Meet the Roamin’ Catholics

We’re Thomas and Sarah, traveling with our three children: Eleanor, 16; Grayson, 15; and Simon, 13.

Our family has a somewhat unconventional beginning.

Thomas and Sarah found each other in perhaps the most 2020 way possible: online, during the pandemic, on Catholic Match. What began as two people getting to know one another during a very strange year eventually became a family of five. Thomas later adopted Sarah’s three children, making official what had already become true in everyday life: we were a family.

Thomas, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer, is a retired U.S. Army physician and cradle Catholic. He continues to work remotely, which is one of the things that makes this unusual way of living possible. These days, his office is wherever we happen to be—with good Wi-Fi when we're lucky and Starlink when we're not.

Sarah came into the Catholic Church as an adult, and her path through life has been anything but linear. Her background has included legal and compliance work, a decade in Catholic youth ministry, years as a full-time stay-at-home mom, and, more recently, business.

One thing has been fairly consistent: she has always been up for an adventure.

Apparently, Thomas should have taken that more literally when he met her.

Today, our family practices what most people would call traditional Catholicism, and we exclusively attend the Traditional Latin Mass. Our faith isn't an accessory to this journey. It is at the heart of it.

That's also why we don't really think of ourselves as digital nomads.

We think of ourselves as pilgrims.

Our children are being worldschooled along the way. At 16, 15, and 13, they're at an extraordinary age for it: old enough to understand much of what they're seeing, but still young enough that we have these precious years together.

History can become something they stand inside instead of simply read about. Art can hang on the wall in front of them. Geography can be traveled. Cultures can be encountered rather than summarized in a textbook. And our faith can take us to churches, shrines, monasteries, and holy places that generations of Catholics have traveled to before us.

But we're also still a perfectly ordinary family.

Thomas has work to do. The kids have schoolwork. Sarah still has to figure out what's for dinner. There are groceries and laundry, budgets and sibling squabbles, missed turns, rainy days, and probably occasions when nobody wants to visit one more museum.

We're not independently wealthy. We're not professional travelers. And we're definitely not on permanent vacation.

We're simply trying something different for this season of our family's life.

We sold or gave away most of what we owned, put what remained into a 10×10 storage unit, packed the car, and let go of the idea that home necessarily has to be one particular place.

We don't know exactly where we'll go.

We don't know exactly how long we'll do this.

And, for perhaps the first time in our lives, we're okay with that.

We want to learn. We want to explore. We want to spend these fleeting years together while our children are still children. We want to meet people whose lives look nothing like ours, experience cultures we have only read about, and stand in places where history actually happened.

Most of all, we want to remain open to wherever God leads us.

Our family itself came together along a road we couldn't have predicted.

Perhaps it's fitting that we're still traveling one.

We are the Roamin’ Catholics.

And so we went.