How Pope Benedict persuaded me to become a Catholic

I grew up in a traditional English family, surrounded by cousins, chivvied by aunts, presided over by my grandmother, who insisted on Sunday church. We weren’t religious but Anglicanism (of a 19th-century sort) was in the air. We read the Revd Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and if I thought about Jesus it was in an English setting. I imagined him barefoot walking through fields, rescuing the lambs that had fallen into cattle grids.

Our family viewed Catholicism with suspicion. For us it was voodoo: foreign and crowded with unnecessary intercessors. The aunts would tell us that our great-great-grandmother had refused to let Catholics in the house and we repeated this story in order to show off both our own relative open-mindedness and our ancestor’s basic good sense.

In our Spectator survey, several well-known men and women reveal a subject on which they changed their minds. I must have changed my mind about Catholicism — that would have to be my answer — because I converted and became a Catholic ten years ago, but it doesn’t feel like a change so much as having two separate notions running at the same time.