why I became a catholic

first published in The Tablet Easter Issue, 8th April 2023

I wrote this piece for The Tablet last Easter. Someone’s just informed me that it’s no longer accessible online, so I’m publishing it here. The 8th of December will mark two years since I was received into the Catholic Church. I’m not a particularly good Catholic, and I tend not to talk about my faith online very much because I don’t want to set a poor example or scandalise anyone, but I’ve never regretted the decision (if you can call it that) for a second. There’s also much more I could say and many ways to tell a conversion story, all of them true. This is the way I chose to tell it at the time for an article in a national magazine. I may tell it another way in future.

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JUST AFTER the second lockdown, in the spring of 2021, my boyfriend took me to Mass at the Oxford Oratory. It was the Novus Ordo in Latin, and as I flicked through a borrowed Mass book, I looked around at pews full of people singing the Creed from memory. Maybe it was because of the pandemic, during which I’d barely been to church, but as I knelt on the stone floor at the back of the nave, I found myself able to pray for the first time in years. The distance from God that I’d felt since before the pandemic suddenly disappeared. As we came out, I turned to my companion and said: “I think I have to convert.”

I started meeting a priest for catechesis shortly afterwards, though it would take more than a year-and-a-half before I was received into the Church. I remember reading through the Catechism for the first time and pausing at this line: “Sustained by divine grace, we respond to God with the obedience of faith, which means the full surrender of ourselves to God and the acceptance of his truth insofar as it is guaranteed by the One who is Truth itself.” I underlined the words “full surrender”. Becoming a Catholic would be, for me, a process of learning to let go of my individual judgement and surrender to something much bigger than myself. It would teach me that faith wasn’t about what I wanted, or what I thought was right, but about being brought to my knees.

I HAD BEEN baptised five years earlier, in the chapel of my undergraduate college. I was studying history and I’d veered towards the pre-modern, learning about medieval theological controversies, liturgy, popular religion—whole realms of human experience that I’d known nothing about before coming to university. At evensong, listening to the choir sing the Magnificat, I found a peace that was otherwise absent from my life. The chaplain had created an environment welcoming and inclusive enough for Wadham’s left-wing, generally non-religious students to fill the chapel each Sunday and share a simple dinner afterwards. After graduating, I realised how lucky I’d been to experience a community coming together in worship, comfortable enough to show up in pyjamas and cry through the hymns.

I knew that if Christianity was true, then I ought to devote my life to it. I started thinking about vocation and ordained ministry, which I saw as the best way to exercise my gifts and the callings I felt towards pastoral care and theological education. After a few catechesis meetings, we got to discussing gender and sexuality, and I decided that I should stay in the Church of England. There, I could commit my life to God without sacrificing my values, and without my gender ruling me out of the priesthood. I got a job as a pastoral assistant at a big church in London known for its inclusivity.

I sometimes wonder if God sent me to work for the Church of England so that I would become a Catholic. The role was meant to be an opportunity to discern my vocation, a step on the way to ordination, but I barely spent any time in the church or with its congregations. Instead, I minuted meetings about branding, marketing, corporate strategy and funding bids. The role involved a programme of study which turned out to be a reading list of the incumbent’s books, intended to train us to go out and spread his personal theological vision. We had catchy, corporate-sounding slogans, like “catalysing kingdom communities”, which occasionally found their way into the eucharistic prayers, designed to appeal to central Church of England strategists. Instead of talking about God, we talked about “mixed ecology”. It felt more like working for a public relations firm than a church. The final straw came on a Sunday when I was asked to carry a camera tripod up to the altar during the elevation and then swivel it around to face the congregation as they received Communion—and nobody understood why I refused.

On 8 December 2021, I got a tattoo of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I didn’t know it was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which I’d never marked. The next morning, as the sun rose, I went into church for an hour of silent prayer before I started work. I knelt before a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, her face gazing at his as she cradled him in her arms. I’d reached a state of complete hopelessness and despair, hating the course my life had taken, but with no idea how to change it. I prayed over Simeon’s prophecy to Mary—“and a sword will pierce through your own soul also”. I dwelt on her sorrow and the cruelty of knowing that her newborn son would die a horrible and violent death. And then I saw her lift her head to smile at me and her arm move to stroke her baby’s hair. I felt an overwhelming sense of tenderness and consolation, as if she’d said to me—yes, there will be suffering, but all of this will be redeemed.

I knew, then, that all of it was true. The Assumption, the saints and miracles, the whole faith of the Church. I knew I had to become a Catholic. I felt an enormous sense of wonder and joy that Mary, the mother of God, was personally looking after me as she brought me home. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception a year later, at the age of twenty-seven, I was received into the Catholic Church. I began catechesis, therefore, with more humility than a year before. When I spoke to a priest, he asked me why someone with my background—my politics—would want to become a Catholic. Because I believe it’s true, I replied. I read the Catechism, this time not scanning for points of disagreement, and worked through my questions with my priest. The first time I’d read the Catechism, I’d agreed easily with the theological points but stumbled over aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, which had then been insurmountable obstacles. Now, in light of the truth of the Catholic faith, these questions seemed less significant. I understood that to make them barriers to Confirmation would be a ridiculous act of self-will. In late antiquity, credo implied a relational trust—trusting in God as one would trust in a friend—rather than belief in particular teachings. I could assent to the wholeness and unity of the Church’s teaching without needing to have every point clearly worked out.

My journey to Catholicism was painful; it was particularly hard to lose close friends who felt betrayed by my apparent complicity with homophobia and misogyny. Some who challenged me over this are still good friends, and I’m grateful for the time and patience they took to understand, while others quietly cut ties. I don’t blame them—I understand that choosing to become a Catholic, which is very different from being brought up Catholic, is a fairly bizarre thing to do in a secular society. I’m grateful for everything that brought me to my knees but, even then, I dragged my feet all the way to Confirmation, full of doubt and fear. In the three months since, I’ve remained in grateful wonder.

Becoming a Catholic is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Regular confession has transformed the way I think about sin, allowing me finally to examine my defects and failures of charity without the weight of shame I carried around for years. I love knowing the Mass by heart and knowing I can turn up to any church in any part of the world and be at home. I engage with liturgy in a different way, no longer sitting there like a spectator and judging how well it lives up to my liturgical sensibilities. I love the seriousness, the Holy Days of Obligation, the fact that priests use their homilies to give practical guidance on how to live. My Catholic friends inspire me to real, attainable virtue which I previously considered far beyond my capacity. A committed daily devotional life is not only accessible but recommended to the laity. The impulse I felt towards ministry was, I think, a desire to commit more seriously to my faith. I suspect that the failure to articulate an Anglican theology of lay holiness prompts many similar young people towards ordination.

WHEN I VISITED Rome in September, one of the priests at the Pantheon led a group of us to a small chapel at the back. There, he showed us the Hodegetria, the original icon of the Virgin Mary presented to Pope Boniface IV in 609 on the consecration of the Pantheon as a Christian Church. “Whenever you visit the Pantheon,” he said, “you should feel like you’re coming home.” I’ve felt like that at every Mass I’ve been to: at the church in Carmarthen where we celebrated the Easter Vigil with a broken CD player and a more diverse congregation than I’d ever seen in a liberal Anglican church in London; or the brick bungalow called Our Lady, Star of the Sea in a Cornish fishing village with walls painted pale blue. At each of them, the same liturgy, words learnt by heart. The unity of the Catholic Church stands in distinct opposition to a secular culture rooted in the sovereignty of the individual will. You don’t belong to it because you have a particular set of preferences and opinions, but because you’re a member of the mystical body of Christ. “You can’t un-become a Catholic,” my godmother reminded me as I prepared for Confirmation. A Church determined to endear itself to the world can only splinter, dividing itself into groups based on shared politics or aesthetic tastes, and in the process sacrifice the basis in shared truth which made it a Church. You can’t really be a bad Anglo-Catholic because the label indicates active identification with a set of behaviours and views. You can be a bad Catholic, but you’re still a Catholic.

Rome, September 2022