Stephen and Elizabeth Agren enrolled their family in MODG in 2019, and were Episcopalian at the time. They were received into the Catholic Church five years later. Thank you to the Agren family for sharing their story with us!

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We were seeking a rigorous, structured home school program for our two younger sons. Based on many issues we experienced with the public school system where Isaac was attending and the Christian school Oliver was attending, we decided to explore other options for our boys when they were in 5th and 7th grade. We first discovered MODG through independent searches for the top homeschool programs in the United States. We explored Johns Hopkins and Mother of Divine Grace before making our decision. The faith-based curriculum at MODG was very appealing to us for our boys' continuing formation. We were told we didn't need to be Catholic to apply, and little did we know that the central Catholic focus of the program would eventually lead to our entire family's conversion.

Both Oliver and Isaac quickly embraced their daily reading assignments along with the written and oral work for their religion classes. Working with the boys and answering questions about differences from what we had been taught as Episcopalians led to further research and discovery about the Catholic Church. There were many evenings over dinner when the boys would bring up things they had learned that day, or references to things we had read together in the St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism, which led to unexpected family discussions. Our consultant, LeAnn Hufnagel, was a true gift from God for our family, and helped us tremendously on our journey. She led by simply modeling her faith in the early years, and then later with gentle encouragement, prayers and resources. At some point, we began listening to Fr. Mike Schmitz's Sunday Homilies in the car on the way home from our church services. We found we were being fed spiritually in a much more meaningful way by Fr. Mike than we had been in the sermon we had just been present for in our church. While becoming disillusioned with the Episcopal church's stance on gay marriage and women priests, among many other differences in doctrine, we decided to begin attending Mass at the Catholic Church. Longing to receive the Eucharist, we inquired about the steps to converting. We ended up enrolling in OCIA in the fall of 2023, in a program led by a wonderful Spiritual Director. We were received into the Church at the Easter Vigil in 2024, and have been abundantly blessed.

As a family, we have a special devotion to Bl. Michael McGivney, who was beatified in 2020. His home parish, which he attended as a child in Waterbury, Connecticut, is the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, where we are now members. We believe that through Bl. McGivney’s intercession, God blessed our son Oliver with freedom from cancer. Our priest prayed over Oliver with a Bl. McGivney relic, and anointed him the day before he was to undergo surgery. In the operating room, the surgeon discovered with a biopsy the diagnosis had changed: it was a rarer form of cancer, yet one that surgery alone could cure. Thanks be to God! We will be forever thankful for Bl. McGivney's intercession. We also realize now that this is a blessing we never would have experienced had we not pulled the boys out of the schools they were attending and enrolled them as students at Mother of Divine Grace.

We are truly grateful for the wonderful, life-changing experience Mother of Divine Grace provided our family. The administrators, faculty, students and families have given us opportunities and blessings we never could have imagined. Many thanks go to Laura Berquist and her family for paving the way for us to have a rich and rewarding Catholic homeschool experience.