«Praying the Rosary Was Especially Helpful to Me While I Was Discerning My Catholic Faith»: The Remarkable Conversions of Contemporary Philosophers
A Princeton University philosophy doctoral student recently announced his conversion to Catholicism. He said he had struggled for years with questions about the faith, including the problem of evil. The Rosary was especially helpful to him as he discerned whether to become Catholic.
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Three contemporary philosophers—Princeton doctoral students Noah McKay and Joe Schmid, and Spanish philosopher Ernesto Castro—have recently described journeys to Catholicism shaped in different ways by intellectual inquiry, personal experience, and prayer. Their accounts range from weighing arguments and reported miracles to a moment of spiritual peace at a monastery. 1
McKay said he was never an atheist, but that he wrestled with uncertainty during high school and university, including doubts about biblical reliability and interpretation. He told EWTN News that arguments from fine-tuning, contemporary Christian miracles, conscience, moral knowledge, and natural beauty helped persuade him of theism. 1
McKay said evidence for miracles associated with Catholic teachings prompted him to investigate the Church’s history and theology more closely. He argued that the evidence was compelling enough that rejecting all such miracles would be unreasonable, and said his subsequent investigation strengthened his case for Catholicism. 1
He also described the decision as difficult for close friends and family, given his Protestant background. For people discerning or returning to Catholicism, McKay recommended prayer, saying the Rosary was especially helpful to him while he was considering the faith. 1
Schmid announced his return to Catholicism on August 21, 2026, after years of publicly identifying as an agnostic and discussing philosophy of religion on his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Princeton and had previously criticized arguments for God’s existence. 1
The article describes his return as gradual: he first regained belief in God, then accepted Christianity, and finally came to Catholicism. It cites arguments from contingency and miracles among the considerations that influenced him, including miracles he regarded as supporting Catholic doctrines. 1
Spanish philosopher and aesthetics professor Ernesto Castro publicly announced in 2026 that he had been baptized and confirmed and had received the Eucharist for the first time, after about a year and a half of catechesis. The article says he had not initially been seeking conversion. 1
Castro recounted that, during a personal crisis, he visited the Montserrat monastery with the woman who is now his wife. He said that experiencing profound peace before an image of the Virgin played a decisive role in his journey toward faith. 1
The article identifies a common thread in the three accounts: an intellectual search that raised questions about God and the meaning of existence. The paths themselves differed, combining philosophical arguments and investigation with prayer, reported spiritual experience, or personal crisis. 1*
Prayer and reason shape conversion amid suffering
Prayer, reason, and suffering can converge in conversion, but they do not do the same work. Reason can examine questions and recognize that faith is not simply irrational; prayer opens a person to grace; and suffering may become a moment of encounter with Christ. None of this means that suffering automatically produces faith or that conversion requires abandoning thought.
Pope Benedict XVI describes conversion as a response to God that may need to be renewed throughout life. He points to people who discovered God in very different circumstances, including Etty Hillesum, who found God amid the catastrophe of the Shoah. Her story suggests that suffering can become a setting for religious discovery, not that suffering itself is good or that every sufferer will experience such discovery.
Prayer, in this account, is not a technique for escaping pain. Benedict teaches that it can sustain a person through trials in union with Christ, while hope looks toward the Resurrection. Prayer also turns outward: it can become intercession and solidarity with other people who suffer, rather than a purely private search for comfort.
Reason remains part of this journey. Catholic faith holds that revelation is not something reason can deduce on its own, but faith is not therefore opposed to reason. The act of believing includes a free response to grace and to what God reveals; reason can still explore the intelligibility and implications of faith. Pope Francis’s reflection on Blaise Pascal similarly presents conversion not as the victory of feeling over thought, but as an encounter in which grace illumines reason and humility frees it from presumption.
Christian teaching also gives suffering a possible meaning without treating pain as desirable. John Paul II writes that suffering united to Christ can draw a person closer to him and become part of a witness to the Gospel; this may bring spiritual growth, but it does not make illness, grief, or injustice good in themselves. The Christian response is not to romanticize suffering or promise that prayer will remove it. Rather, prayer can help someone endure it with hope, and faith can direct that endurance toward love of God and neighbor.
So the headline’s central insight is sound if understood carefully: conversion can involve both intellectual searching and prayer, while suffering may sharpen questions of meaning or deepen a person’s openness to God. But the brief headline alone does not establish what particular person or event it describes, or how suffering specifically shaped that conversion.