Jewish Harvard professor heard Jesus Christ

by BILL MOORE
AUCKLAND — Not many Harvard professors give up their academic careers for faith. And perhaps only one — Dr Roy Schoeman — also converted from being an agnostic Jew to a fervent Catholic.
Growing up, Roy was “unusually devout and passionate about God and Judaism, and raised as a “conservative Jew”. His hometown rabbi was Arthur Hertzberg, the president of the American Jewish Congress and an adviser to several American presidents.
But Roy’s religiosity became mixed up in the drug and “free love” culture and degenerated into an immoral, vague hippie “spirituality”. Despite his enormous worldly successes, including earning degrees from MIT and Harvard and being named a Harvard professor at the age of 29, Mr Schoeman lost his faith and found life “irrelevant and meaningless”.
Then a mystical experience changed his life.

“While walking on an empty beach, it seemed like I ‘fell’ into heaven. I directly felt God’s presence and his love. I knew that he existed; that from the first moment of my life he loved me and watched over me, and that everything, every event which happened in my life, was exactly the best thing which could possibly happen. I knew that everything I did — for good or for bad — mattered and was weighed in the scales. I knew that we lived forever, and knew that heaven existed. I knew about the angelic hierarchy. I knew that this was not the picture of God that I had from the Old Testament.
“I prayed to know the name of my Lord and Master, my God. I prayed: ‘Let me know your name. I don’t mind if you are Buddha, and I have to become a Buddhist. I don’t mind if you are Apollo, and I have to become a Roman pagan. I don’t mind if you are Krishna, and I have to become a Hindu. As long as you are not Christ and I have to become a Christian!’”
Mr Schoeman didn’t immediately seek baptism after his mystical experience. His journey into the Catholic Church took several years and included intense study, “falling in love” with the Blessed Mother at a Marian shrine in La Salette in the French Alps, and spending time at a Carthusian monastery. There, he became aware for the first time of “how the Catholic Church was itself an outgrowth of Judaism. It was unavoidably obvious, given how the monks spent many hours a day chanting the Old Testament psalms, with their continual references to Israel, Zion, Jerusalem, the Jewish patriarchs, and the Jewish people.”
Mr Schoeman now lives a life of evangelism, writing, speaking, appearing on EWTN and teaching theology at Ave Maria University and Holy Apostles Seminary in the United States.
His spiritual journey as a “Jew-turned-Catholic” has been filled with trauma. His father nearly disowned him. His academic brethren thought he’d gone mad. And his mission of seeking prayer for the conversion of the Jews angers many in Judaism and the Catholic Church. Yet his insights, writing and the grace coming from so many prayers, he said, continue to draw many Jews to Catholicism.
His extensive writing on the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism includes Salvation is from the Jews and Honey from the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ.
In October (21 and 22), Mr Schoeman spoke to more than 100 people in St Benedict’s Crypt as part of the build-up to the next Eucharistic Convention, set for April 25 to 27, 2014.
His visit was organised and sponsored by the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.
More information about Mr Schoeman is available at www.salvationisfromthejews.com. Information about the Eucharistic Convention is at www.eucharistic-convention.com.