A life-changing encounter

Sally and Mike Bodron had been searching for more than a decade for a faith community they could call home when they made a spur-of-the-moment decision to attend weekend Mass at Mary, Queen of Peace for the first time.
 That chance introduction to the MQP community in 2023 proved the special encounter that changed the lives of Sally, Mike and their four children – 10-year-old Michael IV, 9-year-old Adaline, 7-year-old Eleanor, and 5-year-old William. Mike and Sally, who three years earlier had relocated to Madisonville from Fort Worth, Texas, recall the day vividly.
 
“This was a short while after Father Cooper became pastor, and at Mass they were inviting everyone to come over afterward to the ministry fair and find out about all the new programs they were rolling out,” Mike recalled. “Talk about a sign!”
 
Intrigued to learn more about the parish’s faith formation programs for adults, the Bodrons connected with Nicole Johnson, who now serves as MQP co-director of evangelization, engagement and adult formation. There Sally discovered that, just as she was a lifelong Methodist now exploring conversion to Catholicism, Nicole also had walked the journey from the Methodist religion to communion with the Catholic Church through the RCIA process - since renamed the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults.
 
That fall, Sally began the RCIA process of study, faith sharing and reflection while the Bodrons’ four children – previously baptized in the Methodist church – also entered the children’s religious education program at MQP. The family’s shared journey in discovering the Catholic Faith proved an equally powerful motivation for Mike to return to active practice of the Faith, an inheritance rooted in his Catholic upbringing in Chalmette and Catholic elementary and high school education.
 
“I just loved everyone in my class and learned so much from Nicole,” Sally recalled. “I would come home and say to Mike, ‘Quiz time!’ And most times, the Catholic boy would get them wrong!” In the midst of her training, Sally realized how close she had grown to her fellow RCIA candidates when she received an unexpected call from Mike during a January session with the painful news that her father had passed away. “I was devastated, but I was exactly where I needed to be -- with my class,” Sally said. “When I shared the news, Nicole gave me an embrace and my class came together to pray for me and my dad before I left for home.”
 
Seven months after their first encounter with MQP, Sally stood before the altar during the Easter Vigil in March 2024 with her four children and other candidates to receive the Rite of Reception into Full Communion with the Catholic Faith. “The older children, Michael and Adaline, were confirmed with me, and each of them got cross necklaces that they wear to this day,” she said. That joyful family occasion shared by hundreds of their fellow parishioners was complemented last year by the intimacy of their private rite of marriage convalidation in the Catholic Faith, presided over by Deacon Eddy Beckendorf. 
 
Now the Bodron family is giving back to the faith formation program that has made such a great difference in their lives. Sally has paid her own experience forward, taking time from her responsibilities as a mother of four and sales representative for Shell Oil to serve as a sponsor,  guiding the path for another OCIA candidate to full communion at the Easter Vigil in April. Mike, a software sales professional, has overcome his self-confessed past fears of entering the confessional to share his witness during faith formation classes on the surprising joy he experienced once he returned to the sacrament of Reconciliation.
 
If another family were to visit Mary, Queen of Peace today and ask them why they should stay and place their roots in this faith community, Sally and Mike have already been there – and they have a ready answer.
 
“The first step you take inside the door, the church feels like home,” Sally said. “People smile at you and welcome you with open arms. Every homily Fr. Cooper gives hits home with us. What we especially love is that there are so many kids at Mass, so many large, beautiful families. Like Father says, ‘If I don’t see the children here, then our church isn’t growing.’”
 
Mike puts it simply. “We spent the better part of 10 years looking for a church, and we have never felt so much at home anywhere.” 

- By Karen Baker, first printed in the October 2025 edition of The Porch Light, a Decided Excellence publication.