“Papists!” my grandmother, God rest her soul, would practically spit at the merest mention of the Roman Catholic Church. She had been raised a Methodist, and viewed even the rather middle of the road Anglican church in our hometown as suspiciously “high”. I can only speculate what she might have said when, on 29 March 2025 – and in Brompton Oratory no less – my girlfriend (now wife) and I were received into the Catholic Church.
If all roads lead to Rome, I can only say that most of the ones I tried to take were diversions. Entry was difficult. There were many U turns. I remember, for example, my first visit to my local Catholic parish when I was a teenager. I was under the impression that Catholic worship was everywhere a thing of great external beauty, reminiscent of the medieval period I continue to love. I was quickly disabused of this notion. Instead of marble or stone there was a garish red carpet; instead of chant, hideously saccharine hymns and pop songs with guitar accompaniment; instead of veils and leather shoes and reverent silence, yoga pants, fluorescent trainers, constant chit chat.
I was horrified. Nothing about it comported with what I had been told about Catholicism or had seen in Hollywood films. Indeed it seemed more protestant than Protestantism, and certainly a great deal less Catholic than Anglo-Catholicism. If this was what passed as the worship of almighty God, you could count me out.
For the next several years I did what I suspect a lot of overly intellectual converts to Christianity do. I went church shopping. For a few months I attended an Anglican parish in London; after that, an Antiochian Orthodox parish in Colchester where I almost became a catechumen. I would come to reject both these communions. But that is another story, and in many ways too rational a story, for, in retrospect, my path to Rome was kept alive not so much by arguments about the papacy or Marian dogmas or the filioque, important though these are, as by a still, small, unsilenceable voice that said: “Rome is home. So come home.” My wife had, it seemed, heard the same voice. Thus it was that, almost a year ago to the day (as I write), we found ourselves reciting the creed of Pius IV beneath the lapidary gaze of St Wilfrid.
I have never looked back. Never once experienced that uncomfortable twinge, with which I had become so familiar, that I was schismatic or in some other way separated from the Church Christ established. I had indeed come home and found my true family. Only, of course, you cannot choose your family.
I quickly discovered that the barque of Peter is seldom smooth sailing. The captain may be asleep at the wheel (or gleefully steering towards the nearest iceberg). Half the crew is planning a mutiny. The cook is experimenting. The gunpowder is too damp to fire. A tidal wave is on the horizon and the boatswain thinks it is an island.
If there is one thing I have learned as a Catholic this past year, it is that the easiest temptation to succumb to is discouragement. And this is twinned with the surreal and slightly annoying realisation that I am merely a statistic – a contributor to that uptick in church attendance and confirmations dubbed the “quiet revival”. Like many, if not most, of my fellow decimal points, I have a hunger for tradition, for a lex orandi that sufficiently reflects my lex credendi. Converts to the Catholic faith by and large have zero interest in the kind of liturgical lunacy and theological laxity that swept through parishes in the years after the Second Vatican Council, a council which itself made no mention of the various practices – communion in the hand, versus populum, the abandonment of Gregorian chant and of the Roman Canon, etc – that came to prevail.
In this sense, “RadTrads” give a false impression; most young converts do not reject Vatican II. Rather, we reject the so called spirit of Vatican II, which is now little more than the spirit of a now bygone era. I think this is why figures like Bps Robert Barron and Erik Varden have such wide appeal. These men are no wet wipes. Bishop Barron in particular has made it quite clear that he has no truck with theological liberals, just as he has no truck with the conspiratorial “right”. (There is a reason he has been interviewed by Matt Fradd and not certain other YouTubers.) Both men are very definitely post conciliar. But whereas other prelates are squabbling childishly over the correct interpretation of this or that Vatican II document or whether receiving on the tongue makes parishioners look like “farm animals” (as an Irish priest recently said), these bishops have utterly transcended the fray by getting down to the serious business of teaching. They understand that converts to Catholicism do not want novelty – why would they? – and they sure as hell do not want synodality (definition forthcoming). They want security. The rock. Christ. As Varden said during the Pope’s Lenten retreat this year:
“It is tempting to think we must keep up with the world’s fashions. It is, I would say, a dubious procedure. The Church, a slow moving body, will always run the risk of looking and sounding last season.”
If only the bishop of Charlotte were as perspicacious.
Speaking from my own experience, the Catholic convert must very quickly come to terms with the fact that the Church Militant is being torn this way and that by ideological factions who wish either to make her indistinguishable from the world (think German bishops) or to reject even the merest olive branch held out to it (those who entomb the faith in post Tridentine amber). For me, navigating these centrifugal forces while remaining sane and, crucially, charitable has proved the most difficult aspect of my life as a Catholic.
But was it ever not thus? The Church Militant may be likened to Christ’s outer garments, which were torn asunder by the soldiers who mocked him. His seamless, inner garment – the Church Triumphant, the Church in Heaven – was kept whole. I did not become Christian, let alone Catholic, for easy answers to easy questions. To take an example: I had long been conscious of the presence in my own soul of the capacity for profound evil. Thus, among other things, it was the doctrine of original sin that drew me to Christianity in the first place, and I still find it hard to fathom how my non believing friends remain largely blind to – or, seeing it, nonplussed by – its sheer explanatory power. In many ways, the very woundedness of the Church has helped me to grow in my fidelity to her, for she was born from the wound in Christ’s side.
And this is to say nothing, so far, of the manifold blessings my wife and I have received as Catholics. When we were Anglican, Mary was a sort of extra – literally an option in the rubrics. It was always a close bet whether our fellow parishioners would venerate her, or simply say nice things about her, or, as sometimes happened, denigrate her. We found this scandalous. As Catholics, we take comfort in knowing that the whole parish is quite happy to bestow upon Our Mother the most vaunted titles the Church has yet come up with (and that includes Co-Redemptrix, whatever certain cardinals say).
Other blessings include the wealth of devotions – litanies, novenas, the rosary – that have sprung up, to use Newman’s language, like the branches and leaves of a great oak tree in the course of centuries. The Mass is our source and summit, and I am grateful that the Church’s theology of the Mass coheres so beautifully with the rest of her teachings. I remember as an Anglican thinking how wonderful it would be to have a catechism. Yes, theosis is the end; but a secure and easy to consult body of teachings would certainly function as a helpful means. The closest Anglicanism ever got to this was of course the Thirty Nine Articles. But as Newman found out, they admit of so many meanings as to render them meaningless. The Catechism of the Catholic Church strikes me as a work of doctrinal synthesis quite unmatched in any other Christian communion, and I often turn to it for spiritual consolation in times of doubt and anxiety.
Then there is community. I will not lie: I hate that word. Like “council”, “community centre”, “co parent”, “estate”, and so on, it smacks of the lingua franca of all secular managerialism. But where there is true community, there is communion. My wife and I were longing to be in communion with other like minded young Christians hungry for the faith and unwilling to compromise with the world. Evidently such communities can be found across the Christian spectrum. But the very solidity and antiquity of the Catholic Church has a unique binding quality. I mean that it is hard to imagine the painter poet David Jones, or the writer Dorothy Day, joining an evangelical commune or swanning off to Taizé (as much I enjoy Taizé hymns). There is definitely such a thing as the sensus Catholicus, and under its influence my wife and I have opened our home to our Catholic brothers and sisters. We have encouraged them to drop in, whenever and for whatever reason – to share a meal, pray, weep, laugh – and they do. And this is good for me, because it challenges my innate English, bourgeois, middle class timidity, which, given half the chance, would prefer the respectable and mannered to the messy and holy.
Finally, I love being a Catholic because my wife is pregnant and Catholics love babies. Motherhood is treated for what it is: not an unfortunate pause in a much more important career, but the career to end all careers – indeed the purpose of all careers. I have been overwhelmed by the support offered up to our unborn child. It is as though he or she is already a fully fledged parishioner. Almost everyone at our parish is a parent, an expectant parent, a priest, or an expectant priest. The language of fatherhood and motherhood is everywhere, just as Joseph and Mary are never far from one’s prayers.
Looking back, I wonder if my grandmother would have been quite so hostile to my conversion after all. In her widowhood, I would often pop in to make her a cup of tea. Surveying the teacups in her cupboard, I was always perplexed and amused to find, imprinted on one of them, the luminously smiling face of Pope St John Paul II. Which raises the interesting question: is a pope a papist?
