providential step that provided an outstanding education for our children while deepening my own formation as well.
Again Providence quietly intervened. In Maryland we met an older Catholic couple who became dear friends. They recognized the same hunger for serious Catholic formation that others had recognized before them. Instead of offering opinions or fashionable theories, they introduced us to faithful teachers. They introduced us to Jeff Cavins and to Scott Hahn.
Together we began working through Cavins’ Bible Timeline. For the first time the unity of salvation history began unfolding before us in a coherent way. The Scriptures were no longer isolated stories scattered across centuries. They revealed one continuous account of God’s covenant with His people.
Then came Scott Hahn. Encountering his teaching felt like water in a desert. Here was someone who loved Scripture, loved the Fathers, loved the Church, and treated all three with intellectual seriousness. His presentations were accessible without being simplistic. They were scholarly without becoming academic exercises detached from the life of faith. He respected both the intelligence of his listeners and the authority of the Church. Perhaps that was why his teaching resonated so deeply with me. He was not asking me to suspend disciplined thinking. He was asking me to use it.
Before long his cassette lecture series began accompanying our family on the long two-day drives between Maryland and Beaumont, Texas, to visit family. Those trips became classrooms on wheels. There were no smartphones, no streaming services, and no tablets keeping children occupied for hours. There were books, conversations, prayers, and stacks of cassette tapes. Ted and I would listen together while six young children rode in the van behind us. They were too young to grasp everything Scott Hahn was explaining, but they knew something important was happening. This was how their parents spent long hours on the road.
While the tapes played I took notes, not casually and not because someone had assigned them. I took them on the same green engineering paper I had used years earlier for circuits, systems, and mathematics. The habits engineering had taught me remained unchanged. I outlined arguments. I wrote down references. I followed lines of reasoning. When Hahn suggested further reading or raised questions for reflection, I completed them just as I would have completed assignments in graduate school. The notebooks from those years still exist. When I look at them today I see much more than pages of notes. I see a young wife and mother discovering that theology deserved every bit as much intellectual effort as engineering had ever required. The method was familiar. The subject was the faith itself.
Looking back I can also see something I could not fully appreciate then. Scott Hahn did not create my love of disciplined study. That had been forming for years. My parents had planted it. Engineering had strengthened it. St. Mary’s had awakened it. Hahn met that already-formed disposition and gave it a home within the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Providence had answered the hunger that All Hallows had left exposed. It had sent trustworthy teachers precisely when they were needed. The cassette cases that still sit on my shelves are more than reminders of an earlier season of life. They mark the beginning of a formation that has continued for more than forty years. They remind me that faithful teachers are among God’s greatest gifts to His Church, not because they ask us to admire them, but because they teach us to love the truth they themselves have received. That truth, once received with gratitude, naturally seeks to be handed on.