Ronda Chervin moves to Morganton, NC!

I just received the good news today that Ronda Chervin has just relocated in Morganton, North Carolina! Ronda Chervin, a Fordham University Ph.D. in Philosophy, with an MA in Religious Studies from Notre Dame Apostolic Institute, has been Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Loyola Marymount University, the Seminary of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and Franciscan University of Steubenville. She is a convert from a Jewish (though atheistic) background, an international speaker and author of some fifty books about Catholic thought, practice, and spirituality.

In an interview with Joseph D'Agostino about her conversion last year, she said, among other things:

My sister, my mother and my husband, who had all been atheists, all became Catholics also. My husband would have become a Catholic just before we got married but Vatican II intervened, and he hated Vatican II. He loved the Latin Mass. He came from an Orthodox Jewish background, and he thought the Catholic Church was the direct descendant of Orthodox Judaism. But he had become an atheist when he was a teen-ager, like most Lower East Side kids. They all became socialists. ... As soon as the Church began to look less sacred to him, he lost interest in it. It took him another 15 years to became Catholic. ... I live in a parish now that has the Fraternity of St. Peter's Tridentine Mass four days a week. And I love the Gregorian chant.

Ronda Chervin is a Consecrated Widow and a mystic. Undoubtedly she will miss her intentional Catholic community in Arkansas -- the Star of the Sea Village about which Jimmy Akin has written a post entitled "It Takes a Catholic Village" -- and St. Michael's Catholic Church in the Ozarks, with its joint English and indult Traditional Latin Rite liturgies. Nevertheless, I know well the parish community into which she has relocated at St. Charles Catholic Church where Fr. Kenneth Whittington is pastor. While the indult for the Traditional Latin Mass has not yet been granted for the Diocese of North Carolina, Fr. Wittington provides probably the best choir in the region, with good traditional fare.

A short bio of "Fr. Ken" is furnished along with the conversion stories of Fr. Conrad Kimbrough and others in "The Ex-Episcopalians," where one learns that the Kenneth Whittington's family was half Lutheran and Episcopalian, that he went to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where he became enamored with the majesty of Anglo-Catholic liturgy and converted to Anglicanism, that he converted to Catholicism when he became aware of the doctrinal incoherence of Anglicanism and saw the solidity underlying the turmoil of the post-Vatican II decades in the lives of devout Catholics. Because of his musical training, Fr. Wittington himself serves as choirmaster at St. Charles and has served up a steady stream of solid fare from Gregorian chant to Renaissance polyphony.

Another Jewish convert to Catholicism, Rosalind Moss, visited St. Charles Catholic Church in Morganton a few years ago and gave a series of talks. She told a parishioner there, Nancy McCall, that if she lived in North Carolina she would drive over 200 miles on Sundays, if she had to, to attend Fr. Ken's church. Hopefully, Ronda Chervin will appreciate St. Charles as much.

Some books by Ronda Chervin:

• Becoming a Handmaid of the Lord: From the Journals of Ronda de Sola Chervin 1977-1996
• Letters for Eternity: Collected from the Correspondence of Charles Rich With Ronda Chervin, 1985-1993
• The Book of Catholic Customs and Traditions
• The Ingrafting: The Conversion Stories of Ten Hebrew-Catholics
• The Kiss from the Cross: Saints for Every Kind of Suffering
• Prayers of the Women Mystics
• Bread From Heaven (stories of 23 Jews who found the Messiah in the Catholic Church)
• A Summer Knight's Tale (story of zealous priests in a sleepy parish who use shocking tactics to stir up their parishioners to lead holy lives)
• En route to eternity: The story of my life