The truth about our father’s faith and final days

Since our father, Dr. Anthony Pezzotta, went home to be with the Lord on April 2, 2014, a claim has circulated that he returned to the Roman Catholic Church and received Catholic “last rites” before he died. As his family, the ones who loved him, cared for him, and were near him at the end, we want to say plainly and gently: that is not true.

We understand how the story took shape, and we hold no bitterness toward anyone in it. But our father’s faith, his life’s work, and his own written words deserve an honest account, and so we offer one here.

What actually happened

In his final years our father lived with a rare, Parkinson’s-related illness that slowly took away his ability to speak and to make his wishes known. That loss came well before his last days. His mind, we believe, remained his own — what he had lost was the ability to express it.

In his final weeks, a member of the staff at his care facility, a woman of Catholic faith who cared about our parents, became convinced that last rites ought to be administered, and asked repeatedly for permission to bring in a priest “simply to pray.” Our mother, Zita, declined again and again, explaining that we are not Catholic. Worn down at last, and wishing only to be gracious, she finally said in effect, “do as you wish.” That was not our father’s decision. He was already unresponsive, unable to ask for anything, agree to anything, or receive anything. A priest was brought in, and a rite was performed over a man who could not speak a word. From that, we believe, the story spread that he had “returned to Catholicism.”

One of those present in his final weeks was Ron Foote, Marie’s father-in-law and a man who knew and loved our father. He wrote down what he witnessed. His account puts it plainly:

This is the heart of it. A ceremony performed over a sleeping, non-communicative man, without his knowledge, his request, or his consent, is not a conversion. It is not a change of heart. It is not the free act of the man himself.

What our father actually believed

To see how false this claim is, you need only look at his life — and read his own words. Our father was a Roman Catholic for thirty-nine years and a priest for thirteen. He did not leave that life in anger or on someone else’s argument. He left it in 1974, after searching the Scriptures for himself and finding he could no longer reconcile what he read in God’s Word with what he had been taught. From that day he gave the next forty years of his life, as a missionary and pastor in the Philippines, in southern California, and beyond, to sharing the grace of Jesus Christ, always with compassion and never with contempt for the Church he had come from.

And he wrote it all down. In Truth Encounter, the book he spent his life on, our father addressed the very rite this rumor is about, the sacrament of last rites, and explained in plain words why he could not accept it:

He wrote that while he was fully able to write it. The rumor asks the world to believe he reversed a lifetime of conviction, and unwrote his own book, in a single unconscious moment. His life says otherwise. His own pen says otherwise.

A closing word

Tony’s daughter, Marie, said it best: a ritual performed on a person doesn’t determine that person’s faith; it is the heart, turned toward Christ, that does. We share this not to win an argument, but simply to tell the truth in love, and then to leave it in God’s hands, as our father would have wanted. We carry no ill will toward the Catholic Church or toward anyone who repeated this story. Our prayer is the one our father gave his life to: that all of us would come to know the grace and truth of Jesus Christ.

With love and in his memory,
— The Pezzotta Family