Australian Notes

Wednesday, 25th February 2009

Have you become a Catholic? I have been pestered with this question over the years, usually by disgusted old atheists demanding to know why I have sold out.

Have you become a Catholic? I have been pestered with this question over the years, usually by disgusted old atheists demanding to know why I have sold out. I often answer lightheartedly, quoting Oscar Wilde: ‘No, I am not a Catholic. I am simply a Papist.’ This deepens the disdain of my inquisitors, but it just about sums me up. Time and again over the years I have rejoiced in the pronouncements of the Popes — John Paul on communism, for example, or Benedict on Islamicism. The shilly-shallying leaders of my own Anglican church have so often left me in despair. Come to think of it, Wilde may have actually said ‘I am simply a violent Papist,’ which better captures the note of provocation. I often read and re-read the witness of Anglican converts to Rome, from, say, John Henry Newman to Malcolm Muggeridge, not to mention more recent cases. I also more readily find a perch these days in Catholic magazines, especially Annals, edited by my friend Fr. Paul Stenhouse, than in Anglican journals. (Annals is, since the demise of the Bulletin, the oldest magazine in Australia.) But none of this makes me a Catholic or gets to the core questions. I have no real understanding of so many central questions of Catholic doctrine, of the Creeds, the Trinity, transubstantiation or consubstantiation, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and so on. It is one thing to reject the prevailing secularism and hedonism but another to assent to the alternatives. I used to believe in the sudden flash of illumination, but it hasn’t happened to me. I am a plodder, a step-by-step man. I soldier on and say: watch this space.

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