Tammy Peterson, the wife of well-known Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, confirmed her conversion to Catholicism on Easter. Tammy was raised Protestant, although she had distanced herself from God, she regularly prayed the rosary during a miraculous recovery from a rare and deadly cancer that led her to embrace her new creed.
BREAKING: Tammy Peterson enters the Catholic Church! https://t.co/B2baALzwNS
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 31, 2024
Illness in full success of her husband
In several interviews, Tammy remembers that she distanced herself from the church when her parents stopped attending religious services. An episode in her youth, when she was a community pool supervisor and her demands to improve user safety were dismissed, led her to adopt a cynical view of life, mixed with a search for truth that lasted until her battle with cancer.
In 2015, she began to suffer severe pain caused by arthritis. Just two years later, just as her husband's publishing success exploded, she could barely go up or down stairs. As if that were not enough, a kidney scan detected a suspicious mass that doctors began to investigate. An initial biopsy confirmed that it was a tumor. The second was even more devastating. The disease was much more aggressive than they had thought, and Tammy was given just a few months to live, as she recalled in conversation with EWTN:
When [my doctor] took me into the office, his hands were shaking and he handed me these papers to sign over to have another surgery and he said, ‘I’m sorry but we did another biopsy and what you have is much more aggressive than what we thought. You have what we think is 10 months to live.’ And my husband and I were quite shocked.
As soon as she received the news, Tammy went to see her son to tell him the news. "I think at that moment, when my son looked at me with such grief and a love that was deeper than I had for myself, what I felt lift off of me was my own cynicism and my own self-doubt because I think I had given that up to God."
Praying the rosary in the hospital
After two operations to remove the tumors, complications arose, forcing her to stay in the hospital for five weeks. She lost weight and hair and was unable to even eat. At that moment, her friend Queenie Yu, a convert to Catholicism as an adult and a member of Opus Dei, brought her "a rosary blessed by Pope Francis, a little pamphlet on how to pray the Rosary and an image of Our Lady and Baby Jesus." Since Tammy pointed out that she didn't know how to do the prayer, Yu offered to teach her and pray together. During the time of her hospitalization, Yu visited her friend every day to pray the rosary and talk about faith and family.
After being discharged, and just before leaving for Philadelphia to undergo new tests, a priest blessed her and proposed that they perform a novena together to Saint José María Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei. On the fifth day of the novena, Tammy was scheduled for another operation, but the doctors found that the problem had resolved itself. The intervention was canceled and she was discharged, something she attributes to God:
[The doctors] didn't even offer me chemotherapy or radiotherapy or gene therapy or anything because they said this type of cancer has killed everyone and there is no treatment for it.
