On becoming a Catholic

Wilfred De'Ath

Next week I expect to celebrate my first Catholic Christmas by attending Midnight Mass at St Thomas's Roman Catholic Church in North Fulham, quite near to where I live. I was actually received into the Roman Catholic Church as recently as Sunday, 28 October, at the Dominican Priory of Blackfriars in Oxford. This article is an attempt to describe my experience of being instructed in the faith and to answer the puzzled inquiries of many friends (and enemies) who, naturally, are asking: 'Why have you become a Catholic?'

The answer has to be, in the first place: as a bulwark against the degradation of despair. Within a single week in the autumn of 1977 my life fell into pieces on the domestic and professional fronts. According to Roger Ruston OP, the Prior of Blackfriars, who supervised my instruction and eventually received me into the Church, human motivation, like faith itself, is infinitely complex and if the operation of divine grace leads one to approach the Catholic Church at such a moment, then the Church is unlikely to turn one away. It is, in fact, a kind of spiritual advantage to get as low as I did.

Ruston was insistent, throughout my instruction, that 'there is no such thing as simple faith' and the extreme complexity of my own leads me to profound agreement with Auberon Waugh who wrote in these pages a few ago weeks of religion as essentially a private rather than a social activity. It is interesting, in this connection, that the currently fashionable Sufi thinker, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, says exactly the same: 'Religionis not concerned with others. It is concerned with you, absolutely with you. Religion is personal. It is not a social phenomonen. In fact, there cannot be any sociology of religion; there can only be a psychology.'

The answer as to why I became a Catholic has to be, in the second place: in order to save my soul. I am aware that this sounds pietistic, yet it is the only truthful thing I can say. Judas, when he betrayed Christ, gave way to the temptation to despair (as I have often been tempted to do) and went out and hanged himself. Peter, who did the same — betrayed Christ in his words took what has always seemed to me the wiser and more practical course: he repented, went on to become a follower, and ended up as the first Pope. It 'goes without saying that at this point in my life I would rather be in Peter's shoes than those oif Judas.

The actual experience of receiving instruction at Blackfriars over a period of five months was, in some ways, the 20th century equivalent of the mediaeval pilgrim kept waiting for days or weeks in the snow outside the monastery, sustained only by the scraps of food that the abbot or other monks might see fit to throw to him . . On a number of occasions Ruston was too busy or preoccupied to see me at the prearranged time, so he assigned me to a scholarly lay brother awaiting ordination, Denis Geraghty OP. Geraghty quite often forgot to turn up. The inefficiency and vagueness of the Dominicans (who have always been the eccentric arm of the Catholic Church) in all departments was such that it made me all the more determined to persist. Whether their apparent forgetfulness was therefore partly intentional, I do not know. I strongly suspect that it was.

I should make it clear at this point that this was not my first experience of receiving instruction in the Roman Catholic faith. I had done so once before, in 1966, during another crisis in my marriage, at the Dominican Priory in Hampstead, but had foolishly allowed myself to be put off the scent by the personality of the priest whom! thought smug and self-satisfied. Today I 4m less prone to fall into the error — and I believe it to be a very grievous one — of paying more attention to the personality of the priest than to what he has to say. But I am by no means free of it. For some time i found Ruston's shyness and twitchy neuroticism and Geraghty's social incompetence extremely hard to deal with.

I have also —on several occasions over the years — been in touch with the Catholic Enquiry Centre in Hampstead, asking for their course of booklets. (The CEC's rather crude advertising with its emphasis on a man in his early thirties who had been crucified as a common criminal without ever having written a book appealed to something very deep in me. The failed writer perhaps?) I have now read through these pamphlets several times but invariably found them bland and uneonvincin,g. They seem to me to aim for the lowest common denominator of intelligence; to lean over backwards not to offend; to point the inquirer to a dead religion. I would still apply these criticisms today — the pamphlets have not been brought up to date since 1967 and stand badly in need of revision — but I think I now possess more insight into why they are written as they are.

My instructions at Blackfriars took place in a small, superbly ill-furnished sitting_ room. (Anglicans, as Evelyn Waugh said, could never have achieved this ruthless absence of 'good taste.) They comprised a course in the seven Sacraments, Baptism, Penance, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction, Matrimony, Holy Orders, as well as a number of discussions on the role of Roman Catholicism in the modern world. My questions were mostly answered to my satisfaction. Beneath his extremely informal, even scruffy appearance, Ruston turned out to be a fairly orthodox, even conservative, priest. became aware that the instruction, when I could get it, was of a considerable intellectual and spiritual quality. Indeed, Ruston turned out to be a person of formidable spiritual intelligence.

I confess that I felt, at times, very badly let down' by the Blackfriars people. But then people do let one down. One's friends let one down. One's wife lets one down. Even God, according to Ruston, lets one down. He does so, apparently, in order that one may go on struggling to find Him. I don't know about this, but it does seem to me, now that I am safely gathered home as it were, that I can and must forgive Ruston and Geraghty for their discourtesy and lack of consideration. I must also acknowledge, fully and freely, that, despite many setbacks, trials and tribulations, I have been granted the infinitely precious gift of religious faith.

Somewhere in the course of Somerset Maugham's excellent novel The Razor's Edge Larry, the hero, a seeker, spends three months in retreat inside a Roman Catholic monastery in Alsace. He is looking, as I have been, for a faith that will give meaning to his life. In the end, he leaves `by the same door as in I went' — he does not find faith. But, as he leaves, the priest who has tried to help him tells him: 'You are a deeply religious man who cannot bring himself to believe in God. Some day, somewhere, faith will be granted to you.' I have always identified myself with Larry in this novel. Elsewhere in the novel, the priest says to Larry: 'Our wise old Church has discovered that if you pray for belief as though you believed already, belief will be granted to you.' I have discovered the truth of this for myself in recent months.

Along with the rather bland and unsatisfactory booklets sent out by the Catholic Enquiry Centre is a small book of prayers for daily use: I find these extremely good and helpful. Among the prayers for various occasions are two prayers for faith: 'Lord, give me the gift of Faith so that I may see the truth of all you teach. I believe, Lord, because you cannot deceive me or lead me astray. Help me, Lord, at all times to trust you rather than myself, and to realise that your truth and your love are the sure road to happiness in this life and in the next.'

'My God, grant me the grace of a deep, fervent, living faith in you and in all you have revealed. Take away from me all pride, vanity, insincerity, self-interest, and anything which may hinder me from accepting your revealed truth. May I be absolutely true to you, accepting fully all that you wish me to believe and always living according to your holy will. Lead me by your grace to worship you as you wish to be worshipped, so that guided by your truth, I may grow daily in your love, Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. AMEN.'

During the long months of July, August and September in Oxford, when the Black friars people were at their most obtuse and difficult, and when all occasions seemed to conspire against me I used to read these two prayers twice a day to myself. (I am still doing so.) The result has been, I can no longer doubt, a slow accretion of religious faith which, God willing, will remain with me for the rest of my life.

I am not entirely happy with the phrase 'slow accretion'. There is another sense in which the faith has come to me quite suddenly. I was travelling on the coach from Oxford to London one morning quite recently and fell into a doze: I woke up, abruptly, with an almost overwhelming conviction of the truth of the Catholic faith. Only the other day, I dozed off on my bed over a volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (Mr Powell quite often has this effect on me), and suddenly woke up with a similar blinding (some would say blind) conviction. In this sense, the faith does not slowly creep up on one: it comes in fits and starts. One takes a pace back, then two paces forward.

Much as I disapprove of it in retrospect, it would be pointless to try to write off the whole of my evangelical past or my long subsequent experience of the Church of England. Those experiences, for better or worse, will go towards making me the kind of Catholic I shall become. What kind of Catholic will that be?! have no idea. A good one, I hope. But a had one would be better than nothing.