In his early 20s, Marcus Roesler, a parishioner of St. Francis Xavier in Shafer, said he felt influenced away from the Catholic Church. He became an agnostic. But behind the scenes, his mom, Lisa, was praying for him the entire time.
“I think it’s probably something a lot of Catholic parents can relate to if they see their adult children drift away from the Church,” Roesler said on the “Practicing Catholic” radio program set to debut at 9 p.m. Aug. 8 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM. “But her special intercessor for those prayers was Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
In 2018, Lisa asked her son if he would go to Mexico City with her to see the Our Lady of Guadalupe tilma.
“In conversations with her, I’ve expressed kind of a doubting Thomas mentality,” Roesler said. “How can I see that the faith is real? She knew that there was an actual miracle that you can go see with your own eyes.”
When they visited the tilma, Roesler was not as moved as his mother might’ve hoped. He said his mother might’ve been heartbroken that a miracle didn’t happen. But Our Lady of Guadalupe was working behind the scenes.
During the winter of 2019, the Roeslers traveled to Costa Rica. Marcus went two weeks earlier with his dad, and their time there happened to include Christmas. On Christmas Eve, they went to a Catholic church for Mass. When the priest held up the Eucharist, Roesler said he had a mystical experience.
“Both my dad and my brother say nothing happened, but it felt like I was lifted up into the air and I was feeling pressure from every direction, just pushing in on me,” Roesler said. “I had tunnel vision to the Eucharist. It was all I could see. I was just being moved, pulled towards it at a high speed.”
Roesler said this was a chaotic moment too, because wild dogs snuck into the church and ran around. He also saw lights flashing around the altar. He asked his dad and brother if the dogs he saw were real, and they confirmed that they were. But when he asked about the Christmas lights, they said there weren’t any.
“I sat with that experience for the remaining two and a half weeks of that vacation,” Roesler said. “I was wrestling with the confusion of what had happened, trying to make sense of it. And then when we returned home — this was early 2020 — I concluded I really ought to go to confession. And so, I did that. Gosh, it was so much easier than I thought it was going to be. And then I received the Eucharist after that confession. And that rolled right into the churches getting closed” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To hear the full interview with radio show host Patrick Conley, listen to this episode of “Practicing Catholic,” which repeats at 1 p.m. Aug. 9 and 2 p.m. Aug. 10.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes an interview with Bishop Michael Izen on how to rekindle the role of spiritual elders, such as grandparents, in forming young hearts. Also, Matt Gerlach, headmaster of Chesterton Academy in Hopkins, shares the fruit of the past school year and how the school’s mission shapes the students’ hearts and minds for Christ.
Listen to interviews after they have aired at archspm.org/faith-and-discipleship/practicing-catholic or choose a streaming platform at Spotify for Podcasters.
