Lenten Campaign 2025
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“I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” These are the words that thousands of catechumens around the world are preparing to hear on Easter night when they are baptized. Throughout Lent, Aleteia is sharing with you the stories of some of these men and women, who are happy to become children of God. Read all of the testimonies here.
Moisés, as an architect, knows how to recognize a building’s beauty. However, the greatest beauty he has found inside a church has nothing to do with columns, styles, or famous architects, but with the call of a patient God.
He grew up in a Christian (but not Catholic) family in the city of Guadalajara in Mexico. Although he had a happy childhood, he also remembers feeling different from the rest. In Mexico, and especially in Guadalajara, the majority of the population is Catholic, so he grew up seeing his schoolmates celebrating Christmas and Holy Week—things that he and his family weren’t used to. This made him feel divided. However, from an early age he felt blessed by God. “I’ve always felt his hand,” he confesses.
When he started university, he began to have doubts about his faith, and he began to distance himself from it. During this stage, Moisés felt no connection with God.
From churches to the Church
While studying architecture, he began to visit churches on the recommendation of his teachers. “Here in Mexico, churches have a very emblematic architecture. I began to visit several of them—respectfully, but separating religion and architecture.”
However, upon entering one of them—the Expiatorio Temple of the Blessed Sacrament in Guadalajara, where Eucharistic adoration is a central activity—he had a very different experience, and not only because of the beauty of the place. “That was my first approach again to something related to God,” he says. But the road back was still long.
At the invitation and insistence of his friends, Moisés attended a Catholic youth retreat. “After five or six years of not having contacted God, I felt a peace again that I hadn’t felt for a long time.” The decision was very simple: “I want this in my life,” he realized.
That strange feeling he experienced in his childhood returned when a key question arose: what should he believe in? He was divided again between the faith of his family and Catholicism.
Thanks to the guidance of a priest who offered him guidance, definitive relief came. Fr. Sergio made him see that it wasn’t a question of being divided or of feeling between a rock and a hard place, between the belief instilled in him as a child and what he was now experiencing. He spoke to him about St. Augustine. “I identified with him completely and it was a relief for me to stop feeling that way.”
Support from his friends
He began to attend Mass regularly. He received a lot of support from the priest and his best friend’s parents, who accompanied and encouraged his first steps in the Catholic faith, until the time came to take the next step.
“I thought, ‘this is the peace I want to experience now and for the rest of my life.’ I spoke to my best friend’s parents and said to them, ‘You know what? I want to be baptized; I want to receive the sacraments and I want to have a family and go to church with them.’”
They went to the parish priest, and he took charge of organizing the extraordinary ministers so that Moisés could receive the catechesis sessions. He acknowledges, with great gratitude, that everyone showed willingness to prepare the classes and teach him.
Discovering Mary and the saints
Although starting to wear crosses and believing in the saints and the Virgin Mary has been strange for this young architect, knowing that he has intercessors has been “incredible.”
His first encounter with Mary was in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which he visited to accompany one of his friends. There he felt a great sense of peace. But it was during the retreat on the pilgrimage that he found Mary’s great motherly love.
“I cried a sea of tears. There, in the chapel, they had an image of the Virgin. I went and knelt down. I asked her for a lot of things that, to this day, she continues to grant. I felt all the stares of my friends; it was shocking for everyone to see how I was praying to someone I didn’t believe in. From then on, I started to ask her intercession, to pray to her. Whenever I go to the Blessed Sacrament, I end my prayer and I also pray to the Virgin. That’s how I’ve been cultivating my relationship with her.”
Imminent baptism
With only days left before receiving baptism, he’s aware of how much God has done in his life. By chance, he recently returned to the Expiatorio Temple. This time he entered, not only to appreciate its architectural beauty, but with devotion. There he realized that God, from the first time he was there, began to call him and to guide him little by little towards him.
Regarding baptism, he says, “He waited almost 25 years for me to take the plunge and I know there are people for whom he can wait a lot longer. Even if one day they decide to leave and then return, I’m sure that God will also welcome them with open arms.”
For him, being baptized means being able to be called a child of God. “Who wouldn’t want to be called a child of God?” he says emotionally.
But it also means shedding original sin and giving oneself completely to God. He recognizes that going to Mass and to youth group meetings isn’t going to do any good if he doesn’t progress on his path of faith.
“I have very much in mind what Jesus said, that he likes someone who is either hot or cold, but he doesn’t like lukewarm people; so that makes me feel that I’m on the right path. I’ve totally felt his presence and baptism is like being reborn.”
And today we celebrate...