The more he studied and researched - and he has read the Bible cover to cover several times - he found nothing to dissuade him from the Catholic Church.
"I've always had faith," he noted, and "I've always had a devotion to our Lady."
"It just happened naturally," he explained. "If you love Jesus you're bound to love the Blessed Virgin Mary."
His first memories of the rosary go back to his Polish-American parish in Cleveland, Ohio, where on Wednesday and Friday evenings parishioners prayed together as World War II raged abroad. Wichorek continued the practice at Purdue University where daily he joined other students at the Newman Center to say the rosary. As a soldier at Camp Pickett, Va., during the Korean War, and later in Germany - where he met his wife and fellow Catholic, Rita – Wichorek continued his prayers.
"As far back as I can remember he's always had a very deep, strong faith," explained Wichorek's daughter Mary Kinder, 47, who is close to her father and who attends Holy Family with her own family. While she was in high school with her dad still working for the Alaska District Corps of Engineers, the two would go to Mass together in the early mornings. And across the years she joined her parents' pilgrimages to Rome and the shrine to the Blessed Virgin at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.
"I just thought everybody grew up that way," she recalled.
And since 1991 Kinder has watched her dad spend a prayerful retirement. In addition to leading the rosary and attending Mass every day at the cathedral, Wichorek serves as a parish sacristan, lector and extraordinary minister of Holy Communion.
Kinder said that her dad's strong faith and endurance in the rosary have proved fruitful for her and her three brothers. All are practicing Catholics.
"I've been spiritually spoiled," Kinder added smiling. "I have a deep love and a deep appreciation of my faith. It's like the greatest gift I could have ever received."
A?guide to Christ
While the rosary isn't the only prayer Wichorek prays, it is a priority.
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"I couldn't separate it from my faith," he said.
That's because Mary is the picture of what it is to be Christ-like, which is especially important during Lent, Wichorek explained. During the 40-day penitential season leading up to Easter, "we are asked to kind of straighten out our life and become better Catholics," Wichorek noted, and he believes there is no better guide than Mary.
"She more closely imitated Christ than any other human being in the history of the world," he said. "Besides being the Mother of Jesus, the Mother of God, Mary participated in the sufferings of Jesus during his Passion."
In fact, the depth of her compassion – which means "to suffer with" as Pope Benedict XVI has noted – goes to her soul.
"Mary feels it in her soul because Mary was conceived without original sin," Wichorek said. Like Eve before the Fall, he explained, Mary's mind, body and soul are "connected completely."
The Protestant question