Six years ago, I confided to a good friend that I had decided to enter the Catholic Church.
“Oh, Sally,” she sighed,”out of the frying pan, into the fire, right?”
I thought that an apt description, for I was leaving the almost-got-it-right Catholicism of the Anglicans for the fullness of faith to be found only in the Catholic Church.
Perhaps those who enjoy stories of escaping Fundamentalist clutches and overcoming anti-Catholicism may be disappointed in my tale. I was brought up an Episcopalian, and my early religious memories are of candles, vestments, the passing of the liturgical year, and services as near to the Offices and Mass as you can get.
My serious interest in the Catholic Church stems from a Girl Scout trip to New Mexico, during which, to save time and trouble, we were all bundled off to Mass on Sunday evening. In Gallup, in 1966, the Mass was still celebrated in Latin, a mysterious and intriguing experience. The English translation in the missalette was reassuringly familiar.
Three things stay with me vividly from that evening. One was the strong sense of something special being in that church, and another was that the altar boy was wearing black hightop Keds under his alb, not the spitshined loafers I was used to. The third was the puzzling reaction of a good friend, a staunch Presbyterian, who sat through the Mass in rigid, Calvinistic disapproval.
The something special, I learned later, was the Real Presence, and the server’s Keds have come to symbolize for me the Church’s ability to wed the sublime and the mundane. My friend’s reaction was my first intimation that not everyone thinks the Church is the greatest.
My interest in Catholicism continued to grow during the next several years, although I did nothing directly about it. Encountering the Church through literature and history in school, especially in Dante and Chaucer, I found much spiritually attractive. The idea that whole societies were once dominated by a Christian philosophy was fascinating, as was a summer spent in Mexico as a high school student. The unselfconscious piety of the people appealed to me.
I got sidetracked in my journey toward the Catholic Church by running across Anglo-Catholicism. In Advent of 1974 I encountered St. Francis Episcopal Church and the Rev. Homer Rogers. This was purest serendipity. A strong believer in the parochial system, I was looking for the closest church to our new apartment and fell into a remarkable parish. It was quite a small group, mostly because of its blend of strict adherence to orthodox Christianity and a heavy Anglo-Catholic liturgical tradition which is not for the spiritually fainthearted.
What made the parish unique was its strong community life, which pursued two concurrent goals: the worship of God and the making of saints. The whys and wherefores of these goals were constantly explained and illustrated by the pastor. Fr. Rogers, who died in 1980, was an unparalleled apologist whose sermons, parish letters, and nine-month-long instruction classes were masterpieces of Christian education. Listening to him was a “Eureka!” experience in which things vaguely known or suspected were made vividly clear by his unvarnished explanations.
Although many parishes style themselves “family places,” the people of St. Francis are a family–not a perfect one, by any means, but an incredibly loving community. I owe a tremendous debt for the grounding in the basics I received there.
I was not only taken by the warmth and friendliness of the parish, but with the idea of Anglo-Catholicism. It seemed to supply not just an active, intellectual understanding of Christianity, but also the most attractive part of Catholic liturgy and devotion without the difficulties of actually joining Rome. High-church Anglicans are fully convinced they are a valid branch of Catholic Christianity, sharing the apostolic faith, the seven sacraments, and apostolic succession with the Roman and Orthodox Churches. They are the “bells and smells” segment of the Episcopal Church, going in for incense, statues, holy water, the stations of the cross, and other sacramentals. Most high-church Anglicans have an excellent understanding of the communion of saints, and many of them have a deep Marian devotion.
Anglo-Catholicism got me out of a potentially unpleasant dilemma by allowing me to shelve any decision on the Catholic Church’s claim to have the fullness of faith. My husband had strong opinions about Catholicism, few of them favorable, and he had made it plain that being married to a Catholic was not something he considered with enthusiasm. It was a relief to drop the subject for a while and immerse myself in the life of the parish.
I had many reasons for wanting Anglo-Catholicism to work, but there arose so many questions about its validity. They couldn’t be answered satisfactorily. I began to wonder why, if we were so Catholic, no one else seemed to notice it but us. Anglo-Catholics began to remind me of a sovereign state recognized by itself, but not by any other country–or, more poignantly, of a small brother tagging along after the big guys, the Roman and Orthodox Churches, because he too was Catholic. If this were truly the case, why did the fact need constant reiteration among ourselves? Was somebody protesting too much?
The history of the Catholic Church had to be considered. That it had always been there–from the descent of the Holy Spirit onward, not always strong or wisely administered, but there without a break–was a fact hard to ignore. The counter argument that the Anglican Church always had been a separate entity, with its own bishops before the arrival in 596 of Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo, who died in 430), would not hold up.
The existence of the Sarum Rite and the insularity and independent spirit of the English Church were cited, but, try as I might, I couldn’t imagine Anselm or Augustine, Hilda, Hugh, or the Venerable Bede considering themselves “Anglicans.” There is an English Catholic tradition, just as there is a French and a Spanish and a German, but it was Catholic first, and English second.
History aside, Catholic doctrines made sense to me. Take, for example, the papacy. The Scripture passages used to explain the primacy of Peter, a doctrine discounted by Anglicans, seemed clear and understandable.
I remember listening to a tape of a Protestant minister who was explaining in annoyed detail why Matthew 16:18 couldn’t possibly mean that Peter was “the rock” because two different Greek words were used for the term. I’d had enough Latin and Greek to recognize the fallacy in his argument–you don’t use a feminine noun like petra to refer to a man, like Simon. You use a masculine form of the word, hence Petros. But it was the vehemence of his argument that puzzled me. If the papacy didn’t affect him, why did he care?
Being in the Episcopal Church with its internal disputes and its falling away into secularism and looking across to Rome was like looking into a mirror, but with one exception. In Rome, the buck stops someplace and that place is with the Pope. A case in point: The Episcopal Church USA voted to ordain women in 1976 and, later, to consecrate them as bishops. Faced with pressure to do the same, the Pope said “No” and that the matter was closed for discussion.
It didn’t seem reasonable that God, knowing human nature, would set up an organization without providing it with some sort of unmistakable, visible leadership. It also didn’t seem reasonable that Christianity had been in error about this leadership for 1500 years, until the Reformation.
So, I had no problems with what the Catholic Church taught, but I was disappointed in Catholics, lay and clerical, that I encountered. They didn’t seem very “Catholic” to me; they seemed embarrassed that anyone might think they actually believed some of the things the Church taught.
The one instruction class I went to was taught by nuns wearing pant suits and using the deficient Christ Among Us, and the discussions centered on why the Church made everyone’s life so tough. My disappointment that everyone was not behaving like the “good examples” in the Baltimore Catechism seems childish now, but it gave me an excuse to stay out another seven years.
These were years spent becoming more convinced of the truth of Catholic claims. The credit for this goes to the Holy Spirit, of course, but also to the owner of the local Catholic bookstore; he kept me supplied with orthodox and worthwhile books and periodicals and was always available to discuss the Church. I learned that there were still many who were loyal to the magisterium, refusing to compromise the faith, and I longed to be one of them.
I realize now that I didn’t really need my husband’s permission to become a Catholic, but I did want it. Once I had it, grudgingly given, I entered the Church with breakneck speed. My sponsor, the bookstore owner, directed me to a priest who coincidentally was an ex-Anglican himself.
After my conversion, I ran across passages in Caryll Houselander’s The Dry Wood in which she contrasts the “Aunthood” of the Church of England with “the Catholic Church, with her celibate clergy, her virgin heart, her disconcerting vulgarity, and the riffraff of the whole world clinging to her flamboyant skirts… unquestioningly the Universal Mother.” That sums it up. The Anglican Church was fine, so far as it went; it just didn’t go far enough.
If I had to choose one word to define being a Catholic, it would be “more”–more faith, but more aggravation; more hope, but more pain; more joy, but more sorrow–more of everything. I attribute this heightened sense to being immersed in the “real thing,” to being embraced by the Mother instead of the Aunt, to being out of the frying pan and into the fire of God’s love.