Why I am not a Catholic priest: Deus vult

I have been asked to write a little about why, unlike many of my more estimable Anglican former colleagues, I have not been ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church, but remain a layman.

It is June 1980. I am standing barefoot in a black cassock in what long before had been the Priory Church of St Mary Overie, on the Feast of St Peter. I had trained at university to be a lawyer. I was now waiting instead to be ordained as an Anglican and to begin work in a parish by Dockhead in Bermondsey, just east of Tower Bridge.

I had a pair of carefully polished black shoes. But I had seen Catholic ordinations and was lamenting that in our own liturgy there was no prostration before the altar and the Blessed Sacrament. The closest I could get to expressing what I felt I needed to express was to do as Moses did and remove my shoes. I was standing on holy ground. My cassock was long; my feet were more or less hidden. I hoped it was a private expression of piety, not a public one. The moment was awesome and solemn.

The night before, most of the other ordinands had left the retreat to go to the pub. It was not that I was excessively pious or antisocial, but I felt that my place was before the altar. I had fasted a little, and there was still time left to pray. The pub did not seem to me to be the place to prepare on the night before ordination.

In 1106, two Norman knights, William Pont de l’Arche and William Dauncey, refounded the church in which I was standing as an Augustinian priory, dedicated to the Virgin Mary on the south bank of the Thames. The priory established a hospital alongside the church, dedicated to St Thomas Becket, which was a predecessor institution in the long history of what became St Thomas’s Hospital, one of London’s oldest medical charities. The medieval priory church is London’s oldest Gothic church, with most of the present structure dating from roughly 1220 to 1420. The poet John Gower, friend of Chaucer, lived at and was buried in the priory; his tomb still stands in the nave.

At the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII in 1539, the priory was suppressed and the canons dispersed. The church building was retained for Anglican state worship and renamed St Saviour’s, a parish church for the local community, though the old name St Mary Overie continued in popular use.

As I stood there in St Mary Overie, waiting for the first hymn, I tried to keep my mind on continuity. I was trying to concentrate on an unbroken continuity of faith with the Catholic faith of England’s past. In 1980 I succeeded. But in later years I was to find that history would not allow the sentiment to settle. The reality, when faced honestly, told a very different story.

The walls of the old priory had not simply witnessed medieval devotion and sacramental continuity; they had also looked on scenes of terrible Catholic suffering. Southwark was not a sanctuary for recusant Catholics after 1565. It was a place of holding, of dread, of waiting. From here, prisoners were dragged northwards across the river towards their execution.

Within minutes’ walk of St Mary Overie stood two notorious prisons. The first was the Clink Prison, controlled by the Bishop of Winchester, ironically the holder of a see that had once been fully Catholic. The Clink held Catholic priests, harbourers, and recusants. Its conditions were deliberately cruel: starvation, extortion, and torture were part of the machinery of deterrence. Nearby stood the Marshalsea Prison, where religious prisoners were confined alongside debtors. Many Catholic clergy passed through its gates on their way to exile or death. In practical terms, St Mary Overie was surrounded by Catholic suffering.

Southwark detained the Catholic faithful; London, on the other side of the river, executed them. Those imprisoned here were not usually killed on this side of the Thames, but their final journey almost always began here. Most recusant Catholics were taken across the river to Tyburn, the principal execution site for priests, or to Tower Hill for prisoners of higher status. They were dragged from the prisons of Southwark, often past St Mary Overie itself, then across London Bridge and on to public execution. In this way, Southwark became part of the liturgical geography of martyrdom, even when it was not the place of death itself.

I was not to discover the truth of this history until I came face to face with the body of St John Southworth one day, thirty-five years later, in Westminster Cathedral. He was executed at Tyburn in 1654. Almost stumbling over him, I felt a sudden need to know him. Reading the history of his witness, arrest, torture, and death brought me face to face with realities that Anglican propaganda had erased from my education. The walls of St Mary Overie had resonated with the cries of recusants and witnessed the shedding of the blood of Catholic martyrs at the hands of the Protestant state and establishment that had offered me its own very different rite of ordination.

A number of things make sense now that made less sense then. During the next twelve months, St John Henry Newman’s Apologia was never out of my inside jacket pocket. I knew he was speaking to me, but truthfully, the text was problematic. I could make out the words, but the meaning was hidden.

There were other moments. I was once on retreat with some nuns in Kent and had a room in the medieval gatehouse. In the room next to mine was another guest: the Roman Catholic Abbot of Quarr, Dom Paulinus Greenwood OSB, Abbot of Quarr from 1969 to 1992.

He was one of the most striking Catholic priests I have ever met, a man who exuded a quiet holiness which, as so often happens, caused the room to seem to light up from time to time. He asked whether I would be kind enough to serve for him at Mass in the mornings in the small chapel in the gatehouse. And so it was that, as an Anglican vicar with ten years’ experience in parishes, I found myself serving at my first Catholic Mass, celebrated in Latin and offered by a man who seemed, to my eye, to carry a train of angels with him, particularly when he stood at the altar.

I knew, instinctively and without argument, that of all the Eucharists I had ever taken part in, they had been attempts, however sincere, to replicate this moment in a kind of sub-Platonic, aspirational way. I knew that this was the Mass. And I knew that where reality was, that was where I needed to be.

There were, of course, other Catholic Masses that I attended later. In particular, I remember the striking contrast with the informality of the Jesuit Masses at Heythrop, where I spent a couple of years doing postgraduate work. If one wanted down-to-earth immanence, where the daily intellectual labour of the university flowed seamlessly into a celebration of the sacramental mysteries, the Jesuits managed it with an ease that was almost disarming. They made the gentle sidestep from one world into the other with no fuss and no strain.

Meanwhile, the slow and inexorable unravelling of Anglicanism eventually broke whatever pretence of continuity I had conjured up in my mind. The move from the ordination of women as presbyters to so-called bishops ended forever the fiction that Anglicanism could claim any kind of sacramental continuity. This feminist takeover was presented as an exercise in discernment rather than ideological colonisation.

My subsequent journey into the history of Our Lady’s apparitions, and the discovery of the scientific validation of Eucharistic miracles, made the gap that Protestantism dug between the churches of the Reformation and historic Catholicism too painfully wide to bridge. I knew I had to cross the chasm.

At the beginning of Advent 2019, my Catholic bishop asked to see me and asked if, and when, I was going to convert. I knew the moment had come. There was no longer any “if”.

I told him I thought I needed two years to set my affairs in order, write an explanatory book, and explain myself to my Anglican community and to the ecclesial authorities who had asked me to act as a missionary bishop for orthodox sacramental Anglicanism. He looked disappointed.

I prayed. I reflected. I asked Jesus. I agreed and was received on the Third Sunday of Advent 2019. It was time. That was the simple part. It became more complex from that point on.

It was agreed that I would be sent to study some canon law and then be ordained into the diocese. Things then began to go inexplicably wrong. My first set of papers was lost for two years.

“Don’t panic,” said Fr Dwight Longenecker, now a good friend. “They kept me waiting for ten years.”

I found my way to the Ordinariate for liturgical reasons. They were very generous and offered to be proactively helpful. We began again. More interviews, more committees, more conversations. They re-sent my papers to Rome. We waited. And waited.

Then came news of where the papers were this time. They had once again failed to arrive. They had been misdirected to Vietnam. Vietnam, some time later, was sending them back.

I waited some more and, as I waited, I wrote and broadcast. Something, or Someone, had been preparing me for this. For four years from 2008 I had hosted my own BBC Faith and Ethics live phone-in programme. For about seven years I had a full-page column in the Jersey Evening Post writing about the Christian worldview. The editor had commissioned a cartoon to accompany what was proving to be a very provocative column. In the end, the woke began a petition to have me removed from the Island of Jersey.

With this media experience I felt confident, as a Catholic layman, to start a YouTube channel which was growing quickly. I featured on mainstream news programmes, often on GB News, and commented on relevant news, such as royal weddings and funerals. I was interviewed as a Catholic convert and invited to explain why a chaplain to the Queen would repudiate the Supreme Governor of the Church, the Protestant antipope, and become a Catholic. I was appointed Associate Editor of the Catholic Herald.

As I wrote, broadcast, and spoke at conferences, I argued for the need to resist the secular lure of the dictatorship of relativism, and reminded my former ecclesial community that the treasure safeguarded in the Magisterium would save them from being overwhelmed by culture wars from the Left and by militant Islamism from the right.

I cannot say how far the enthusiasm of the passionate convert strengthened Catholic confidence, but I can speak of the steady stream of Anglicans and agnostics, friends, acquaintances, and strangers, who read or heard my words and began their determined journey into the Catholic Church. The stream quickened and deepened.

But there was a very large obstacle which I am unsure of how to put politely. The circumstances of Catholic culture were becoming more complex and more contested. What had begun with a certain excitement at the beginning of Francis’s pontificate had changed.

The legitimate dubia were refused and “who am I to judge?” was received as the removal of objective moral teaching. Amoris Laetitia in 2016 appeared to open communion to the divorced and civilly remarried without a firm commitment to continence, producing a practical separation of sacramental discipline from objective moral state.

The Abu Dhabi Declaration of 2019 appeared to open the door to religious indifferentism and the idea that God positively wills the plurality of religions, weakening the uniqueness of Christ and the Church in salvation. Traditionis Custodes in 2021 appeared to permit a rupture-based reading of liturgical continuity and the marginalisation of the pre-conciliar Roman Rite. Fiducia Supplicans in 2023 appeared to open the door to the public blessing of objectively sinful unions and confusion between blessing persons and validating relationships.

The synodality process, begun in 2021, appeared to open the door to doctrinal outcomes shaped by consultation rather than reception, with pressure to revisit settled teaching on sexual ethics, women’s ordination, and authority.

This in turn led to an ever-deepening panic for Anglicans trying to escape the moral delusion of their own ecclesiastical community . They were not fleeing the spirit of the secular age in one denomination only to find themselves asphyxiated by it in Rome. For my part, I argued and promised, wrote and persuaded, that the Magisterium would be strong enough to resist the ambiguities of a passing pontificate. There had been problematic popes before, and Christ would keep His Church safe.

Needless to say, these were not propitious circumstances. I had not become Catholic to criticise the Pope. Yet explanations and reassurances were thin on the ground. The Pope was a problem. I found myself having to explain that conversion had not meant capitulating to a more sophisticated exponent of the same spirit of the age. At least the Anglicans, I was told, were honest in their progressive permutations.

“We may have rescued your papers from Vietnam, but you need to know the deal has now changed. You can only be ordained if you swear yourself to silence in public.”

“It would not be prudent to permit you to continue your high profile in the media.”

“But might not this platform have been given by God to use on behalf of the Church?” I suggested. It had not been achieved by any cleverness or cunning on my part. It seemed to me to be a gift and a responsibility. “Is this an absolute prohibition, or might this be open to negotiation?” I asked.

The platform I have for this apostolate had not been sought by me. In fact, it is not even wanted by me. But it was making new Catholics, in significant numbers. It was playing some small part in renewing the cause of Catholic identity, anthropology, and vision. I explained that ordaining me, so that I could celebrate Mass, might in some way be consistent with exercising an apostolate of evangelisation in public. If it was about obedience, I had not come this far to practise disobedience.

“It would not be prudent to permit you to continue your high profile in the media.”

Ordination to the Catholic priesthood felt like the fulfilment of thirty-nine years of working, praying, questioning, struggling and, in the end, waiting as an Anglican minister with ever-deepening sacramental yearnings. But what was ‘my’ fulfilment if the lost stayed lost? What was ‘my’ fulfilment if the schismatic remained in schism, separated from the last rites and from absolution? When was any of this ever about ‘my’ ordination or ‘my’ fulfilment?

G. K. Chesterton exercised his apostolate as a lay apologist. His authority came from a spirit-blown imagination and an ever more perceptive moral and intellectual clarity. He too converted late and understood instinctively that his role was to make the faith visible and attractive, not to administer it. His obedience was expressed in joy and paradox, in thinking and in words. He was a very effective Catholic apologist.

Hilaire Belloc exercised unapologetic Catholic authority precisely as a layman. His vocation was public, political and polemical. He never sought ordination because his calling was to contest the culture, not to wait before the altar. His authority lay in witness, not jurisdiction. He was a very effective Catholic apologist.

Christopher Dawson was a historian rather than a polemicist, but he understood the deep interpenetrative interdependence of culture and spirituality, or prayer. He saw the outward expression of worship and civilisation as the long echo of belief. His central claim, that when religion is severed from public life culture does not become neutral but collapses into incoherence, has become prophecy rather than analysis. Without clerical office or institutional power, Dawson nevertheless shaped Catholic understanding of history, education, and the spiritual roots of the West. His influence extended to figures as diverse as T. S. Eliot and later generations of Catholic thinkers. His authority lay not in jurisdiction but in the authenticity and clarity of his perception. He saw, earlier than most, that the crisis of the modern West was not political or economic but religious, and that no technical solution could repair what amounted to a loss of soul.

I was no Belloc, Chesterton or Dawson, not even a shadow of any of them. But I could think a little, write a little, argue a little, publish a little, and contend a little.

And every time I did so, someone was drawn nearer to Jesus in the Mass, deeper into the ministry of reconciliation, further away from schism, and closer to reception into the Church that Our Lord planted through the hands of St Peter, and against which the gates of hell could not and would not prevail.

And as an added gift, I could find a place at the lowest foot of the Church, with no status and no title, asked only to find some prayers to be said, some thoughts to be clarified, some words to be crafted, a deeper passion with which to serve Jesus, and some souls to carry to Our Lady.

I was no Belloc, Chesterton or Dawson, not even a shadow of any of them. But I could think a little, write a little, argue a little, publish a little, and contend a little.

First, I m not roman Catholic, second I do not believe that “God wills” me to be Roman Catholic.

At one time I had very great respect for the (Roman) Catholic Church. Those feelings have changed over the years just as has The Roman Catholic Church.

If God is the same yesterday, today and forever then how can the recent changes that have taken place possibly be God’s will? How can it be that after many tens of thousands of believing loyal followers of Christ in the Roman Catholic Church died protecting the Holy Land from the Moslems that we now embrace Islam and give Islam equivelence? How can it be that the scriptures make it clear that homesexual relations are sin but The Church blesses homesexual unions? How can it be that The Church only allowed men to be priests but now The Church is beginning to cave on this issue too.

If The Roman Catholic Church changed away from what Martin Luther said was wrong how could The Church have done those things in first place. Either The Church is led by one descended from Peter and Christ or it is not.

The Savior tells us through His Apostles that Christ said “by their fruits ye shall know them”. Now it seems The Church instead is full of fruits, but not the same kind of fruits spoken of in Matthew in the Holy Bible.

While The Holy Catholic Church once held my complete respect, while it carried on it’s shoulders the care of The religion of Jesus Christ for many centuries, I don’t think it now does. I could never now give my alligence to a church that in my own opinion has turned away from God. I instead will find a way to do the best I can in serving Jesus Christ outside of The Roman Church that has gone astray.

I have compassion and feel sorrow for those in The Roman Church who love The Lord Jesus Christ but are misled in many of the actions by the church in which they worship.

give Islam equivelence

??? Islam is a false religion. It's better than something like animism, Shintoism, or other forms of paganism, because it at least attempts to recognize the one true God. It also recognizes Jesus as (at least) someone real and important, and has a moral code which overlaps the Christian moral code in a few spots, but that's about all you can say in its favor.

The Church blesses homesexual unions

I am the last person on earth to endorse Fiducia Supplicans, but de jure, that's not what is supposed to be happening. You can argue that that is how it appears, and that that appearance gives great scandal, and I won't disagree with you. But at least formally, legally, and officially, the church absolutely does not bless sodomitic "unions".

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