SALT LAKE CITY — Each year on Holy Saturday during the Easter Vigil, thousands of people are baptized into the Catholic Church in the United States and around the world. This year, one of those people was Erika De León, a parishioner of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, who also received her First Communion and was one of the 12 people selected to participate in the Rite of the Washing of the Feet by the Most. Rev. Oscar A. Solis, Bishop of Salt Lake City on Holy Thursday during the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Then, on April 17, the day after Easter, she and her husband received the Sacrament of Marriage.
Her story, filled with challenges, has brought her to where she is today. “A happy, faithful Catholic; married, with three daughters,” is how she describes herself.
Raised in a Catholic family, De Leon was 8 months old when she was left in her grandmother’s care in Mexico while her mother went to the United States in search of the American Dream.
“When I turned 9 years old my grandmother decided to bring me to the United States, and at that moment I started taking religion classes,” said De Leon.
Before she completed them, she got separated again. Her mother took her for four years, and then one of her aunts brought her to Utah.
It wasn’t long after their arrival in Utah that her aunt decided to enter The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
As time passed, De Leon saw how her relatives professed their faith, but she didn’t get involved.
“God was always present, but the faith was not in me,” said De Leon.
One night she went dancing at a club, and she met Jose Guadalupe Vasquez.
“When I met him he was really involved with the Catholic Church, he went to the retreats, to Mass. … I was really impressed on how happy with his Catholic faith he has always been,” said De Leon.
After 15 years of living with Vasquez, and having three daughters with him, De Leon decided to return to the Catholic faith, so she inquired about the RCIA process.
“Prior to beginning the RCIA process, an individual comes to some knowledge of Jesus Christ, considers his or her relationship with Jesus Christ and is usually attracted in some way to the Catholic Church. This period is known as the Period of Evangelization and Precatechumenate,” reads in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
This process might involve a long period of searching; for others, a shorter time. For De Leon, it started when she enrolled her daughters in the catechism classes two years ago.
“Those talks helped me to decided that I wanted to have my First Communion and the Sacrament of Marriage,” said De Leon, adding that her husband always supported her faith decisions but never pressured her to join the Catholic Church.
De Leon dreamed of getting married in the Cathedral of the Madeleine, which she and her husband did during a community wedding on April 17.
“People used to tell me, ‘But you are already together! You don’t need a paper stating that you are a couple,’ … but now that we have the marriage sacrament I can tell you I feel a different type of joy, a peace that I can’t explain with words,” De Leon said.
Joining the Church has also helped her get rid of all the anger and resentment that she had accumulated through her life experiences, she said.
“I was really angry at my mother and used to have lots of harsh feelings towards her for abandoning me. … Now I don’t know if it was because of my RCIA teachers or because now I know that God is the center of our lives, or because both, but those feelings are being erased,” said De Leon.
When asked if God has been with her through her life, De Leon pauses for a moment, then answers, “Yes. Of course. Without him I would be nothing. I now feel more complete. Before I used to think that I had either good luck or bad luck, but now I know that when you put your trust in God, things just flow,” said De Leon who will receive the Sacrament of Confirmation on June 3 at the Cathedral of the Madeleine. “Without him, we are nothing. I have learned to enjoy every single moment God gives to us.”
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