TCK Testimony by Joel Thomson
This was posted to my new facebook group yesterday. All glory and honor to God! Hopefully more are waking up!
I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Eric Gajewski for so much. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his ministry.
This time last year I was a liberal neo-Catholic who mistakenly believed that socialism and Catholicism could not only co-exist but belonged together. I was conservative on many social issues like the pro-life issue and anti LGBT agenda but I believed for 20 years that Christ's teachings about taking care of the poor and providing for the needs of others was something the State could legitimately do and that the separation of Church and State was good and necessary.
After the primaries were over and the relentless news cycle slowed down a bit, I decided to start exploring my faith better. It was during this time I stumbled on TradCatKnight for the first time. I was astonished. It was the first time in my life I had ever heard about the crisis in the Church. I knew about Vatican II and that many were unhappy with the developments after the council but I had never heard the arguments as to why it was wrong before. I was a convert to the Novus Ordo in my early 20's from an evangelical background. Needless to say, I started digging furiously to find corroborating evidence and I found Fr. Hesse, Fr. Kramer, Fr. Michael Rodriguez, Fr. Gruner and the Fatima Centre. Learning about Our Lady of Fatima changed my entire life.
Everything just clicked. I always believed since my conversion that there was no salvation outside the Church but I was duped in my formation to buy The "council's" definitions. Now I had found a whole group of people who not only believed it in its pure form but proclaimed it fearlessly. It liberated me to just believe it and declare it too. I had always believed in hell, but I learned how easy it was to fall into mortal sin. The conciliar church never mentions hell, doesn't talk about mortal sin and glosses over the seriousness of sin in general. I had always believed that sacrifice and mortification were good and useful but the conciliar church gave me the impression that holy saints could do it, and it was good if you could but God would understand if you couldn't. I know now that suffering is our calling and duty, nay our privilege and God empowers us by grace to endure it. I now understand St. Paul when he writes "I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength." I always went to Mass but I never knew what I was missing. I started to attend a local TLM every week and within a few weeks felt I could never go back. There is just something different about the True Mass, something you can't explain any other way but the movement of the Holy Spirit and it just isn't there in the Novus Ordo.
I worked on my wife for a while and she started to come to the TLM with me. She was a cradle Catholic and she was very resistant to good arguments. She was a child of JPII and really believed he was holy. The more she learned and the more she went to the True Mass, the more she realized what was lost and she eventually came to see that Vatican II was a deliberate sabotage of the faith. She even veils now and that's a really big deal for her. Her mother filled her full of feminism when she was young.
We are still learning more and solidifying the practice of the faith. We are starting to grow in virtue and avoid sin much more and are growing in grace. I attribute this amazing change to Our Lady who called to me through her apostle Eric. Thank you Eric for your witness. You are reaching people, I wanted you to know that.