Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Robert Novak, R.I.P.



Today, reporter and columnist, Robert Novak died after suffering from brain cancer. I always enjoyed his newspaper columns and his television punditry. What I remember most vividly, though, is this story of his conversion to Christianity.
Novak started to go to Mass regularly, but it wasn't until a few years later that he decided to convert to Catholicism. The turning point, as he recounts in his book, happened when he went to Syracuse University in New York to give a lecture. Before he spoke, he was seated at a dinner table near a young woman who was wearing a necklace with a cross. Novak asked her if she was Catholic, and she posed the same question to him.

Novak replied that he had been going to Mass each Sunday for the last four years, but that he had not converted.

Her response – "Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever" – motivated him to start the process of becoming a Catholic through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. He was baptized at St. Patrick's Church in 1998. His wife was also baptized a Catholic.

Novak said he believed the Holy Spirit led him to Catholicism. He told an audience at the Heritage Foundation in Washington Aug. 2 that when he was interviewed by The New York Times about his book the interviewer scoffed at his story about his source turned priest.

But Novak said he told her he believed the Holy Spirit was behind the coincidences.

Of course, there are no coincidences.
Read more about his life here.

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