(LifeSiteNews) — Joining me on this episode of The John Henry Westen Show is Catholic speaker Tim Francis. We discussed his remarkable reversion story from a fallen-away to a devout Catholic after watching a documentary about a South American stigmatist, as well as his work evangelizing others.
I opened the episode by asking Francis to tell the story of how he returned to the faith.
He explained that he grew up in a Catholic household but drifted away from the faith in college, turning to drugs and alcohol. Then after graduating and traveling to Texas for a business opportunity, Francis met a woman who would become his wife.
“Eventually, as we were dating and we were going to get married, we got invited to a big megachurch down in Texas called Fellowship Church. It’s truly the Grand Poobah of megachurches,” Francis recalled. “But I thought, ‘I can’t believe this is church!’ My wife loved it, and so we kind of went from … the bar scene to the Bible scene.”
Then Francis explained that shortly after he began attending the megachurch, his devout Catholic mother sent him apologetics videos, which he began to view along with Protestant apologetic videos to get both perspectives.
Eventually, he became convinced that the Catholic faith was the most biblical and historical of the various Christian denominations, but he still had a major reservation about Catholicism.
“I intellectually knew there was historical evidence for Jesus; I understood the apologetics behind the Catholic faith. But what happened is there was an issue for me when I started going back to the Catholic Church in the early 2000s,” Francis said. “I remember people would come late and leave early, and I couldn’t even find a Bible study in the early 2000s where I was.”
“But when I was at the big megachurch, they came early and left late. They had 20 home groups; they were really talking about Jesus 24/7,” he added. “So I had this question: ‘If all this is real, if the Catholic Church is the Church of Christ, why aren’t people on their knees lined up to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus?’”
But after watching one of the documentaries his mother sent him entitled Signs From God, in which filmmaker Ron Tesoriero and a skeptical investigative journalist, Mike Willesee, witnessed the stigmata appear on a South American woman, Francis was convinced of the Catholic faith.
“Nothing like this has ever been filmed, according to the father of Australian investigative journalism. … He didn’t believe in God; he hated the Catholic Church with a passion. And he investigated this over many years with Ron Tesoriero, and they film this lady predicting him having a stigmata, the wounds of Christ,” he said.
“I just couldn’t believe I was witnessing somebody have the wounds of Christ!” he added.
To hear Tim Francis’s full story, watch or listen to this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.
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