Why I Am a Catholic
Paul J. Griffiths, for The Cardinal Newman Review

I was received into the Catholic Church at St. Thomas Apostle Church on the south side of Chicago on the third Sunday of Advent – Gaudete Sunday – in 1996, at the age of 41. Almost twenty years before that, at Easter in 1977, I had been baptized as an Anglican in Oxford, England. The move from Anglicanism to Catholicism was a gradual one, half unconscious; and the final reception – the chrism of Confirmation dripping from my hair into my eyes, and the words "I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God" echoing in my ears – felt like a natural culmination of a process begun with my Anglican baptism. It was not a conversion but a fulfilment. Catholicism is Anglicanism's natural terminus, and in reaching it I reached the place toward which I had been moving all my life.

I was born in England, into a notionally Anglican family, but was not baptized as a baby. My parents' relationship to the Anglican Church was never intimate, and gradually, in accord with the times, it became more distant: they had my elder sister baptized as a baby, but not me or my younger sister. I went to church rarely as a child, sometimes at Christmas, more rarely at Easter, and now and again for harvest festivals, weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage. There was much discussion at home of philosophical and religious matters, and this was deeply formative. But the church (and this always meant the Anglican Church) did not figure much in these discussions. It was implicitly present in family discussion as an institution of some cultural and aesthetic importance, but without any other significance. The Roman Catholic Church figured not at all, except as some distant, alien presence, inextricably linked with the dubiously civilized Irish, and, inevitably, also with the IRA, which at that time seemed to be only actively engaged in killing English civilians in shops and pubs in England. I was not aware of knowing any Catholics before my early teen years, and I am almost sure that I did not enter a Catholic church until I was sixteen – and then only with an ethnographer's interest.

The grammar school at which I was educated from ten to sixteen had compulsory morning assembly of a vaguely Anglican sort: there were Bible readings and a hymn or two, as well as prayers for the Queen and the nation. Catholics and Jews were permitted not to attend these assemblies, but if my memory is accurate there were few of either (and then, in the 1960s, there were no Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists in the small town in southern England in which I lived), and I would have been hard pressed to say what the difference was between them. The school also had compulsory religious education, which as I remember it consisted largely of drawing maps of St. Paul's missionary journeys and struggling with the cadences and rhythms of the seventeenth-century prose of the King James' Bible. We were sometimes asked to read aloud from the Bible in religious education class, each child taking a verse in turn, and I have a vivid memory of one day (perhaps at age ten or eleven) arriving at Genesis 3:1 ("Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field ..."), being puzzled by the archaic spelling, and mispronouncing the word 'subtil' to the ridicule of classmates and the firm correction of the teacher. So far as I recall, there was no teaching about the substance of Christian doctrine. If there was, it made no impression at all on me. At the age of thirteen or fourteen I knew some Bible stories and many hymns; but I was as ignorant of Christian teaching as I was of Swahili.

At the age of sixteen or so, however, this began to change. I began to read widely, eclectically, and almost entirely uncomprehendingly in philosophy (Sartre, Camus, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard – whatever was easily available on the shelves of the local library or for sale in cheap editions at the local bookshops). As part of this reading, I happened across a paperback anthology of twentieth-century theology (I believe it was the Pelican Guide to Modern Theology, published in the late 1960s). I'd have been hard-pressed to say what theology was, but I picked it up and read in it some substantial selections from Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. Barth was the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century (he died in 1968), and while I understood very little of what I read, I did understand that here was something important and of massive scope. Christian thought and life opened before me, through Barth's prompting, as something attractive and mysterious, and above all as something big, something to chew on intellectually, and something that promised not only ideas but also a way of life. Barth led me to Augustine, and I read my way through all of Augustine's City of God. I chose that because, again, it was big, bigger than anything else I could find. It's hard for me now to remember what I understood (not much, I think); but I do remember being ravished by Augustine, in the strict sense of that word: seized, appropriated, despoiled, removed to a new place against my will.

But still, this was all mostly intellectual. I knew that Barth and Augustine were presenting me with an intellectual vision that demanded some re-ordering of my life as well as my mind. I knew, too, that the Church had something to do with it. But it took me a surprisingly long time to bring the intellectual ravishment together with the simple fact that I needed to be baptized. I began to study theology as an undergraduate at Oxford in 1975, and was eventually, a year or so later, moved to ask my college chaplain for instruction and baptism, which he freely gave and for which I remain deeply grateful. From that time onward I was a regular churchgoer, and (especially) a regular recipient of (what some Anglicans hold to be) the body and blood of Christ at what they prefer to call Holy Communion. I entered the Anglican Communion not out of any conviction that it was the one true church, and certainly not as a result of any deep study of the claims of Anglicanism over against those of other Protestant churches or those of the Catholic or Orthodox churches. I became Anglican because I wanted to be a Christian, because I was English, and because I was at Oxford. No other church seemed a lively possibility. It did not enter my head that I might become Catholic. The Anglican Church formed me as a Christian: it made me alive to the beauty and significance of the liturgy; it gave me an aesthetic, intellectual, and literary tradition that seemed (still seems) bred in my bones (George Herbert, John Donne, Joseph Butler, and so on); and, above all, it made me begin to understand the Church as the primary institutional reality for Christians, a reality more important than the nation, the professional association, or even the family. These gifts are of fundamental importance, and I have nothing but reverence and respect for those among my Anglican teachers and priests who so freely and lovingly gave them to me.

In 1980 I moved to the United States, and since then I've lived there, first as a student, and then as a teacher at various universities. All my professional life has been here; my children were born here; and I became a US citizen in 1994. It was also in the US that I had my first lively contacts with the Catholic Church. I taught for a while in the late 1980s at the University of Notre Dame, and was fascinated to see the extent to which the practice of Christianity informed the lives of students there – dormitory Masses late at night; prayers for victory in football games; ordinary, reflex pious actions such as crossing oneself or muttering a Hail Mary. At this time I began to read the encyclicals and other writings of John Paul II. These impressed me greatly, as did what I came to know of the man himself. Here was someone seriously concerned to speak the Gospel to the world, and someone who had the intellectual capacity to do so. And here, too, was someone of profound personal piety, who was prepared to use the language of Christianity to engage and attempt to transform the world, first with the aim of bringing about the end of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s, and since then in providing a nuanced and powerful critique of the excesses and self-righteousnesses of the nascent American empire. It began to seem to me, as the 1980s ended and the 1990s began, that the Catholic Church was alone in having both the leadership and the institutional form to preserve Christianity in a world increasingly hostile to it. This impression was deepened when the new Catechism of the Catholic Church was published in the early 1990s: here was a pedagogical tool of great power, further evidence of a Church confident in its teachings and with sufficient energy to share them with the world rather than to consume itself in internal debates as the Anglican Church (along with most other Protestant churches) was then doing.

In the 1990s I began to travel more outside the English-speaking world, to India, Indonesia, Japan, and Israel. On these trips – most especially in a summer spent in South India in 1996 – it became apparent to me that the Catholic Church is a lively world church in ways that no other church is. The remnants of the Anglican Church in India are like frozen pieces of England, circa 1920: they have not become fully Indian, and they appeal only to a narrow segment of India's social hierarchy. The Catholic Church in India, by contrast, is deeply acculturated and crosses class- and caste-lines with relative ease. As I walked with the enormous ecstatic crowd following the Apostle Thomas's bones around the streets of Chennai (Madras) on his feast day in 1996 (tradition says that Thomas travelled to India and died there; his bones are enshrined in the Cathedral in Chennai) I was moved by the sheer reality and vibrancy of the Catholic Church.

It was at this time that I began to think ecclesiologically for the first time. Why was I Anglican? Were there good reasons to become Catholic? Just what are the claims of the Catholic Church for itself? Thinking about these things led me by 1996 to conclude that J. H. Newman (once Anglican and eventually a Cardinal of the Catholic Church) had been right that the Anglican Church's claim to a via media between the endless fissiparousness of Protestantism and the monolithic oppressiveness of the Catholic Church cannot be sustained. I became more deeply convinced, too, that a public teaching authority – a magisterium – is an essential feature of the Church. Without it, the Church can sustain itself neither against heresy within nor against the powers and principalities of the world without. And, finally, I was simply seduced, ravished, by the reality of the Church Catholic – by those naive Notre Dame students, by those enthusiastic Indian peasants, by the endless round of stammeringly beautiful liturgical celebration, and by the grandeur of the intellectual vision. The Church stripped me naked and embraced me. It's not always a gentle embrace, but in it Truth and Beauty are manifest. I wish everyone could be so ravished.