Gayle Somers

A Catholic armed with Scripture

By Claudia I. Provencio
The Catholic Sun

Gayle Somers wasn’t much of a Christian as a teenager. But when her idol John Lennon observed that his band, The Beatles, was more popular than Jesus Christ, something within her stirred to life.

In Somers’ eyes the statement, which garnered tremendous media attention, wasn’t about bragging. It was simply acknowledging teenagers’ priorities.

“What he was talking about is that religion is not very popular, rock music is more popular. More kids are concerned about rock music than they are about Jesus,” she said.

“The minute I heard the words, I was just cut to the quick and convicted. I knew that was true of me. He was talking about me,” said the New Orleans native. “The Beatles were way more important to me than God. I didn’t even know anything about God. I didn’t even go to church.”

Lennon’s words spurred the petite brunette to flip open the telephone book. She randomly selected a church and became a Presbyterian.

That decision eventually led Somers to study theology, teach women’s Bible studies and to embark on a journey that would lead her away from being an evangelical Christian to becoming a practicing Catholic.

Finding God

When Somers first became a Presbyterian, she received a Billy Graham Bible whose introductory pages encouraged her to begin her studies with the Gospel of John.

The oft cited John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but have eternal life,” gave her a deeper longing to know Jesus Christ.

“I got through maybe 10 chapters and I completely freaked out,” she said. “I had no idea that God sent Jesus, that He loves me, He wants me.”

So following the instructions in Graham’s Bible, she got down on her knees and asked Jesus to come into her heart and to forgive her sins.

“When I got up from there, I was a different person,” Somers said. “My life had begun anew. It was a dramatic night and day kind of thing.”

She attended Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. — the same interdenominational seminary attended by author and fellow Catholic convert Scott Hahn — and graduated with a master’s degree in theological studies in 1976.

“The seminary has a kind of interesting history. It once belonged to the Carmelites… for years they prayed for vocations,” she said. “There are quite a few of us who have graduated from Gordon Conwell who are now Catholic. It was a way that their prayers were answered unexpectedly.”

While working at an evangelical church in the Midwest, Somers met her husband, Gary, and returned to Massachusetts. After looking for a church that best preached the Gospel, the two became Episcopalians.

“That’s what Protestants do. You go to the church where you hear the Gospel and then you become that,” she said. “So I had been Presbyterian, my husband had been kind of ‘free church’ and we both became Episcopalians.”

Having never experienced the church’s liturgical life, the couple found it very refreshing.

“We appreciated the liturgy’s ability to kind of lift us out of ourselves and to have an experience of God, a communal experience that was larger than life,” she said. “We were really happy. We had all of our children baptized as Episcopalians and we just assumed that was it.”

The moment of truth

For 15 years, she was blissfully happy in the Episcopal Church until a good family friend from a strong evangelical family became highly interested in the Catholic Church and converted to Catholicism in 1985.

“Nobody from our circle ever did that,” she said. “If anybody became a Catholic from our background, you had either lost your faith or you had just gone off the deep end.”

The couple knew their friend was neither and they began to investigate further. They loved the works of Catholic authors Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and G.K. Chesterton, whose book “The Everlasting Man” purportedly led C.S. Lewis (“The Chronicles of Narnia”) to become a Christian.

For eight years the couple mulled over thoughts of the Catholic Church, never believing they would ever overcome the theological differences between the two denominations. But when their Episcopal church experienced a huge split, they began to reconsider.

“For me, there was something underneath this split that really bothered me and it made me question how Christians can ever know the truth,” Somers said. “How can two groups of Christians who are sincere, have a lively faith, who pray, read the Scripture and want to do God’s will, have opposite conclusions to what’s true? This became a big problem, philosophically, for me.”

Somers began to doubt the whole Protestant framework. Ready for a break, she began attending an Anglo-Catholic church at the invitation of a friend. She reveled in the liturgy, the incense, the statues of Mary, the confessionals and the Mary chapel.

Instead of finding these things appalling, Somers said both she and her husband felt like they’d “stepped into heaven.”

The feeling was so palpable they never went back to their Episcopal church and embarked on a two-year intensive study of the Catholic Church. They studied the Catechism from cover to cover.

“If you would have asked me 15 years ago, ‘how come you can’t be a Catholic?’ I would have said, ‘The Catholic Church teaches a bunch of stuff that’s not in the Bible,’” Somers said. “That would have been my top answer. The Scripture prevents me from being Catholic.

“But in the end, the Scripture forced us to become Catholic because the Church that you see in Scripture in the book of Acts, in the Gospels, in the Epistles, the Church that rises up off the pages of the New Testament is a Catholic Church, not a Protestant one.”

Seeing the revelation as the incontrovertible proof they were looking for, the Somers family entered the Church on Pentecost Sunday in 1995, a move that shocked their friends.

Somers said that God, perhaps realizing they needed a fresh start, provided a job for her husband in Phoenix, two months after their conversion.

“We had that awkward time of being misunderstood by our friends, so it was just providential that we moved,” she said. “We just moved, not planning to move. We just got lifted up and plunked down in Phoenix. We didn’t know anybody.”

New life in Arizona

Somers said coming into the Church was a great gift but has found some aspects of Catholic life more difficult than others.

“We didn’t feel like Catholics on the first day, the first month or even the first year. It took us a while to settle in,” she said. “The Marian aspect has been the most difficult… and some things felt easier. Reconciliation, going to confession — that felt spectacular.

“The Eucharist was spectacular,” said Somers, who attends Mass and says the Liturgy of the Hours everyday. “I’m pretty sure for the first five years every time I went up to take the Eucharist, I cried every single time… it was just five years of being in awe.”

Now, Somers communicates her love of Scripture and her love of the Church to women at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in central Phoenix, where she leads two Bible studies each week.

She has been teaching Catholics about the Bible for the past 10 years and has found that Catholics’ literacy of the Bible is very limited. Frustrated by Catholics’ lack of passion for Scripture, she wondered if she was forcing her Protestant ways on her students.

She launched into a study of the Catholic Church’s relationship with Scripture and read every papal encyclical that was written 100 years before Vatican II.

“It was a wonderful period in my life because I could see that the mind of the Church is very much that Catholics have the same relationship with Scripture that Protestants do,” said Somers, who also spends her free time volunteering at 1st Way Crisis Pregnancy Center.

Emboldened by the words of the early Church fathers including St. Augustine, who said, “treat the Scriptures of God as the face of God and melt in its presence,” she wrote four Bible studies designed to familiarize Catholics with the people, places and events of the Bible.

Her Tuesday morning Bible study attracts about 100 women and her evening study has about 30 participants.

Anita Hatch-Miller, who coordinates Somers’ Bible studies, said many of the women in her classes refer to Somers as a female Scott Hahn — “an intellectual and someone who wants to get to the truth.”

“She teaches in a way that changes hearts, that makes hearts burn,” Hatch-Miller said. “The emphasis on the study is the Scripture itself, reading slowly, over and over again. The questions make us go back to re-read Scripture and are often informed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

“Gayle is never disconnected from Scripture,” said graduate Madeline Rose, who has gone on to facilitate a Bible study at St. Maria Goretti using Somers’ teachings. “Her family situations and events of her everyday life are always connected to the Word of God.”

Somers said she owes her devotion to her Protestant background and is committed to helping Catholics regain their heritage in Scripture, or as she sees it, the verbal part of God’s intimacy with His people.

“I don’t have to win the whole world,” Somers said. “I am content with just a few ladies who have never opened the Bible and now they can’t put it down. If that happens, ‘thank you Lord,’ my work is bearing fruit.”