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. I can still summon my old impression of the Catholic Church — kitsch, gloomy, misogynistic — but then there’s how life inside it feels too. It’s like the Tardis or C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe: an unpromising little doorway that happens to open into a whole new land.
It’s the same with other Church things. Transubstantiation, celibate priests, active saints, venerated bones, the dominance of Mary: from a distance, to me they all seem absurd, distasteful. But take a few steps towards them, and they begin to make frightening sense. Oddly, the more baroque the belief, the more easily I found it slid, on closer inspection, into a coherent bigger picture.
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