“Signo te signo crucis, et confirmo te chrismate salutis”: Nine words and it was done, the seal of the Spirit of God given in the sacrament of confirmation. I was kneeling before the high altar of Farnborough Abbey as the abbot administered the sacred chrism and placed the seal on a journey of conversion which began with my baptism in 1966 and which has carried me through many joys and vicissitudes at last into the One True Fold of the Redeemer.

My spiritual home for sixty years has been the Church of England. From her I learned the Christian faith, the sacramental life, liturgical piety, and habits of devotion for which I will always be grateful. To be an English Anglican now is to belong to a pluralist, strained, apprehensive tradition, a sort of ecclesiastical Austria-Hungary: loyal to an elderly monarch, covetous of a wealthy but inaccessible common treasury looked after by the Church Commissioners for England, frustrated by a sclerotic ecclesiastical bureaucracy in Westminster. But this has not always been so.

The French have always found English religion baffling. “This is the land of sects,” Voltaire wrote in his Letters on England. “An Englishman, as a free man, goes to Heaven by whatever route he likes.” But this is a misjudgement. It assumes that the English attached much importance to ecclesiastical organization and issues of “communion.” For four hundred years, English Christianity was the product of a culture of print, and the sort of Christian you were depended on whether you accepted the king’s two books, the Bible of 1611 and the Book of Common Prayer, and conformed to the Church of England, or whether you took the first but not the second and availed yourself of the toleration given to dissenters when William and Mary arrived to see off the papist James II.

My religion began as the first sort, a religion where the Book of Common Prayer was not something that you had to seek out, something to choose, but something that was given, the ordinary practice of an English parish church. At the time I did not realize that mine would be the last generation to experience this unselfconscious Anglican piety, a piety that was liturgical but not ceremonial, sacramental but Protestant, attentive to the exposition of the Word. To this public common prayer was added a personal devotional life that was as rigorous and as well taught as that of a Jesuit novice: daily Bible reading using approved notes to guide meditation and prompt application, daily examination of conscience, intercession, and acts of faith. It was a real religion: stringent, demanding, severe.

In church we prayed together using the same words as the men who lit the beacons to warn of the Armada, as the army of the Royal Martyr before Edgehill and Naseby, as Tess Durbeyfield desperately baptizing her dying child, as Bishop James Hannington martyred in Uganda, as my school headmaster reciting the burial service from memory over the grave of a fellow soldier in the fight against Imperial Japan. The Book of Common Prayer was what C. S. Lewis called “the one glory of the Drab Age” of English literature in the mid-sixteenth century, and by some remarkable work of providence it had survived essentially intact into the 1980s for me to encounter for myself.

This was the religion of a bookish, somewhat introspective schoolboy, and one who had begun to learn from the books he read and the texts he prayed that there might be something more substantive to be said about the church, and something more fulsome to be expressed in her way of worship. It was at this point that I encountered the Oxford Movement: I read Geoffrey Faber’s astute if skeptical Oxford Apostles, and I began to stray into some of the Victorian brick-built polychromatic shrines of London, gloomy and thick with incense, with the intense attraction of a Huysmans novel. By the time I arrived in Oxford in 1984, my heart was set on conversion to Anglo-Catholicism.

If I have spent time trying to justify the hold that English Prayer Book Anglicanism could have on a serious-minded Christian nearly half a century ago, then even more must I say that to commit oneself to Anglo-Catholicism was not a contrarian choice. At that time it was already waning in power, but I was at Magdalen College, where I read the special English course largely devised by Tolkien and Lewis to specialize in the technicalities of philology and the literature of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare was excluded as too modern. Oddly enough, there was no cult of Lewis at all at Magdalen, where the fellows were embarrassed by his religiosity and exasperated by his unflattering presentation of common room life in That Hideous Strength. But before Lewis, the college had been the setting of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, and I was to live in buildings and scenes that seemed unchanged from the intensity of his spiritual bildungsroman.

It was in the college chapel that I encountered for the first time Catholic-minded Anglicanism as a living system: the Sunday Sung Eucharist, the daily Mass, the advertised times for confession with encouragement to use them, Compline and Benediction every Sunday, the grand procession around the cloister at Corpus Christi. Because I was young, it never occurred to me that being able to go to all of this in my carpet slippers was anything unusual. I made excursions to Pusey House, St Mary Magdalen’s Church, and other shrines of the movement and threw myself enthusiastically into Anglo-Catholicism. I also found that Eastern Orthodoxy held a certain amount of interest, not least in the Anglicized form presented by Bishop Kallistos Ware, which I encountered first in reading The Orthodox Church and subsequently in meeting its author, whom I found both formidable and endearing. Apart from a few excursions to attend what we then called “Tridentine Masses” celebrated in bleak north Oxford parish halls for small, aged congregations of what seemed to be despairing people, the Catholic Church made no impression at all.

After Magdalen I went to St Stephen’s House ten minutes up the road to be trained for ordination. The college had something of a reputation for high camp disorder, largely because unlike many other places with similar problems in the 1970s, the troubles of “Staggers” had been immortalized in a very funny novel by A. N. Wilson called Unguarded Hours. The consequence of this for those of us who followed was an unremittingly bleak liturgical life: Anything solemn risked being seen as “flamboyant” and so out of hand. Academic theology was taught well in those days, or at least academic theology as the University of Oxford conceived it in the 1980s: essentially an exercise in minutely close reading of biblical texts, historical study of doctrine, and closed-book examinations under time pressure crammed into five days at the end. I was good at this and did well, and these were useful “civil service” skills of extraction and compression to acquire. But of systematic theology, and particularly the scholastic method, I knew nothing, nor did anyone give much of an impression of thinking it worthwhile to correct this lack. In retrospect we were invited to live off the fat of accumulated liturgical and spiritual practices inherited from a more doctrinally articulate age, and then left to ourselves to sustain them.

I then spent a happy and fulfilling fifteen years working as an Anglican priest in parish ministry. This took me to some interesting places: Romford in Essex, to a back-street church founded to cater for the workers at the local brewery; Willesden Green in north London, to an “extreme” Anglo-Catholic church largely attended by West Indians and Ghanaians who were used to the churchmanship from home, and which was the only Anglican church I knew of with a shrine to the Infant of Prague; and to Sevenoaks in Kent, a more demure setting where I completed doctoral studies on early church history, served on the General Synod, and was latterly canon theologian of the Diocese of Rochester.

Service as a clerical representative on the General Synod was satisfying and unsettling in equal measure. Catholic-minded Anglicans in England have tended to disparage the synod since its establishment in 1970 as a liberal talking shop, and more recently as actively undermining Catholic faith and order through innovations such as the ordination of women. But in fact synodical government was the keystone of the Catholic revival: Instead of an Erastian state church, England would now have a properly functioning system of provincial ecclesiastical government, able to order and amend its own liturgy, declare its own doctrine, and establish terms of communion with the other provinces of Anglicanism a true international “branch” church to compare with Rome and Constantinople. Not for nothing with this hope in mind did J. G. Lockhart entitle one chapter of his biography of Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang “Alterius Orbis Papa—Pope of the Isles.”

The Anglo-Catholics who pushed for synodical government in England got what they wanted, just as they got what they wanted when they refused to compromise over doctrine and when they refused to compromise over ritual. But for a synod to govern in a catholic way, it requires catholic members, and from the beginning it was evident that the maintenance of catholic principles would rely not on the consensus of the synod but on the political organization of a catholic party. This has been the bleak history of the last six decades, one of frustration and defeat.

The vote to ordain women to the priesthood took place six months after I was myself ordained, and I decided then to stay in the Church of England and take advantage of the provision made for those who opposed the measure to receive sacramental care from specially appointed bishops who also opposed it. So for more than thirty years I have exercised my ministry as a priest in the Church of England in a state of impaired communion with the hierarchy under which I have served. How could someone who saw himself as a Catholic accept such an arrangement, especially when many priests were leaving for Rome? The Tractarian project had run deep with me: The romance of Oxford was strong; the beauty of the liturgy was affecting; the pastoral history, with its legacy of sacrifice, was uplifting. But I was reluctant to embrace what the classic Anglo-Catholic divines saw as Roman “innovations” in doctrine, particularly concerning the papacy and the Marian dogmas.

To be candid, this discounting of innovation was always a rather flexible thing among Anglo-Catholics. The movement was liturgically divided between those who considered appropriation of contemporary Latin practice the only sensible ritual principle and those who invented a modified medieval usage and stuck more closely to the text of the Book of Common Prayer. But this bifurcation applied also to doctrine: More “liberal” Anglo-Catholics embraced Hegelian philosophy, the higher criticism, kenotic Christology, and an anti-papal disposition, while the traditionally minded remained attached to a historical approach to doctrine, intensely suspicious of any formal principle of development, but at the same time stealthily moving the point of difference with Rome forward from the Reformation to the declension they saw as arriving with Saint Alphonsus Liguori and the First Vatican Council. Neither side noticed until the 1950s the revival of scholasticism, and even when they did it was the liberal Catholic Michael Ramsey who became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, not the Thomist Eric Mascall.

In 2006 I returned to St Stephen’s House as principal, and I was to remain there for the next nineteen years. Theological colleges in the Church of England are sui generis institutions: They are essentially private educational charities franchised and paid by the church to train clergy. This means that the trustees decide on the tone of the institution, and the staff market the college to bishops and their candidates. Many of them work closely with neighboring universities, which is why five of the ten colleges are in Oxford and Cambridge. The three Oxford colleges represent a microcosm of the Church of England: Wycliffe Hall is, as its name suggests, evangelical and Reformed; Ripon College Cuddesdon is an amalgam of the modernist Ripon Hall and the moderate Catholic Cuddesdon College; St Stephen’s House is “unrespectably” Anglo-Catholic in a way that the hierarchy has never really welcomed.

Founded in 1876, St Stephen’s House rather proudly did not produce an English diocesan bishop until 1966, when one of its old members became the Catholic Bishop of Leeds; it took another decade for one to be raised to the episcopate in the Church of England, when the distinguished canonist Eric Kemp went to Chichester. So in the same city, three colleges present radically different conceptions of what the Church of England is, living happily cheek by jowl and each relating in its own way to the pastoral life of the parishes of the city and the intellectual life of the university. Curiously enough, no one really seems to find this odd.

Running a seminary presents all sorts of complexities and difficulties. As the expertise needed to teach the various distinct theological disciplines becomes more disparate, who can be found to cover the topics required in sufficient depth? How should these ecclesial institutions relate to universities in which confessional study, and indeed any study of the humanities at all, becomes increasingly problematic? These were my day-to-day challenges for the best part of two decades, along with all the human complexities that candidates for ordination present. But fundamentally the task was a simple one: to propose to those who came, “Who is Jesus Christ? What is a priest? What is the Church?” The ordered life of prayer and study addressed the first question; I wrote a short book in 2011 to work out in my own mind what I wanted to propose about the second; but it was the answer to the third that made me begin to think that the foundation on which I intended to build was not a secure one.

At first, it was certainly possible to feel optimistic: The pontificate of Benedict XVI seemed to vindicate many of the values and methods that characterized Catholic Anglican theological method and liturgical practice, and he himself identified a significant “Catholic potential” in the Anglican tradition which had its own reviviscent power. When Anglican clergy left for Rome in the early 1990s, their Anglican patrimony was very often seen as something to be left behind; under Pope Benedict, it seemed as if the patristic, liturgical, unscholastic style of his own theological endeavors harmonized uncannily with what Cardinal Manning called disparagingly “the old Oxford patristic tone” he disliked in John Henry Newman. Although the Catholic party within the Church of England was divided about female priests and would be still more divided about female bishops, nevertheless there seemed to be in some inchoate way a plausible ecclesiology in which to invest, a moment of convergence in which the themes of the Benedictine papacy and its hermeneutic of continuity might draw together the various threads of the Anglo-Catholic tradition.

And so now we come to Newman. I first encountered him near the end of the beginning of a revival of interest in his life and work that had begun with Eric Przywara, Henri Bremond, and Louis Bouyer, one which in Oxford had been carried on by the indefatigable labors of the Anglican historian Goeffrey Rowell and the Catholic scholar Ian Ker. These two were responsible for teaching an undergraduate “paper” (elective module) on Newman, although it has to be said that less perceptive students listening to them both might not have immediately realized that the former’s Mr. Newman, the lost leader of 1845, and the latter’s Father Newman were the same person. Editors were bringing more and more of Newman’s work to light, especially his charming letters, but his cause for canonization seemed stuck, and his donnish disposition rather out of place in the Church of John Paul II.

With Pope Benedict all this changed. Newman’s cause moved forward, and his theological insights as the doctor of conscience and the doctor of doctrinal development became fundamental expository tools of the pope’s public teaching ministry. It was a great honor and a moment of deep spiritual clarity to be present in Birmingham for Newman’s beatification in 2010 and to see his legacy secured as a lodestone of Catholic theological method. A rising tide seemed to be lifting all boats: St Stephen’s House had its largest intake of new ordination candidates at this time. But Newman’s beatification coincided with the establishment of the Anglican Ordinariates established by the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus: It was now possible to come into communion with the Apostolic See while preserving an Anglican liturgical identity.

There was now a choice that must be made for those of us who were unable to accept the ordination of women: Come into communion with Rome or remain where we were and resign ourselves to an ever-diminishing communion between ourselves and our bishops.

Why then was this not the moment of my conversion? One reason, not always apparent to North American Anglicans, is that many English Anglo-Catholics did not use Anglican liturgies and took advantage of the lax enforcement of liturgical law in England to introduce the Roman rite. This was a principled stance: The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission had decided—perhaps too optimistically—that there was now no longer any substantive disagreement between Anglicans and Catholics on Eucharistic theology; that both churches had radically reformed sixteenth-century liturgies to become more participatory, didactic, and demotic; and that the best way to work toward visible unity was to occlude superannuated liturgical differences. These people had no desire to return to the Anglican usage in the Prayer Book tradition that they had deliberately left behind. To this were added all the issues about buildings, local ecclesiastical politics, and a certain exhaustion among Anglicans “shivering at the gates,” as Newman once put it, which meant that the moment of decision passed, unembraced by the Catholic movement in the Church of England as a whole.

By the time the Church of England consecrated its first female bishops in 2015, Pope Benedict was gone. His successor was never anything other than publicly supportive of the Ordinariates, but his background and ethos could not have been more different from those of Benedict, rather as in the Church of England Justin Welby was a stark contrast to Rowan Williams. Pope Francis was a “pact of the catacombs” churchman, and this mentality was not one that communicated itself easily to Anglo-Catholics who had found a ready empathy with the style and tone of Pope Benedict’s papacy. Balthasar wrote incisively in Der antirömische Affekt about the way in which dissent appeals from the actual pope to an ideal one: “the papacy but not this pope” and “a papacy as it was before.” I must confess that these were often my own sentiments, ones magnified by the coincidence of Pope Francis’s tenure with a new culture of social media agitation which left no purported liturgical abuse, no curial appointment, and no gesture or allocution unscrutinized.

But it was also evident that the Church of England had largely and happily embraced the ordination of women to all three orders of ministry. The ecclesiological concerns that had motivated Anglo-Catholic opposition to this change had no traction with the wider body, which was becoming progressively more evangelical and less sacramentally ordered in its self-understanding. Pastoral provision in the form of separately consecrated male bishops remained in place to provide acceptable episcopal and sacramental ministry—though not jurisdiction—to those parishes who wished for it. With the number of female bishops increasing, it would eventually be the case that the lineage of all or at least most male bishops would trace back to a female consecrator; the provision for traditionalists to maintain Catholic order as they had received it was becoming a very cramped zareba.

Of course, a thousand things might be wrong with the Church of England without papal claims being true. I had begun to notice the “antirömische Affekt” gaining more traction in certain once-familiar quarters: Oxford remains a place of academic and spiritual pilgrimage for many North American Anglicans, often converts to liturgical Christianity from Reformed traditions, who wanted to assert a distinctive Anglican identity in contradistinction to Rome, while happily eliding into that identity many liturgical and spiritual practices which were essentially nineteenth-century borrowings from Latin Catholic culture. For these people, and increasingly for the students whom it was my responsibility to form for the Anglican priesthood, I felt that my answer to the question “What is the Church?” was increasingly unconvincing, both for me and for them.

By the spring of 2025, I felt that the time had come for me to finish as principal of St Stephen’s House and weigh up what my future should be. I moved with my family to Cornwall, and although I continued to attend an Anglican parish—one which I had known well for twenty years, as my mother lives in Truro—I no longer officiated as an Anglican priest. Cornwall is part of the far Celtic fringe of the British Isles, and a land where the Church of England has always struggled to make itself seem natural. The introduction of the Prayer Book in 1549 provoked an armed insurrection; no effort was made as it was in Wales and in Ireland to translate the liturgy and the Bible into the native Celtic language, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the great majority of churchgoers were Methodists. A century of Tractarian-inspired effort to counteract this trend has now largely faded away. It has been a good place to enter the “desert.” An Anglican bishop whom I met sitting outside a pub last summer said to me, “This is your Littlemore time.” I rather bristled, but he was quite right: Newman again. At the beginning of this year, everything came together rather suddenly: The conviction that I needed to be received into the Catholic Church led me to contact the abbot of Farnborough, whom I had known from Oxford, and he and his community were most welcoming in arranging for my reception. I am very grateful to them. I took John Henry as my confirmation name.

I have been immensely fortunate to have the time and leisure to make this decision without any of the many anxieties about work and livelihood that others have had to overcome. For this I am thankful to those who have supported me, especially my family, and I certainly make no claim to be anything other than a laborer hired about the eleventh hour. For the future, I now need to learn how to live within the household and to trust in God’s providence for the work and vocation He intends for me: “one step enough for me.” I have been tremendously encouraged by the kindness of so many, not least those who for many years have been praying for me, and I rejoice without regret or hesitation to find myself in this place. Everything is very new, but I do feel a palpable sense of communion—substantive ecclesial communion—with the chief pastor of the Church and with him more than one billion fellow Catholic Christians.