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 in my bare feet, in a black cassock, in what long before had been the Priory Church of St Mary Overie, on the Feast of St Peter. I trained at university to be a lawyer. I am now waiting instead to be ordained as an Anglican, and start work in a parishe by Dockhead in Bermondsey, just east of Tower Bridge.
I had coming wearing 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 upon 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 by the side of the river Thames, 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 1220–1420. 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 what had been St Mary Overie, (now Southwark Anglican cathedral) waiting for the first hymn, I tried to keep my mind on continuity. I was trying to concentrate on the flow of 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 witnesses to medieval devotion and sacramental continuity; they had 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.
But I was not to discover the truth about this aspect of 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. Literally almost stumbling over him, I felt the sudden need to know him. Reading the history of his witness, arrest, torture, and death brought me face to face with the reality of history that Anglican propaganda had erased from my education. The walls of St Mary Overie had resonated with the cried of the recusants and witnessed the shedding of the blood of the 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 makes 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 there was another guest: the Roman Catholic Abbot of Quarr, Dom Aelred Sillem., Abbot of Quarr from 1969 to 1992.
He was one of the most striking Catholic priests I have ever met—a man who simply 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 around 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, I where I ought to be and 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 you 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, no strain.
Meanwhile the slow, 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 finished forever the fiction that Anglicanism could claim some kind of sacramental continuity. It had become only too clear that this feminist ‘take-over’ was an enterprise of ideological colonisation. It was not, and it seemed never had been the exercise of discernment it promised it would be.
My subsequent journey into the history of Our Lady’s apparitions, and the discovery of the scientific validation of the 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.
When, 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”.
We discussed ‘when’.
I told him I thought I needed two years to set my affairs in order, write an explanatory book, 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 had in mind a period more like two weeks.”
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 bit. It got more complex from that point on.
It was agreed I would be sent to learn some Canon Law, and then ordained into the diocese. Things began to go inexplicably wrong. My first set of papers got lost for two years.
“Don’t panic” said Fr Dwight Longenecker now become a good friend. “They kept me waiting for ten years.”
“But I’m nearly 70 already. I expect to be dead in ten years.”
I found my way to the Ordinariate for litugical reasons. The were very generous and offered to be proactively helpful.
We started again. More interviews, more committees, more conversations.
They re-sent my papers to Rome. We waited.
And waited.
Then came the news of where the papers were this time.
They had once again, never made it. They had been misdirected to Vietnam.
Vietnam, (now, sometime later,) were 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 in 2008 I had had my own BBC Faith and Ethics live phone-in programme. I had pioneered the BBC Faith & Ethics podcast.
For about seven years I had been given by the editor, a whole page column in the Jersey Evening Post to write about the Christian world view.
The editor had commissioned this cartoon to go with what was proving to be a very provocative column. It divided the island.
The ‘Woke’ began a petition to get me removed from the Island of Jersey.
But now, as a Catholic layman, I had a growing YouTube channel.
I was interviewed on ordinary news programmes- often with GB News; and extraordinary ones for 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, aka the Protestant antipope, and become a Catholic?
I was appointed Associate Editor of the Catholic Herald.
And as I wrote and broadcast and spoke at conferences, I the need to encourage my new friends to resist the siren secular lure of the dictatorship of relativism; and to remind my old ecclesiastical community that the treasure Catholicism guarded in the Magisterium, would save them for ever from being overcome by the culture wars from the Left, and by the militant Islamism from the right.
I can’t answer for the extent to which the dewy-eyed enthusiasm of the passionate convert strengthened Catholic sinews; (who is this man? why does he think he knows better than we do? who does he think he is? ) but I can talk about the steady stream of Anglicans and agnostics, friends, acquaintances and strangers, who read my words, or heard them, and began to make their dogged and determined way into reception with the Catholic Church. It was an ever-quickening stream; and it grew broader and deeper.
But—and there was a big but. How do we say this politely?
The circumstances of Catholic culture were becoming more complex and more contested.
What had begun with a certain amount of excitement at the beginning of Francis’ pontificate had morphed.
