Jettie Pettit describes herself as a “Mississippi Baptist woman who’s been Catholic all my life — but I just didn’t know it!” That is until Father François Pellissier, a Glenmary Home Missioner, knocked on her door and offered her an invitation that changed her life.
Jettie, a member of Glenmary’s mission in Bruce, Miss., has great respect for her Southern Baptist roots but says she always felt a hunger — a spiritual hunger — for something she could not identify. She remembers as a child listening from an open window to a conversation a Baptist preacher had with her father that further confused her.
“He told Daddy that I was ‘under conviction,’ and in the Baptist tradition that means God had put a call in my life,” Jettie remembers with a laugh “Well, Daddy told the preacher, ‘she’s only eight years old — what’s she being convicted of?'”
Ask Jettie today and she’ll tell you she’s indeed “under conviction.” But the call she says God has put on her life is to evangelize for the Catholic Church — and for Glenmary! Jettie, who comes from a long line of Baptist preachers, was introduced to the Catholic Church by Glenmary home missioners. Although suspicious and hesitant at first, Jettie says she soon realized after attending Mass that she finally “found what I was hungry for!”
As a child, Jettie knew God had a special plan for her life. She married young and was ordained to the Baptist ministry with her husband, James, who died in 1992. As they worked side-by-side in the ministry, Jettie continued her spiritual search. She visited every church in a 50-mile radius of her home — every church, that is, except for a Catholic church. She thought there was no point visiting a Catholic church because she had been taught “that Catholics didn’t believe in God!” Today she says what she was taught as a child about the Catholic faith was based on many misconceptions.
Those misconceptions guided her reaction to Father François’ knock on her door. She says she remembers seeing “this big, tall feller standin’ on my front porch telling me that he stopped at my house to invite me to a celebration of life in heaven.” She didn’t take the time to ask him what he meant — all she could think of was how to get rid of him!
After scooting him off her porch, she later realized that “I had gotten rid of that Catholic feller so fast that I didn’t realize that he had invited me to Easter services.” She pondered the invitation and decided to go, just to see what it was all about.
When Jettie attended Mass for the first time that Easter morning in 1984, she felt she was in familiar surroundings — that she was at home. That very day, she says, she started on a journey to the Catholic Church that she unknowingly started as a toddler when she was taken to a Catholic hospital after a playground accident. Years later she discovered that while in the hospital she had been baptized by the chaplain.
Only a year after first stepping into a Catholic church, Jettie felt ready to join, but Father François persuaded her to continue her studies. “He would tell me ‘the Church isn’t ready for you yet!'” Jettie laughs. “But really, he could see I was still focused on the idea of me and God and hadn’t hooked into the concept of the Church as the Body of Christ.” On Pentecost Sunday in 1987 she was received into the Church. Her searching had ended.
The sacraments, especially the Eucharist, set Jettie’s soul on fire. When she speaks about her spiritual journey and how the Catholic tradition fills her up, her enthusiasm is contagious. It’s as if when she entered the Church on Pentecost those many years ago, she, like the apostles, was filled with the Holy Spirit and ordained to spread the word of God to the corners of the earth!
Although she knows it was God’s grace that ultimately brought the Church to her, she never passes up the opportunity to thank Glenmary donors for helping place instruments of that grace — Glenmary priests, brothers and coworkers — in her path. She often volunteers to travel to parishes or events to share her conversion story and explain the importance of Glenmary’s work in home mission counties like her own.
The work of Glenmary, Jettie says, is to feed the hungry: those lacking food and those, like herself, who are starving spiritually. Today, she continues to bring life to the Catholic community in Bruce, Miss., and everywhere she travels to tell her story.
