Why I'm Becoming a Catholic

“This is a heretics’ Mass,” he said. “This is a black Mass.”

For within me there was a famine of that inward food: Thyself, my God.

—Augustine

My decision to become a Roman Catholic has met with decidedly mixed responses and has generated misunderstandings. Partly for that reason, then—a setting straight of the record—and partly for my own benefit, I wish to explain (a) why I’m becoming Catholic and (b) why I’m leaving Anglicanism. After all, the two are distinct. Dissatisfaction with one’s existing church is not necessarily a good reason to join another.

So let me say at once that my main reason for becoming Catholic is positive, not negative. Notwithstanding the Orthodox Church(es), with whom her relationship is one of suspended fraternity, I believe the Catholic Church has the best claim to be Christ’s Church, against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail. (In fact, I recently told an Orthodox friend that it felt like I was joining his church, too. Of course, I’m not; but he understood my meaning readily: were it not for schism, we would automatically be in communion with each other.)

I have had this sense of the Catholic Church’s authenticity for as long as I have been a Christian. I remember being at a dinner party in London where the then-editor of the Church Times, an Anglo-Catholic, asked me what exactly I “saw” in Rome. I wanted my answer to impress, but I knew scarcely any of the intricacies of, say, eucharistic theology or Reformation history that might have given my answer a degree of subtlety. So, I simply shrugged and said, “It just seems like the real deal.” The implication, quite unintended, was that his Christianity was very much not the real deal. He was visibly angry. I hadn’t meant to offend, but anything else I might have said would merely have been a variation of the same.

It seems to me that the four marks of the church—unity, holiness, catholicity, apostolicity—are most obviously true of the Roman Catholic Church. I think especially of her holiness. The Catholic Church still produces saints, such as the Blessed Carlo Acutis. There is also the existence of eucharistic miracles. There was once a time when I thought bleeding hosts were fabrications (I’m sure some are), and was suspicious of the fact that these miracles only seemed to take place in a church which in some measure expected them.

But I had got it the wrong way round. It is only too obvious why eucharistic miracles occur in a church that teaches unambiguously that the bread becomes the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ; and obvious, moreover, why such miracles are few and far between in the Anglican communion, which contains such a contradictory smorgasbord of views on the subject as to make a mockery of lex orandi, lex credendi; if different priests think they are “doing” different things at the altar, how can practice cohere? How can that church claim unity? And how, more to the point, is its disunity—which we might charitably call pluralism—of any help to anyone?

I have nearly become Catholic more times than I care to count. But I would always back away. Behold, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church. I was scared by the sheer stature of that rock. I knew that if I clung to it, I could not go on being lukewarm, skipping my prayers, avoiding charity, cleaving to the false consolations of politics and the gratifying distractions of the ‘culture war’; for here was a church—the Church—that demanded nothing less than sanctity. She would remind me of the blood of the martyrs. She would present to me the intricate bulwark of her magisterium, the immense authority of the successor of Peter, the uncompromising body of morals by which I would have to remould my life. If—as Caryll Houselander puts it—the Church of England was my “immensely satisfactory aunt”, I had discovered that my “real mother is living, and is a disconcerting, unknown quantity, who apparently violates every one of the conventions that he has learned to love, and is likely to make constant and probably unreasonable demands.” I would have to acknowledge my true Mother and “submit to her devastating love.”

That’s why it took me this long. I was looking for excuses to ignore the Tiber, to swim somewhere the current was less tidal, less fatal. To that end I cleaved to a historiography according to which the Church of England was “the continuation of the catholic church in England”. Just as the Elizabethan settlement was essentially an exercise in diplomacy—the political containment of theological contraries—so I set about quelling the factions at war in my own mind. Really I was embarked on the same project that had occupied the Tractarians: could I square the Thirty-Nine Articles, Protestant as they are, with catholic ecclesiology and sacramentology?

I could not—but God knows I tried. The BCP and the holy rosary make for strange bedfellows. During Cranmer’s time, after all, merely owning a rosary could get you imprisoned or worse; and not all the literary talent in the world can excuse Cranmer himself from his complicity in the executions of More and Fisher. Thus, to call the Church of England the continuation of the catholic church in England is like saying that the United States of America is the continuation of England in America. Fundamentally, the mere existence of the United States constitutes a rejection of English political authority.

But even this analogy may be too charitable. The U.S. and Britain still share an essentially Lockian view of individual rights and both uphold common law. We speak the same language. With the exception of basic creedal formulae (a low bar), however, the Thirty-Nine Articles reject root and branch over a millennium of Christian practice and doctrine. Intercessory prayer: out. Five of seven sacraments: out. Magisterial authority: out. Mary: out.

In fact, the Blessed Virgin’s near complete absence from the BCP was for me the most decisive refutation of the Anglican project. Honouring Mary has been an uncontroversial feature of Christianity since the time of the Apostles, as anyone who has read accounts of her Assumption/Dormition will know. Who were the reformers to debase Mulier amicta sole, the woman clothed with the sun, the second Eve who crushed the serpent’s head and bore God in her womb?

Protestantism suddenly struck me as barren and pathologically masculine—the sort of Islam-adjacent, fideistic, Old Testament Christianity that might appeal to gym bros but could never inspire Notre Dame or St. Therese of Lisieux’s Little Way. Protestantism harbours a deep-seated misogyny. Catholicism harbours the only true feminism—and by extension the only true masculinity. Protestants are ashamed of their mum.

I digress. Broadly speaking, I was faced with two options: pretend the Thirty-Nine Articles no longer mattered, or accept that they still mattered. The former seems disingenuous (not to mention a kick in the teeth to those Protestants who died for what was contained in those Articles). If they no longer matter, then the whole theological and historical rationale for splitting from Rome instantly loses its force. Worse, it makes so-called ecumenical dialogue completely pointless: why would Rome hash out a plan for unification with a body whose motive(s) for schism has passed into obscurity and irrelevance? Clearly not all Anglicans were convinced by Newman’s Apologia; but I’d have thought the Ordinariate a pretty fatal blow to the cosmetic catholicism of Newman’s Anglican heirs. In short, there is no excuse for not coming home; and in my experience, “catholic” Anglicans who refuse to countenance Rome do so more from a fear of having to sacrifice comfort, position, sex life etc. than out of any visceral theological objections.

Then there’s the view that the Thirty-Nine Articles—or the Augsburg Confession or whatever other Protestant equivalents there are—do still matter. For this view I have much more respect. But since I am not nor ever will be a Protestant, I can hardly sympathise with it.

By the time my fiancée and I decided to become Roman Catholic, I regarded the Church of England much as Tolkien did, “a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs.” I did not hold this view lightly. In fact I had hoped to avoid feeling this way. But Anglicanism—institutional Anglicanism—seems hellbent on meriting Tolkien’s characterisation. For example, earlier this year my fiancée and I travelled to York to visit our Orthodox friend. Together we attended a eucharist service at the Minster where the priest, not content with a sermon that undermined the entire theology of saints, failed to offer a single intercessory prayer to any saint—and this on All Saints Day. I could see my friend shaking his head in the chair beside me. “This is a heretics’ Mass,” he said. “This is a black Mass.”

Matters were hardly helped when the pastor announced a “mind-blowing light show” due to take place in the nave afterwards. (The Church of England’s ongoing desecration of holy spaces is such an obvious turn-off to tradition-hungry young Christians that it scarcely seems worth elaborating.) A visit the next day to the shrine of St. Margaret Clitherow only strengthened our resolve. I remember learning, with a sudden sharp pang, that she had been pregnant when crushed to death. And for what? For hiding priests. For being Catholic.

We also visited York’s Bar Convent. Founded in 1686, it is the oldest surviving convent in the British isles. It now houses an exhibition covering the history of recusants in York. A wall card invites the visitor to climb inside a mock priest hole. This we did, whereupon the lights went out and a hidden speaker played the sound of a priest hunter barging into the house, banging his boots on the floor, demanding to know where the priest was. None of it felt like your average museum gimmick. It felt real, as though the present had collapsed into the past and the rosary in my pocket was once again a crime.

On our penultimate day in York, my fiancée and I went to the Oratory for a Latin Mass. On our approach, we saw, leaning against the black cast-iron railings, fag in hand, a dirty t-shirt stretched over his paunch, one foot shoeless and bandaged, and a long, recusant-style rosary round his neck, the living embodiment of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Here was merry old England; here, in the venous rouge of his cheeks, were the fasts and feasts and saints days lost to this land in a spasm of puritanical hatred. It was like seeing a long lost family member.

“One thing in this world is different from all others. It has a personality and a force. It is recognised, and (when recognised) most violently loved or hated. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it is the night.”

Belloc is right. It has certainly been my experience that the mere mention of the Catholic Church can elicit violent hatred. Sometimes this is quite understandable, as in the case of victims of clerical abuse. More often, though, it is a blind rage. One of my atheist friends was nonplussed when I joined the Anglican fold, and curious when I considered the Orthodox. When I told him I was becoming Catholic, however, he at once became angry, polemical, and accusatory.

I’m under no illusion that the Catholic Church is perfect. I am joining a church whose “normal” Mass is, I think, inferior to its old; whose current Pontiff continues to sew a great deal of unnecessary confusion; and which has yet fully to reckon with the scale of historic sexual abuse. Despite these flaws, however, I love the Catholic Church because it is within her orbit that this sinner has felt already an abundance of grace, and because she is my mother, and “you cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the Church as your Mother.”

I leave the Anglican fold with fond memories and good friends and with gratitude for the formation it provided me. But I do not leave it sadly. I am glad to be able to place my beliefs with the apostles instead of a handful of 16th century malcontents. I am glad to have discovered for myself the old faith of this land. I am grateful for the Catechism. I am relieved not to have to “explain” Mary or justify the rosary to fellow congregants. I am grateful for Latin, once the language of conquest but now, because God makes all things new, the language of love. I am pleased to belong to the same communion as Augustine and Hildegard von Bingen and Maximilian Kolbe and Benedict XVI. I am pleased, at long last, to be coming home.