# A Priest Converts to Islam – His Love for Jesus Led Him to Islam

- Language: en
- Published: 2026-08-26
- Canonical: https://blog.towardseternity.com/en/blog/a-priest-converts-to-islam-his-love-for-jesus-led-him-to-islam
- Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jrmp0XON7I
- Channel: Towards Eternity

This is the cleaned transcript of the source video. The speech is unaltered.

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My love of Jesus... I wanted to know who Jesus was in reality. My love of Jesus called me to see who he was. My love of God caused me to see that Jesus can't be God. People don't think of the Muslim world and they don't think about people freely converting to Islam. They think that Islam was spread by the sword. For us, for me, coming from a Latin American background, that's extremely important because Christianity for us was forced upon us by the sword. When I took my Shahada (declaration of faith), I began half Shahada: La ilaha illallah (There is no god but Allah). So for me, there was questions. Is the Prophet Muhammad a "Dajjal" (Antichrist)? A'udhu billah (I seek refuge in Allah).

Because that's what's taught, that anybody that comes after Jesus is a false prophet. The Prophet Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam was able to establish a community and a society of faith and justice. The Muslim community became my family, they became the refuge for me. As-salamu alaykum (peace be upon you), Imam Yusuf Rios. Thank you so much for accepting our invitation as Towards Eternity. We are very happy to have you with us. Wa alaykumu s-salam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh, Ahmed abi. Nice to be here. So, my first question is, who is Imam Yusuf Rios? Can you tell us briefly about your life, please? Well, briefly, I was born in the US. I was born into a Catholic and a Protestant family.

And so I grew up in between those two strands of Christianity. And during my early teens, I had some struggles, and then in my late, uh, 20s, I ended up becoming a Muslim. So for the last 25 years or so, after two and a half years of education, I was studying to be a priest, I ended up converting to Islam and I've been focusing on serving the Muslim community, focusing on Da'wah (inviting to Islam) and education. So, how was your life in regards to faith? What were you believing in? I grew up in a pretty religious background, pretty religious family. My father's side was practicing Protestant, and they even were founders of churches.

And my, uh, mother's side was practicing Catholic, and they were pretty committed to the Catholic Church. I leaned more heavily toward the Roman Catholic orientation of Christianity. So in my early teens, I struggled a little bit with making sense of being religious in a society which was increasingly becoming secular. In the city that I grew up in, it was pretty intense. Like, you know, we got hit with crime and drugs, and even the music was opening up to ways of thinking and behaving that were not normal in the society. My early teens, I experienced a very dark reality of being a human being. And so when I started to come out of that in my late teens, I was looking more for religiosity.

My view of the world was very negative. I was thinking the end of the world was coming. It was time to prepare for the hereafter and so on and so forth. So I went to the opposite extreme. The opposite extreme was just I wanted to abandon everything and just commit myself to a limited sense of worship and detach myself from the world. And part of that journey was to become a priest. I actually wanted to become a monk before that. But then I didn't go that route, and I ended up studying to be a priest for two and a half years. And then there I decided to come into Islam. How did this two and a half years go for you? And what did you experience in those years that you decided to become Muslim?

To study to be a priest, you just don't study like, uh, religious teachings, but you have to study philosophy, you have to study other religions, not just your own religion. So then with that challenge of ideas that came up also from my philosophical studies, it caused me to question. And where I was at emotionally, like I told you, I was not really engaged in the world too much. So I began to ask myself, what does religion mean to life? And that's where I saw that, you know, my practice of Christianity was not capable of really speaking to family life, to society, and so on and so forth. The idea that we were being given with that religiosity was you have to be detached from the world.

And people that are married or people in society, they have a lesser form of religion. So to me, it didn't make sense that, uh, the prophets struggled to teach Bani Israel (Children of Israel) the Oneness of God. And then at the end, you know, we're saying that God is a human being. But, you know, we know the struggle of Ibrahim alayhis-salatu was-salam (upon him be peace and blessings) and the struggle of Musa alayhis-salatu was-salam. So it didn't make too much sense at the end. Also, when I was studying to be a priest, we used to read the Psalms, the Zabur (Psalms), uh, in the version that they had it. And so the question that God created evil was very clear in the Psalms.

But in the Christian theology, it was something else. So the idea of the Tawhid (Oneness of God) became a very important question for me. Like, what does Tawhid (Oneness of God) really mean? So, there also, knowing who Jesus is, and I've mentioned this in other platforms, that there was no clear understanding of who Jesus is. Not the way that we have in the life of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam as Muslims. We have historical data. It's not just emotional, it's not imagination. And then also the question came up, what do you do with the millions of people that are from other faiths? Do you say that they're going to hell? Like, how do you deal with that reality?

So those things really impacted me and forced me to question. Those were the things that pushed me towards Islam. And how did your journey towards Islam begin? What was the thing that started your journey? My love of Jesus. I wanted to know who Jesus was. There's so many different realities when you-- when you convert to Islam, you realize it's not one event. There's a lot of different events, but there's always that core thing that's moving you. But my love of Jesus was what pushed me to towards Islam. I wanted to know who Jesus was in reality. That pushed me to look towards Palestine. It pushed me to study that reality, and then I began to hear the Adhan (call to prayer).

And when I began to hear the Adhan (call to prayer), it called me more and more to Islam. But in my desire to really worship God and really get to know Jesus, that forced me to question myself, like, what does this really mean? And so more and more I had to work through those types of issues, like Jesus as a model of worship, who Jesus actually is, what Jesus' actual teachings were. You know, did Jesus say that he was God, or was Jesus teaching us to follow the one God? And even in Christian scholarship, uh, the idea that Jesus said he's God, for the past 200 years has been doubted among Christian scholars themselves. That's not Muslims imposing their own idea. That's not Jews.

That's the Christians themselves saying within their own scholarship that, no, we don't have actual tangible evidence. There may be things that look like that, but we don't have the actual tangible evidence. And that type of questioning came from Protestant Christianity. My love of Jesus called me to see who he was. My love of God caused me to see that Jesus can't be God. Because that would be idolatry. But there's an interesting thing here. When I was began to practice, and I should mention this, when I began to practice Catholicism, I told you that I began to become religious because I had a bad experience in life as a young teenager in my early teens.

But the one who caused me to question my Christianity was my cousin, because he posed to me, he said, 'You believe in that, but what do you have to say?' Because my cousin was dealing with Muslims. He said, 'But what about these millions of Muslims? Are you claiming that they're going to go to hell? They're righteous people.' And so my cousin, he was dealing with the Muslims quite a bit, and so he was bringing me around the circle of Muslims. And they would question me, and that would force me to become more research-oriented in practice in Christianity. But in many senses, he was the one that gave me the more intimate view of Islam.

And for a while, he didn't take the Shahada (declaration of faith). When I took my Shahada (declaration of faith), I began half Shahada: La ilaha illallah (There is no god but Allah). We were taught that there's no prophet that's coming after Jesus. So for me, there was questions. Is the Prophet Muhammad a "Dajjal" (Antichrist)? A'udhu billah (I seek refuge in Allah). What we understand in Islam, was he a false prophet? Because that's what's taught, that anybody that comes after Jesus is a false prophet. So I had fear that, whoa, hold on a second.

But the Oneness of God, because when you look in the Bible, the Bible says, 'Hear ye Israel, the Lord your God is one.' And you look at the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments teach you that you shall have no other gods except God. Which is basically the Shahada (declaration of faith). So I said, 'I'll come this far, ' which for Muslims, that's not acceptable, right? Because they want you to accept the whole of the Shahada. But I said, 'I'll come this far, and then I'll worry about the rest later, ' because I believe-- I'm convinced of this. I went through a crisis when I left the, when I left studying to be a priest.

I already had studied Buddhism, I studied other versions of Christianity. I believed in the prophets. So I didn't want to abandon that, but I was not sure what direction to go, and I didn't want to be an atheist. I didn't feel I can belong to the Jewish community because of, you know, their race-based commitment. You know, you have to be part of their ethnic group. And so that's a reality. And so I said, 'The only thing that's left is Islam.' So I'll come in this much and worry about the rest later. And so then when I began to do more and more studies, things became more and more clear for me.

So I was not clear on who on Jesus, I was not clear on the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam. But I was clear on La ilaha illallah (There is no god but Allah). And so then I began to be more clear on the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam. Then what made you, like, convinced that Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is the prophet of God? So what did you learn that made you think this way? When I began to study the life of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam that was the turning point. Although, you know, I have my own issues with the way that we do Seerah (Prophetic biography). We have to be careful how we do Seerah (Prophetic biography). That's extremely important as Muslims.

Because we do Seerah (Prophetic biography), Seerah, the organization of Seerah, it paints it like the Prophet Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam was born, he had his youth. Then he encountered God at a certain point, and then he became, you know, he became a prophet, and then he gave Da'wah (inviting to Islam), then he established a community. Then from there, in the whole process of establishing a community, what you find is the Ghazawat (battles/expeditions). There's all these battles that are mentioned. So it paints the prophet from that angle as being a warrior.

That's a dimension, but it's important for us Muslims also to put a lot of emphasis on how the prophet dealt with people, his enemies, people of other religions. That's important, right? So those dimensions, the compassion of the Prophet Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam, his role as a leader, his role in establishing justice. Those things, they convinced me more and more of the reality of who the Prophet ﷺ is. And also the fact that we have documented evidence. There's no other documented evidence of any other prophet or any human being to that level, you know, that we see. That we're able to verify.

This is not something that is we're being asked to believe on imagination or faith without evidence. But also knowing that there's a lot of misunderstanding of what Islam teaches. The way that Islam is framed is still framed within the mindset of Islam against the world. You know, Henry Kissinger, he had that mindset of teaching that Islam is just war, a war religion. And the way that the Orientalists painted Islam is still dominates somewhat. People don't think of the Muslim world and they don't think about people freely converting to Islam. They think that Islam was spread by the sword. That's a very real reality.

So the historical side of that, and the cultural side of that, and the civilizational side of that is really not dominant. For us, for me, coming from a Latin American background, that's extremely important because Christianity for us was forced upon us by the sword. So, how did your family and the people around you react to your conversion to Islam? That was very difficult because I came from a Christian background. And then you had, a couple years later, you have 9/11. You know, so you had this built up. I was already Muslim for a little while, but 9/11 hits, and I don't have a very good relationship with my family. So my mom pretty much rejected me, especially when I got married.

So I went through a period where my mom had rejected me, and there was always a, when I would talk to her, there was always an issue of religiosity. Where we didn't have that before, but she always laid down the groundwork in our conversations that it was going to come to a point that Jesus is God. And that if I don't accept that Jesus is God, there's a problem. Because in her eyes, I was a Murtad (apostate). You know, I abandoned the faith. In Puerto Rican culture, especially Catholic culture, the two are one. So when you abandon Catholicism, it's like being abandoning being a Christian. I mean, being a Puerto Rican, sorry. So that was a big conflict.

When I got married, I took my wife to meet my grandmother because my grandmother was a devout, active Catholic. She was active in the church, not just a regular practitioner. But she was active. She had some leadership role. So when she saw my wife with the Hijab (headscarf). She's like, 'That's the right way.' At the beginning, she would not talk to me, and then the communication was very minimal until towards the end. Then it changed with my children. When my children were born, you know, there was a certain period of time she would not deal with them, but then it's like I had to fight for them to have a relationship with my mom. Then it changed.

You know, then the communication became a lot better. The Muslim Ummah (community) became my mother. It was very difficult up to now. It made me be sensitive to other people. That's where it made me to be sensitive to other people. I can still grow in that area, but it definitely made me be sensitive. It made me rely a lot on the Muslim community, maybe more than I should have. But it definitely forced me to rely on the Muslim community because that became my family. The Muslim community became my family, they became the refuge for me. And has any one of your family members, like extended family members, become Muslim after you?

My cousin became Muslim, the one who inspired me to come into Islam. You know, he was my brother. He was like my cousin-brother. We grew up together, and he didn't become Muslim when I became Muslim. So I thought he was going to become Muslim. And so it's like, he still struggled with a lot of things. So I was on my journey, like in studying Islam and, you know, doing Da'wah (inviting to Islam) and so on and so forth. So I had to kind of keep going. So it was hard. It was hard because it's like I was torn from my family, I was torn from my community and everything. You kind of feel like, yeah, there's one more, you know what I'm saying, that became Muslim.

So final questions: what impressed you the most about Prophet Muhammad Alayhis Salatu Wasallam, about his life? The Prophet Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam was able to establish a community and a society of faith and justice. That's kind of where everybody's struggling with right now. What's the meaning of life? How to establish justice? On every level: politically, economically. How do we deal with differences? The modern world would do well to study the life of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam from that angle. What does good leadership look like? Because there's a relationship directly between faith and life. And that model. That was the struggle I had.

So you said you searched for many religions, and why Islam out of hundreds of religions? Simplicity of belief, authenticity of resources, practicality in terms of relating to life. Islam deals with every aspect of the human being. Islam is the only religion on the face of the earth, I can say that with certainty, that deals with every aspect of the human being. And includes humanity as a whole. It's not based on one ethnic group or tribe or race, but for all of humanity, gives guidance on every level of life. Celebrates life. Life is very beautiful and positive. Human being is good. The origin of the human being is very optimistic, very hopeful in that regard.

Imagine that a Christian comes to you. How do you describe Islam to them in just one minute, like briefly? I always say that Islam is in capsule form, you know, what we have in the Ten Commandments: to worship only God and no god other than God. And don't have idols. Reaffirming the reality of Jesus, affirming Jesus's teachings, fulfilling Jesus's mission. Jesus was pointing to love and compassion. And so you learn that perfectly in the life of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam, who is for all of humanity. And Jesus taught the Oneness of God and to worship God and to have a simple faith, simple life, you know. So all those things, you find them in Islam with more clarity.

Jesus was a Muslim. He submitted to God. Muslim simply means to submit to God's will. Jesus did that, yes. And lastly, if there was a chance to speak to all the non-Muslims in the world, what would you like to say to them if you had only just a few moments? Don't deprive yourself of being exposed to the Quran (the holy book of Islam), the only authentic revelation on the face of the earth since its beginning, the point of revelation to us to now has been intact and its language is accessible. And don't deprive yourself of actually encountering who the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is. Peace be upon him. Those are for two foundational things. And the other, lastly, is, you know, Islam as a civilization.

Not just as a religious practice, but Islam influencing civilization has a lot to offer all of humanity. Take from it what's beneficial. I think those are the three main core messages that I would give to people throughout the world.