Fr. Anthony Chadwick

The idea of this article came about on reading some recent comments in The Anglo Catholic, in particular from an Evangelical Anglican who converted to the Catholic Church some time ago. There are others, both courteous and insolent. In a spirit of logic and fairness, I can “hear” the question – “You want to bring your baggage with you. Why not also the Evangelicals?”. Indeed, there are gems of Methodist and German Pietist preaching, spirituality and hymnody. As time goes on, and other communities having their roots in the Reformation begin to cross the Tiber by that beautiful bridge the Holy Father has given us, these elements of historical Christian patrimony can also be assimilated into Catholicism.

That being said, I came across a number of persons and associations in the early 1980’s in London. One was the highly-respected Catholic Evidence Guild which gave lessons in apologetics and instruction in the Faith to those who wanted then to go and test their apologetic wit at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park. As most people know, Speakers’ Corner is a symbol of free speech in English common law. You can go there and say anything you like without fear of prosecution. You can even deny the Holocaust and speak in favour of the revival of Nazism! However, beware and be prepared for relentless heckling and insults from your audience. They are all there on their soap boxes on a Sunday afternoon, speaking on every subject according to the usually strong and convinced opinions of each speaker. The Catholic Evidence Guild goes there, and finds both the usual Protestant hecklers and open minds who have contrasted the beauty of Christianity and the ugliness of murderous political ideologies. You will also find the Protestant Truth Society, established at some time to counter the ‘Papists’, and they also have their opinions to express.

The Blogosphere seems to have become a kind of virtual and electronic Speaker’s Corner. The blogger writes instead of shouting through a megaphone against the noise and heckling, and then the comments come. There are two types of comments, as two types of response from people listening to the speakers at Hyde Park – those intended to demolish the blogger’s article and impose his own opinion, and those intended either to ask questions or encourage developments of the article’s weaker points. In this way, knowledge is built and developed, and it is a learning curve for us all.

After my early enthusiasm to learn the Faith, I went on to study philosophy and theology. I came out of it all aware that I was more ignorant than ever, and that learning is the task of a lifetime. However, these studies have given me another vision, a more critical sense for intellectual coherence and honesty.

With our former Evangelical apologist, I had the impression of someone who went through Frank Sheed’s apologetics at great speed, and perhaps acquired a smattering of formal logic and epistemology as well as natural theology. An amazing quantity of literature was written in the nineteenth century in the wake of the conversions of man like Newman and Manning, and especially between the wars. All those books had one thing in common: the contrast between a strong and beautiful Catholic Church under Pius XI and Pius XII and Anglicanism with increasing evidence of encroaching liberalism and relativism in matters of doctrine.

I was amazed in the early 1980’s to hear of the Catholic Church as if everything was going just beautifully, and everything was perfect (societas perfecta and all that…). Cognitive dissonance indeed! In those old books, one would read – as a major argument of Anglicanism – the fact that they were using a vernacular liturgy! I had the impression of being in a madhouse, a House of the Blind!

How did I came to all this? It was through a young man living in lodgings in the same East End Methodist students’ hostel as where I had a room. He was someone from no religious background who had been bitten by the bug, and was under instruction with a Jesuit priest at Farm Street. He was as enthusiastic about this as his project of inventing an ‘infinitely variable gearbox’, a ‘perpetual motion machine’ and a motorcycle designed to be incapable of falling over. I had never met someone so intense and with such an unhealthy passion. To express the reality, he was a crank. I have met many other cranks, nothing to do with the genuine English eccentric, since! Having researched the name of this person on Google, I was flabbergasted to learn that he was still working on these projects thirty years later, and no working prototype had ever been built. The more scientifically-minded among us will know that perpetual motion is impossible. Amazing! Indeed, I have moved on in life.

Let us go from anecdote to some more substantial reflections. Apologetics are a very superficial and unreliable way of getting people to become convinced of the truth of Catholic doctrine, for the simple reason that the life of the Church is not merely doctrine and books. It is also liturgy, experience and spirituality. Our Evangelical convert will try to work as he did when he was a Protestant: at all costs work on a person and get him to recite that magical saving formula “Lord Jesus, I accept you into my heart. I regret my sins and ask forgiveness”. Admittedly, the Catholic Catechism is more complex than simply the Bible and the Creeds, but it is still a book.

Apologetics are the art of demonstrating that beliefs are reasonable, and they show why the objections against them are unreasonable. But, it cannot be proven by reason that the articles of Faith are true. It is a beginning, and one way of many of accomplishing our duty of evangelism.

Evangelism? I yield again to the temptation of going into anecdotes and personal experience. When I was about 16 years of age, I sang in the choir of Kendal Parish Church during the school holidays (I was boarding in York). This was, under the then incumbent a central-to-high Prayer Book parish with a good Willis organ and a fine choral tradition. I was as religious as I was, not having yet discovered the real ‘spiky stuff’. My sister attended the parish of St Thomas in the same town, in fact the parish where I was baptised, but which was lower than low. They still had north-end celebration in the 1970’s, and the whole place reeked – not of candles and incense – but heating oil! The smell of diesel fuel, when I fill up my van, still reminds me of that church! After Sunday Evensong, I used to go to the prayer group at St Thomas Vicarage, because my sister had my mother’s car and drove us home afterwards. How I heard that the religion of Kendal Parish Church was ‘dead’, because we didn’t have their choruses and solas. At the time, I didn’t really understand why there should be so much enmity between two parishes of the same Church of England.

I was supposed, as a Christian, to be peddling the Bible and the Faith to other people, getting them to ‘save themselves’ through the ‘magic formula’. How cheap and tawdry! I preferred to find God in the beauty of choral music and the sonorous prose of the Prayer Book. God will always find ways to draw people to Himself. My encounter with Evangelical religion began to gnaw away at my very soul and belief. Either I had to reject religion as just another vain ideology, or look for God in deeper things, experiences, and above all, in beauty.

Between my sister and myself, I saw two types of personalities: the in-the-box conformist and the anarchical searching personality that drove me to search ever further and further, though it would create other problems.

The Evangelical Christian is the “democratic” type of personality, oriented to the life of society and the collective. Their view of life is prosaic. “I have given you milk”, said Saint Paul, “not solid food, for ye could not bear it: and ye cannot bear it even now, for ye are yet carnal”. The Church needs to feed her infants on milk, since many are indeed infants in the Faith. But milk is not enough for one who has grown to the extent of needing solid food. There is a hierarchy of temperaments and gifts. If the religion of St Thomas’ Parish was the one true Christianity, then I would have felt profoundly repelled and destined to life in quest for some other spiritual principle, paganism or ‘natural religion’ perhaps. Since my theological studies, I understood that Christianity is finely balanced between Judeo-Christian monotheism and Hellenic philosophy. There is the whole tension between Biblical faith and Greek / Alexandrine gnosis.

Fundamentalist Protestantism is a religion of words, of a Book, like Judaism and Islam. I will not digress along this line, as it is another subject for study, but it does form the mentality of the neo-Catholic apologist. The Bible remains, but is then supplemented with the Code of Canon Law (with the same hermeneutic key) and apologetics. The results can be quite startling, especially among American traditionalists.

I have always been impressed by the old saying of St. Ignatius of Loyola – “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who disbelieve, no amount of proof is sufficient”. Even the Resurrection was not enough for the more hard-hearted Jews of the first century. I am very much of the conviction that faith comes from experience of God. It is informed by hearing Scripture and the teaching of the Church, but its origin is visceral.

A point I would like to make before closing is that we are all a community on the way to Rome (or back to Rome in some cases). We do not need cheap preaching or trite apologetic arguments. They are often an insult to us. Some of us, with no pretence to holiness or perfection, have spent years in the desert wrestling with the Hound of Heaven. We have not known where to turn, except away from religion salesmen.

Some of us are university-trained intellectuals and some of us are ordinary people. I prefer to identify with the latter. We don’t need the Church justified for us, because we are convinced and are heading there. We don’t need to be told to “jump into the Tiber” because the Pope has built us a bridge, but it isn’t opened yet.

I’ll simply ask the hecklers and those who want attention to come up with something original. Don’t go on like the ‘programmed’ Jehovah’s Witness. It turns us right off. Experience of life is a great place to start, and you don’t need libraries or universities for that.