‘Thanks be to God!’: Notre Dame student’s family converts on solemnity of the Assumption

The Smith family at the motherhouse for the Nashville Dominican sisters on the solemnity of the Assumption, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. / Credit: Photo courtesy of Colin Smith

CNA Staff, Aug 28, 2024 / 13:20 pm (CNA).

A student at the University of Notre Dame revealed this month that his entire family converted to Catholicism on the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Aug. 15 — a blessing he attributes to God “trouncing Satan at every turn.”

Colin Smith, who is studying political science and theology at Notre Dame, said on X that “on the solemnity of the Assumption of Mary, my whole family came into the Catholic Church.” 

The family’s conversion occurred three years after Smith himself came into the Church, he said. The family attended multiple Protestant churches over several years when Smith was younger, he told CNA this week.

Smith said on X that he wrote “probably over 100 pages of letters to family members explaining various doctrines and practices” of the Church.

And yet, “I played a rather small role in my family’s decision to enter the Church,” he said. 

It “was really enemies of the Church who did the most to help them become Catholic,” he wrote, observing: “God trounced Satan at every turn. His every move only aided God’s plan.”

As an example Smith cited his sister’s experience at a “very secular progressive feminist girls’ school” in Nashville, which led his parents to send her to the city’s St. Cecilia Academy run by the Dominican Sisters of the St. Cecilia Congregation.

Through the school, the family became acquainted with the Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph and one of the friars, Father Dominic Legge, became Smith’s mentor, while the Dominican sisters’ instruction led his sister to the faith.

“I would ask [Legge] many questions about the faith, which he would answer with great skill, depth, and grace,” Smith told CNA.

“He also directed me to St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica” as well as some Thomistic podcasts, he said.

“Early on, I listened to these podcasts a great deal because the Summa seemed a bit inaccessible for someone without any Catholic or philosophical background,” Smith said. “I became convinced of the Christian claims mostly in this way and through a few other readings.”

Ultimately, “I decided to convert in my early senior year of high school,” Smith told CNA, “and I was brought into the Church by Father Dominic in the St. Thomas Aquinas chapel at the Dominican House of Studies on Aug. 6, 2021,” the feast of the Transfiguration as well as the 800th anniversary of St. Dominic’s death.  

Smith would go on to spend a summer abroad in Rome; his family’s visits there proved “instrumental” in his mother’s conversion, he wrote on X. 

“Perhaps the biggest step in her journey was visiting the Circus of Nero outside St. Peter’s Basilica,” he said.

“Her progressive atheist tour guide explained that Nero was really ‘misunderstood.’ He ‘didn’t hate Christians. He thought they were weird for eating the flesh of their God.’”

“She took her biggest step to the Church when she learned from this secular tour guide that Nero thought the early Christians affirmed the Real Presence, and those Christians were willing to die for it,” Smith said.

His brother, Andrew, meanwhile, was moved last year after participating in a protest of a drag show at Notre Dame.

Andrew had “a hang-up on rote prayer,” Smith wrote, and yet he “never felt more comfortable than in the cold at that protest.”

“He finally saw Catholics mean every word of their memorized prayers as we all prayed the rosary, St. Michael prayer, etc.,” he said.

Smith’s father also converted along with the family, having grown “quite sympathetic” to the Catholic faith by the time his son converted, Smith told CNA.

Now that his family has followed into the Church, Smith observed this month that it was “absolutely the enemies of the Church and of God that God paradoxically used” to bring them into the faith.

Smith said his family attends Mass together whenever possible. All three Smith children are at Notre Dame, while their parents still live in Nashville.

“My sister, Abigail Smith, is in the liturgical choir, so my brother and I usually choose Sunday Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart when she is singing,” he said.

Reflecting on the family’s journey into the faith in spite of the opposition they encountered, Smith wrote on X this month: “It is as though Christ is reminding his disciples that he has decided to use them to bring people into the Church … but he certainly doesn’t need them.”

“We are all his servants, and he has already won by his providence!” he said.