Anne Costa
Anne Costa, from Baldwinsville, New York, had been raised Catholic. As a child she used to even pretend she was at Mass using a cracker and grape juice.
Like so many in recent times, by the time she went to college, she fell away from the Church. She began to consult a minister for a New Age church who practiced psychic channeling. She began to take classes on divination and psychic healing, and got introduced to occult rituals that, as she assessed it later, amounted to witchcraft.
She then became engaged and decided to be married in the Catholic Church. She took all the necessary preparatory steps but, along the way, mentioned to no one her involvement with the New Age Church.
The day of her wedding arrived. The ceremony was being held in the very church she had attended as she was growing up and, as she walked down the aisle, she was seized with a “profound restlessness” that only subsided once the consecration had occurred.
During the early years of her marriage, she continued with the New Age church and got more and more entangled in occult practices. Many times, she went back to Mass, but would experience a severe uneasiness, the same as she had felt on her wedding day, that she could not go through with a reception of the Eucharist, but would literally run out of the church each time, in tears.
She and her husband then battled with infertility. In her efforts to have a child with her husband, she suffered through three operations and a miscarriage before finally becoming pregnant in 1995.
At the same time, she was advancing in her New Age church. She was about to begin taking classes to be a leader in the church. She was sitting in an occult class one day when she was “filled with an overwhelming urge” to return to the Catholic Church. The “incredible force of conviction” within her was so strong that it left her feeling afraid. She says that, “there was no confusion about the message my heart received. My soul and the soul of my unborn infant child were in jeopardy.”
That Sunday, she went back to Mass. She was eight months pregnant, “alone and confused.” She ended up returning to the Church wholeheartedly that day. She became an almost daily receiver of the Blessed Sacrament and learned to appreciate again the truth of the Eucharist that she first experienced as a child.
Source: Proctor, Sr. Patricia, OSC, 201 Inspirational Stories of the Eucharist (Spokane, Washington, The Franciscan Monastery of St. Clare, 2004) p. 10-12.