St. Peter's Basilica in the early morning before the tourists arrive

After I had been in the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada (ACCC) for about four years, and not long after I began writing for Roman Catholic newspapers,  a friend of mine who is a priest arranged for me to get an invitation to a dinner at the Apostolic Nunciature, in February 2005.

I joined people from Catholic Christian Outreach and others around a big table inside the Holy See's embassy.  My priest friend introduced me and said, "Deborah's doing a great job for the Catholic papers and the funny thing is, she's not even Catholic!"

"I am Catholic," I responded.  "I am Anglican Catholic."

It's a little embarrassing to admit that now.

Everyone around the table was too polite to correct me on the spot.  That's one of the gracious things about most Catholics who are not converts.  Many converts would have given me chapter and verse of why I was not Catholic, because being Catholic is not just holding a Catholic faith (which obviously was (and is) still in formation) that makes one a Catholic.  The Catholic Church (and I include all the Churches in communion with the Holy See) is both the mystical Body of Christ of which I am already a part, and an earthly institution that requires membership in order to be fully capital "C" Catholic.  And without membership, you are not in communion and thus not Catholic.

Cradle Catholics, especially the deeply faithful ones,  have a great deal of trust in the Holy Spirit and patience when it comes to dealing with someone like me who thinks she knows everything already.   Interestingly, one archbishop told me that it was probably better in some ways that I was both an outsider and a woman to be writing the way I did about the Church, and Holy Orders.  Maybe because I could not be suspected of "having to" toe the line on these matters.

In my early years in the cathedral, I was taught that the Catholic faith was the undivided faith shared by both East and West.  I loved this line from the Affirmation of St. Louis:

We acknowledge that rule of faith laid down by St. Vincent of Lerins: "Let us hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all, for that is truly and properly Catholic."

From a priest, I was told about "Papal accretions" — dogmata added afterwards such as "papal infallibility" and doctrines about Mary that were considered "pious opinion" because they were not held by all, everywhere.

I recalled a discussion among some Christian academics back in the 1990s where one scholar pointed out that even St. Thomas Aquinas had trouble with the Immaculate Conception.  If a doctor of the church had problems with this, why should I have to accept it?

And then I would look at the Roman Catholic Church and see it awash in liberalism and modernism.  Such a high bar for entry,  such a low bar for those who are actual members by virtue of birth and baptism. The catechesis they receive is sometimes terrible.

And oh, how some of my Catholic convert friends used to bug me.  They would throw Cardinal Newman in my face.  Once, after one of them, a lawyer, had pummeled me with Newman, I called my little cathedral and got one of the priests on the phone.  He comforted me by saying, "Oh, Newman's a liberal.  He believes in the development of doctrine."

Heh heh heh.  Newman's a liberal!  I no longer see that now.  And I understand we have to find a way between the extreme of some kind of pristine, pure faith frozen in amber at some point of history and the other extreme of the development of doctrine that looks too much like the small-"s" spirit of Vatican II running amok, so that instead of developing in the way Newman spoke, it is a rupture from the Apostolic faith, and something entirely new, the "Gospel of Welcome" that replaces the Gospel of Jesus Christ that focuses on His sacrifice for our sin.

I tell this because I urge all of us to be charitable towards those Anglicans who still believe the way I did as recently as five or six years ago. Why should be less charitable towards them than we might be to Christians of other denominations who are even further away from a catholic faith?

In our meeting on Sunday, many of the people who voted to leave hold the views I held then.   They see the bishops involved in an act of betrayal because they have changed, while they have remained the same.  They see it as similar to the change the Anglican Church of Canada pulled on them when they started ordaining women.  Some are deeply hurt by this.  Let's not be so eager to judge and condemn or accuse people who are having problems with the move.

During the debate, some of the people who voted to disaffiliate quoted back some of the remarks from speeches or homilies given by some of our founding bishops.  There was even a zinger from Bishop Peter Wilkinson from years ago, in which he defended the interpretation of "Upon this Rock I shall found my Church" in the Protestant manner.  The "rock" is not Peter, but Peter's testimony 0f faith, he asserted, according to the text.

Bishop Wilkinson sat calmly to the side as his own words were thrown up at him.  Alas, he had already had his 15 minutes of fame in the meeting and did not have a chance to refute his own words at the time.

+Wilkinson said after the meeting that his faith has grown and developed since then.

As has mine.  And it has been gradual.  It has been a little precept here, a little line there, a sudden flash of insight, often because of a God-timed, charitable and non pushy statement from someone when I was ready to hear it.

It was Bishop Robert Mercer who, in a casual remark near the coffee maker in our cathedral basement, who showed me the light on "Upon this Rock, I shall found my Church," that it refers to Peter himself.

And, since then, I have been able to tour the Scavi, the excavations under the altar at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and see St. Peter's bone fragments, and how they were buried right under where the present altar is.  It was quite something to stand with a small group of people under ground and pray the Lord's Prayer near those bones, after hearing about his martyrdom, crucified upside down, and then climb up a narrow staircase taking us right under the present altar.

Bishop Peter explained on Sunday that the East does hold the Marian dogmas though they might explain them differently since their theology about Original Sin is a little different from the West's and the Orthodox have never felt a need to define them because they were not under assault in the East.

As for papal infallibility — it will be interesting to see how this is handled when it comes to talks with the Orthodox.  I no longer have a problem with that as well.  I see it as a supernatural protection for the Apostolic faith, which the Holy Father serves, he does not get to ad lib or make it up as he goes along.  And the present office holder?  Who can compare with him in the Christian world?  And Orthodoxy, while it may have preserved doctrinal and liturgical elements, it has become fractured.  Many Orthodox bodies are not in communion with each other.  Some have become vehicles in the West for preserving culture and language more than they have focused on spreading the Gospel.

A friend of mine told me one of his relatives converted to the Catholic faith after he read Humanae Vitae, and realized that while Pope Paul VI had much theological advice from fellow Catholics to approve artificial contraception and may have personally been tempted to lean in that direction, he could not and wrote that encyclical which many Canadian bishops distanced themselves from in the Winnipeg Statement.

Related posts:

1. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Papal Infallibility, and the TAC
2. What "Thinking Catholic" Means to Me
3. To Foster by Every Means
4. Old Catholicism and False Difficulties with Papal Authority in the Church
5. A Quick Note on Papal Infallibility