Becoming a Catholic without illusions
The historian Christopher Lee is familiar with Catholicism's patchy historical record. So why was he received into the Church earlier this month?
30 May 2008

My mother used to say that Catholics have dirty bathrooms. They never washed behind the taps, she said. She never explained why she thought this. How many Catholic taps my mother had examined was never clear.

My father said you could smell the smoke. He said it softly, in a matter-of-fact manner and without malice.

But these were the 1950s, and in our Kentish village this was not seen or heard as a bald prejudice. Catholics were simply different, although I cannot remember why we thought so other than a vague recollection that they always looked more interesting. Such is childhood instinct.

At school - not a Church school - the Catholic boys, seemingly on some theatrical cue, left Morning Assembly during a pause before prayers. Where they went I never knew.

Later, in the Royal Navy, when we paraded for Divisions, the order bawled by the Gunnery Officer before "Off caps" (for prayers) was "Fall out the Roman Catholics". They turned right and with clenched fists and bent elbows doubled away. Again, where to, I never knew. There was no Catholic chapel.

We then prayed the Navy's prayers, sang "For Those in Peril", obeyed the order "On caps" and marched off. Miraculously the Catholics always re-appeared on time for duties and instruction.

Catholics were not meant to be like we Anglicans. C of E was an assumed and national status and had, since the Protestant arrogance of the 18th century, set aside the English as a superior nation peoples.

When Thompson wrote his lines to "Rule, Britannia!" they dignified that arrogance by proclaiming that the English were obeying God's personal command to them to put to sea and rule the waves - against, of course, the Catholic French and Spanish fleets.

By my own time, any official form-filler in the university bursar's office, the Navy, the passport office or personnel department, would, without asking, put C of E in the box marked "Religion".

I became a fellow in a Puritan-based Cambridge college where the basins were perfectly and daily cleaned by my bedder. I enjoyed saying my public prayers in one of Wren's finer monuments, cheered on by hymns (mostly ancient) generally sung in a manageable key.

It all seemed a proper order to my life and shortly after the 1982 Falklands War I offered myself for ordination.

In all, it should have been a sober and sometimes intelligent progression from choirboy (weddings one shilling and sixpence) to parson (humbling stipend). The bishop marked my card NY - Not Yet. He was right, of course.

Twenty six years on, at 10.30 on the day of Pentecost at the small church in Goudhurst, I was received by Fr Vic McClean from the Established Church into the Church of Rome.

My family, Anglicans, wondered (still wonder) why. After all this was no reception of a born-again Christian stumbled on by a mendicant preacher. I am not a prize. My Faith is no stronger, my frailties no weaker.

Thus mine is no angelic conversion. It is simply an expression of truth in faith.

Indeed, my path to Rome over two decades has been complicated by the constant question to myself: do I need to be a Roman Catholic?

As a historian I have few illusions about the way of this persuasion. Schisms; internecine conflict; difficult to understand factions. Dogma that could so easily be questioned when Faith has more answers.

Moreover, in present times, a friend left his Franciscan order because he could not tolerate a cover-up of sexual abuses; his penitence did nothing to soothe my uneasiness.

What about the inspiration of personality? The truth is that no pope, no bishop, no cardinal, no priest draws me in. In fact, I wonder where may be the theological debaters that would inspire others to think that Rome has more to say than it ever says clearly.

At a Tablet reception an editor offered me the opinion that not a single Catholic bishop in England could hold down with any distinction a lectureship in theology at any British university. An astute fellow I thought, he must know. Where is the debate I hear clearly from my instructor, Fr Vic McClean at Goudhurst, or the unswerving clarity from Francis Kemsley the Carmelite Prior at Aylesford?

So what does bring me to Rome? First, I feel at home in its structure, its ritual, its devotion to Our Lady and the Sacrament of Confession.

But above all, I am brought to Rome by one simple celebration of Faith: the Mass.

I am welcomed by the unswerving devotion in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. It is a devout and profoundly personal moment when that wafer is indeed the Body.

It is a moment that has no need for the debate between a philosophical and anthropological approach to the Eucharist.

The Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx wrote that "the basis of the entire Eucharist event is Christ's personal gift of himself to his fellow-men and, within this, to the Father".

For me, it is a moment of almost mediaeval simplicity transcending a Tridentine and post-Tridentine perception of faith. It is a personal experience that is both frightening and a blessed excitement.

Did I not find it elsewhere? No, no I did not.

Yet, I have no evangelic message, certainly no sense of ecumenism. To my mind, one is one and the other is the other. There is no reason for wishy-washy diplomatic compromise and certainly not reconciliation.

Moreover, the Church of Rome is not a refuge of downtrodden worshippers. It is the true home of the expression of the Trinity and the Liturgy of the Mass. That is an awesome responsibility and one that it must with much louder voice more publicly celebrate.

On May 11 the Church of Rome welcomed me home - mucky taps and all. Thanks be to the Trinity.

Christopher Lee is a historian and writer of BBC's This Sceptred Isle. His six-part light drama series Kicking the Habit, based at the Carmelite Priory at Aylesford, starts on Radio 4 in August