Sister Carino Hodder, OP, from The Dominican Sisters of Saint Joseph, sat down for a podcast interview with Catholic Truth Society.
In a captivating video clip pulled from their conversation and posted on the Catholic Truth Society YouTube channel,
“Sister Carino tells the story of her conversion at the age of 20, going from a member of the New Atheism movement to discovering that the teachings of the Catholic Church made sense of her life.”
Sister Carino Hodder begins the clip saying that she was not brought up with any particular religion or faith background.
She explains that this was a great burden for her:
“I think the more natural and intuitive and freeing thing to believe is that there is an objective truth.”
Later, Sister Carino Hodder adds,
“I looked into the different faiths of the world. The Catholic faith kept sort of resonating in my heart and mind, which was really annoying because, you know, there’s this kind of cultural idea that Catholics are very rigid, very narrow-minded…”
Regarding her time as an atheist leading up to her conversion, Sister Carino explains that one of her favorite atheist thinkers at the time stopped her in her tracks.
She began to consider that human dignity is found in the "pursuit of an objective truth and not in total self-creation and self-invention, which is actually a form of self-deception.”
At the age of 20, Sister Carino was received into the Catholic Church.
She speaks of the impact the Catholic community had on her, which “helped a lot of things click into place.”
In a blog post shared on The Lamp, Sister Carino shares more about her vocation as a Dominican sister, specifically, choosing Saint Carino as her patron saint.