Anglo-Catholicism and My Search for the Catholic Church

As I reflect on the words of friends who remain Anglo-Catholic in the Church of England, I am reminded of the grace that it takes for conversion to take place. Unlike so many of my former colleagues and good friends, I was not raised in the C of E nor as an Anglo-Catholic. I of course immigrated to England from the States nearly seven years ago. But, I have been in search of the Catholic Church for a very long time. Like G.K. Chesterton says, not all men enter into the Catholic Church in the same way as there are hundreds of gates. That is definitely true for me and for instance there is the difference between those who converted in the early 90's and myself who converted in June 2009. My conversion came through my deep longing and searching for the Church founded by Jesus Christ. I was looking for the Church that I began reading and learning about as I picked up the volumes of the Church Fathers that I purchased for my library. I was looking for the Church where beauty and holiness were coming together and kissing one another in the Sunday liturgy.

My journey into Catholicism began with a love for the liturgy that I had discovered through reading. I wondered where this church was within my own tradition as a Protestant that I discovered in the Fathers. God brought me to High Church Anglicanism that eventually led me to Anglo-Catholicism/Papalism. But when I lived the Catholic liturgy as an Anglo-Catholic priest, there was still something missing. I had not yet arrived in the resting place that the depth of my soul was seeking by simply celebrating the Anglican Eucharist with the liturgy of the Latin Rite Catholic Church. I came to understand that Tradition was set within an ecclesial context that was supported by an authority that was divinely given and in existence to protect the Church from error and apostasy. I came to believe in my heart of hearts that the authority that keeps the Church together was not to be found in Anglo-Catholicism. G.K. Chesterton writes a paragraph in his story of conversion that I could have written myself as someone who experienced the very same transformation of thinking when I knew that being an Anglo-Catholic separated from the See of Peter was not yet really Catholic, no matter what rite I used to celebrate the Eucharist. He writes,

The Church is a house with a hundred gates; and no two men enter at exactly the same angle. Mine was at least as much Agnostic as Anglican, though I accepted for a time the borderland of Anglicanism; but only on the assumption that it could really be Anglo-Catholicism. There is a distinction of ultimate intention there which in the vague English atmosphere is often missed. It is not a difference of degree but of definite aim. There are High Churchmen as much as Low Churchmen who are concerned first and last to save the Church of England. Some of them think it can be saved by calling it Catholic, or making it Catholic, or believing that it is Catholic; but that is what they want to save. But I did not start out with the idea of saving the English Church, but of finding the Catholic Church. If the two were one, so much the better; but I had never conceived of Catholicism as a sort of showy attribute or attraction to be tacked on to my own national body, but as the inmost soul of the true body, wherever it might be. It might be said that Anglo-Catholicism was simply my own uncompleted conversion to Catholicism.

I didn't leave the CofE because I believed it treated me unfairly or didn't want me around. Actually, the CofE provided very well for me and my family and treated me exceptionally well in many respects. There were many who of course disagreed with the theological framework from which I served out my priesthood and ministry but I never felt as if I was not wanted or not provided for. What brought me to the point of making my move to become a Catholic and give up my identity and ministry as an Anglican priest was my longing to be Catholic in truth. I knew that if I was ever going to really live in what the Apostle James called the law of perfect freedom, and be truly free, I was to be really Catholic in truth. This is one of the greatest lessons I have learned in my 17 short months as a Catholic convert--I live my Catholic Faith in perfect freedom. I have never felt more liberated in my faith and love for Jesus and love for the Church and truth than since my time as a Catholic. I have truly been converted in the sense that Cardinal Newman speaks about his own journey into the Catholic Church. To leave Anglo-Catholicism or any other tradition of Protestantism for single issues is not to embrace Catholicism. To leave Protestantism and to become Catholic is to completely leave autonomy behind and embrace the freedom that living under authority provides. I close with a lengthy quotation from Chesterton for reflection and discussion:

The same people who call the convert a pervert, and especially a traitor to patriotism, very often use the other catchword to the effect that he is forced to believe this or that. But it is not really a question of what a man is made to believe but of what he must believe; what he cannot help believing. He cannot disbelieve in an elephant when he has seen one; and he cannot treat the Church as a child when he has discovered that she is his mother. She is not only his mother but his country's mother in being much older and more aboriginal than his country. She is such a mother not in sentimental feeling but in historical fact. He cannot think one thing when he knows the contrary thing. He cannot think that Christianity was invented by Penda of Mercia, who sent missionaries to the heathen Augustine and the rude and barbarous Gregory. He cannot think that the Church first rose in the middle of the British Empire, and not of the Roman Empire. He cannot think that England existed, with cricket and fox-hunting and the Jacobean translation all complete, when Rome was founded or when Christ was born. It is no good talking about his being "free" to believe these things. He is exactly as free to believe them as he is to believe that a horse has feathers or that the sun is pea green. He cannot believe them when once he fully realises them; and among such things is the notion that the national claim upon a good patriot is in its nature more absolute, ancient and authoritative than the claim of the whole religious culture which first mapped out its territories and anointed its kings. That religious culture does indeed encourage him to fight to the last for his country, as for his family. But that is because the religious culture is generous and imaginative and humane and knows that men must have intimate and individual ties. But those secondary loyalties are secondary in time and logic to the law of universal morality which justifies them. And if the patriot is such a fool as to force the issue against that universal tradition from which his own patriotism descends, if he presses his claim to priority over the primitive law of the whole earth--then he will have brought it on himself if he is answered with the pulverising plainness of the Book of Job. As God said to the man, "Where were you when the foundations of the world were laid?" We might well say to the nation, "Where were you when the foundations of the Church were laid?" And the nation will not know in the least what to answer--if it should wish to answer-- but will be forced to put its hand upon its mouth, if only like one who yawns and falls asleep.