The Bishop's Weekly Column from the Parish Bulletin

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Conversion of St Paul
(22 Years ago)

January 25th 2010

Two Trad Priestly Vocations were inspired in this building
(believe it or not !)

As the Week for Church Unity closes today, my thoughts go back 22 years to my lunch break on this very day. I was 20 years old and I was sitting in the Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool. I have ranted about the architecture of that structure before but that is by the by.

Years earlier my Father had taken my Sister and myself to both the Anglican and the Catholic Cathedrals whilst my mother, who was working on her Master's thesis had an appointment at the University over the road. I can still remember my first sight of that hideous structure from the interior and being deeply repulsed by its ugliness. The Anglican Cathedral by contrast was dark and somber and quite impressive with its massive tower. I must confess, though, to being slightly frightened by that tower even now when I see it. Its sheer size looks as though it is too heavy for the structure that supports it below. Indeed, given the scale of the building one might say it was truly miraculous that not one bomb fell on the structure during the Blitz of the Second World War.

In any case, this day 22 years ago, I, an Anglican, sat praying the Roman Office in Latin in the Catholic Cathedral - suddenly I saw the incongruity of it all: recognizing, finally, the truth of Catholicism - it had taken me 5 years of intense study - I had to submit to Rome. That evening I attended a Eucharist Service in an Anglican Church (St. Paul's, Croxteth) for the closing of the Week of Church Unity. I found it distinctly odd that we were celebrating "Church Unity" when actual unity was the last thing on the agenda !

I made contact with one of the local Catholic parish priests who was ordained well before the Council. For 3 months he gave me classes in the Faith. We needed no text book, Father taught me every thing from memory - what an intellect that priest had ! Our last class was all about the Second Vatican Council. I sat in utter amazement as the vision of the Church that was now being presented to me seemed opposed to what I had heard in the previous 3 months of classes.

I should perhaps back up to the process that had led me to this priest. There was an old second hand bookstore in Liverpool that I loved to frequent. The proprietor, Mr Waterstone looked as old as some of the books he sold, but we were good friends and he would let me into an old house down a side street where he housed his overflow theology department. There I bought an Altar Missal (Tridentine of Course), a Franciscan 1951 Breviary (complete and in mint condition) and the various seminary manuals a priest had used in his studies - all in Latin and for 5 years I pored over them. The 3 years of Latin in High School really were advantageous. Here I studied the "Old Faith" and this was what I was really looking for.

Back now to the last class: when Father had finished I simply said to him: "Father, in this class you seem to be saying the reverse of much of what you told me." His response (a tacit acknowledgment of my quandry) was "It's a new way of doing things." There it was: either I accepted the new way of doing things, or I looked for the Faith I had found in those Old Latin manuals. By now it was Holy Week, and after 3 months of Catholicism I decided to return to Anglicanism, because using the famous English Missal, I thought that at least Anglo-Catholicism was more "catholic" than the Catholic Church. For the uninitiated: The English Missal is an absolutely beautiful translation of the Tridentine Mass that used to be in vogue in Anglo-Catholic circles before Rome provided them with the Novus Ordo.

That was 1988, before the Catholic Church re-opened the way for her Traditional Liturgy to return in the wake of Archbishop Lefebvre's episcopal ordination of the 4 bishops. It was this action that caused me to hear that the Old Latin Mass was alive and well. What happened next is a different story.

The question of the Council remained unsolved until that memorable line of the Archbishop who said (and signed) that he accepted the Council in the "Light of Tradition", words most eloquently echoed in Pope Benedict XVI's address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, where he said the Council needs to be considered in reference and in continuity with the Magisterium that proceeded it. The Council was initially presented to me 22 years ago as a rupture with the past, as indeed it sometimes is said to be, but understood rightly, the Council must be capable of a Catholic understanding, when seen in the context of continuity.

+TF