Join professional soccer player Taylor Kemp as he shares his faith journey and lessons learned in the locker room. This Catholic conversion story will inspire and enlighten soccer fans everywhere. Taylor Kemp works through the realities of high-performance team evangelization as he shares his lessons learned through locker room ministry. Taylor was a co-captain at Maryland University soccer and went on to play for the major league soccer team DC United! Taylor is now the vice president of content at the Augustine Institute and the host of Formed Now on Formed.org. This is a Catholic soccer conversion story from a Catholic professional athlete on a high-performing team! It is possible to be a Catholic soccer pro, and God can work through mistakes, a pretty girl and an awesome teacher!

Taylor Kemp: Catholic Soccer Pro

Next, I would love to dive into that transition from general Christianity to radical Catholicism. How did I get there? It was a crazy journey.

The quick version is, I had a very serious girlfriend at the time. We had dated—and she’s now my wife, so, spoiler alert, it worked out. We started dating right at the end of high school and then we dated long-distance all the way through college. She went to Colorado State University, and I was in Maryland. We dated long-distance all the way through college, and she moved out to Washington DC after she graduated, and I had been drafted.

Okay, so we’re living together in Washington DC—which is not advised, listeners out there—but we were living together. Britney was working out there, and I was a professional soccer player there. I had hurt Britney tremendously through college and some of my pro years, and eventually got to a place where I told her about this. I really, really hurt her and thank the Lord for conscience out there. So, if you’ve got that ping of your conscience, that’s God. Even if it’s hard, listen to it. Thanks be to God I did, and I eventually laid bare to Britney some of my past infidelities. It was just brutal. It was awful. Our lives fell apart. Our relationship fell apart, and Britney and I were really in this tortured place because we loved each other very imperfectly, but we wanted to figure out a way to put the pieces of our relationship back together. But we just couldn’t.

We were in this place of trying to figure out how to make things work, and we couldn’t do it. We got to a place where—this was in 2015—we realized, we can’t do this anymore. Britney, we’ve got to break up. You’ve got to move home. This thing is over. She had grown up a cradle Catholic and she wasn’t exactly a practicing Catholic, but she still held on to those cultural ties to her faith. When we got to this place of ultimatum, she came to me and said, “Taylor, we’ve tried everything ourselves, but we’ve never tried God. We’ve never given God a real shot in our relationship to see if He can help us heal and learn how to recover from what we had done to each other.”

I said, “What do you mean by that? Sure, what do you want to do?” She said, “I really want you to think about entering RCIA.” I was like, “Awesome, where do I sign the form or whatever?” She said, “Actually, it’s like a seven or eight-month thing, and I want you to consider becoming Catholic because I think we need to let God into our relationship and I think we need to be unified.” She was always a cradle Catholic. Like I said, faith wasn’t a big thing for me, so I was kind of like whatever. I didn’t have a particular affiliation, and she said, “I think we need to give God a shot and be unified. I want you to consider becoming Catholic, and it’s a seven-month thing. You have to go to the church every night forever.”

And I said no. Unbelievably, I said no. And my wife is super headstrong and strong-willed, and she signed me up without telling me. Two days before the first class, she just told me, “Hey, I signed you up, you gotta go, it’s on Tuesday, and you have to go, or else this is it.” And I was like, “Fine.”

So, I went. This was at St. Peter’s Church on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. It’s September in Washington DC, so it’s like a million degrees and 100% humidity. I go into this church basement and it’s like peeling yellow wallpaper. It’s 89 degrees in this basement because the AC of the church does not work. I’m not happy. I don’t want to be there. I’m like mildly embarrassed because I think people are going to recognize me, whatever. I hear the door open, and in walks this man wearing what looked to me like a bed sheet—a white bed sheet with huge rosary beads clanking from his hips. For anybody who’s watching out there, this was a Dominican priest, but I had never seen a Dominican priest. So, I’m like, that’s not a priest I’ve ever seen before—no collar. I lean over to Britney, who went with me, and I’m like, “Is that a priest?” She said, “I think so.”

I just couldn’t believe this. I’m sitting there counting the minutes, and I’m like, “You know what, I’m going to get through this for a month, and then I’m going to tell Britney I gave it the old college try and then I’m going to be done with this.” That priest was a Dominican friar named Father Thomas Joseph White. For any of the Catholic nerds out there, he is an excellent and well-known Catholic theologian. He ran the Thomistic Institute, and he was head of formation at the Dominican House of Studies. Now, he’s the director of the Angelicum in Rome, but he was my teacher. He’s an unbelievable catechist—amazing—and I had no idea.

So, he sits down. I’m skeptical of this dude, thinking, what the heck am I doing here? And he starts to teach, and my life has never been the same. He was the best teacher. Like I said, I had really grown up Catholic, so he’s opening up topics I have never heard anyone talk about before. He’s talking about our sexuality and what it’s for. He’s talking about the nature of sin. He’s talking about original sin. He’s talking about the virtues and vices, and I’m sitting there, skeptical. A couple of weeks in, I’m like, he’s on to something. This is pretty good stuff. And probably two or three months in, I am not thinking about dropping out. I am not sitting in the back with my arms folded angrily. I am there, eager to hear what he’s going to say every week.

I had never heard God explained in the way that he did. I had never heard about the person of Jesus Christ explained this way. It was a whole new world, and it just completely captivated me. About six months into RCIA, not only was I going to enter the Church at Easter, I was pretty sure I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to learn the same things. I just really fell in love with God, I fell in love with learning, and I didn’t know it, but I really fell in love with theology and philosophy during that time. I had an amazing conversion experience, really through RCIA.

To zoom out: What was my conversion in miniature? It was absolute moral failure on my end, which is a gift from God when recognized, right? The Lord uses these things to turn us—moral failure, a pretty girl, and a good teacher. That’s my conversion in miniature, obviously all infused with the grace of God. It was super powerful. I might not have been the last person you would think would become a passionate Catholic, but I was pretty close to that. It was a really powerful, beautiful conversion, and it had some unbelievable effects on my life.

I was suffering tremendously with anxiety and fear, being a professional athlete, of injury or losing my spot or whatever, and that cloud lifted during this time. Britney and my relationship started to heal. It gave us a vocabulary to understand what we had done to each other. It was incredible. And then, it brought with it an incredible amount of challenges too, right? Conversion is hard. Conversion is messy.

Yeah, I’ll pause there. That was the quick version.