I can’t quite put my finger on it. When was the moment I was converted? Was it after a friend, whose virtues stood as a witness to the supernatural grace of God, unexpectedly forgave me with true Christian charity, despite all the injury I’d done him? Was it after being moved by the magnificence and soul-striking beauty of Florence and Venice, or the peaceful reverence of an Andalusian mountain town on a Sunday? Or was it rather upon the encounter with Holy Mother Church’s rich wellspring of truthful and sensical philosophy and theology?

What I do know is that, today, I’m home. More than that, it would be an insult to the graces I’ve received to pretend I’m anything less than certain about the Faith. My soul, intellect, and will have been shown more than enough for any doubts to flee.

The Catholic Faith closely reflects a Gothic cathedral; it’s not a simple thing. And, in the same vein a great cathedral is built, none of this happened overnight. 

My foundations were laid in the home. My father was a lapsed French Catholic, who- despite his sound catechesis at his pre-conciliar Jesuit school- had been swept up in the cultural tidal wave of the social revolution in the 1970s; to say what my Scottish mother’s faith was is more difficult. But I believe she had some semblance of a culturally Anglican moral philosophy. 

We were non-practising, but they had me- thanks be to God- baptised in the local Anglican church in our Lincolnshire villlage. The Faith had little direct effect on our daily lives. The general impression I was given was that we were Christians because we generally believed in a creator God (probably) and thought Jesus a nice man with a good message.

Nonetheless, a cross propped itself above one of the doorways in our living room- my father’s confirmation gift. I was handed a children’s bible to flick through alongside my other books about knights and Greek mythology, which- of course- were only actually examined in the spates of boredom between sessions whacking and being whacked by my friends with lightsabres.

I was hardly a pious seven-year-old. I could not name the twelve apostles. I prayed only when desperate or upset. The Trinity was an alien concept. If I was regarded as the ‘Christian’ of the boys at school- that probably warns readers about secularism in 21st century Britain. It didn’t help I was very often an awful person.

This elementary deism, verging on agnosticism, persisted all the way to university. There, after spending my first year almost entirely at the gym, listening to electronic dance music, and cultivating delusional vanity, one friendship I had made would prove lifechanging. The friend’s name was Chris; a Christian of confused persuasion between his intellectual Dutch father’s ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ and his American now-wife’s non-denominational Evangelicalism. He was of sincere (if heretical) faith.

It was not a coincidence that when my mother died, it was Chris who immediately drove to my university accommodation with his father, helped me pack my bags in silence, encouragement, patience, and tenderness, and took me to the station. Compared to the mutual degeneracy I would indulge in with the rest of my friends, there was something different about this guy. There was agape: Christian love. Not the world’s ‘love’ in which the person loves for their own sake, but even when inconvenient- or mortifying.

Much commanded respect. He was a semi-professional football player contemporaneous to achieving firsts on our politics course. He was celibate. Teetotal. He chose to go to a worse university than the top-five one he met the grades for to be closer to his family. That’s the type of person this guy was.

Midway through our undergraduate studies, the events transpired. We both began seeking positions as two new recruits in the vast and shameless legion of young aspirational elites, clamouring for opportunities for self-advancement, eerily reminiscent of Richard Rich in A Man For All Seasons. 

Chris had one substantial advantage over me; he was not lazy. His activity and drive quickly earned him a merited opportunity. And I, as a self-entitled and particularly selfish thing, expected to reap the benefits. Magnanimously, in the new environmental think tank he was being helped to set up, he was willing to give me a good (if albeit initially unpaid) position. But it wasn’t good enough; I wanted to be running it with him. I just did not even remotely deserve it.

We fell out. Or rather, I fell out with him. My ensuing vindictiveness would have left most friendships I’d ever made up to that point beyond repair. Pride has a perennial way of alienating people. I wouldn’t have blamed him for never seeing me again. He was at LSE and due to move out to Washington DC, while I was abroad in Norway. He had new social circles; so did I.

Yet, despite my false friendship, he, once again, witnessed to his faith. From his ever-busy schedule one evening he insisted we call with each other. I ceded, determined to let him know my mind. But his reasonableness and love melted my rage down. 

He spent over an hour on the phone reconciling. He was patient, and I was tired of being proud and angry and miserable. But my life might not have been changed had he not uttered those delicate evangelistic words at the end; “I know you sometimes regard yourself a Christian. Have you tried reading the Bible? It helps.”

I sighed. I was twenty years old. I probably should get round to it one of these days, I thought. Days later, I lazily began with an audio-recording of Genesis. I soon realised that it wasn’t the place to start and switched to the Gospel of St Matthew. 

Much, naturally, went over my head. But I noticed three things. First, the authority with which Christ spoke. He did not speak as a mere moral philosopher. He spoke more of the supernatural than the natural and he offered insight beyond the words of men. Second, he was not that fun-loving domesticated hippy who stood for tolerance that secular and Protestant culture insists he was. Finally, he was profound and unearthly- He was the Christ, a sometimes-angry God who cast out demons, turned over tables, rebuked his followers, announced kingship and reign, and the profoundly metaphysical.

I could not reconcile this Christ with what was presented at the ‘service’ Chris once dragged me to at Canterbury Cathedral and again at another unstructured happy-clappy Evangelical thing in a school. The first struck me as uninspired. The latter was too blasé and Earthly. 

I soon realised that if I wanted to get to know God, I wanted nothing watered down or dressed up in agreeableness. My life was disordered; the world was disordered. Sin dominated my life; it was celebrated in the culture I grew up in. Movies and television romanticised and championed adulterousness and pride… as families collapsed at record rates and society slipped aided by technology into self-obsession and narcissism.

Apart from discovering that Catholics were a bit stricter, I was broadly unaware of doctrine. Why, then, was I instinctively drawn to the Catholic Church? It can be summarised in a word: beauty.

When travelling through Catholic countries, I had already come to notice that the things which the Faith had touched were utterly transfigured. It had left an impression on my soul. The sheer magnificence of Florence, with its domed Duomo, from the Piazzale Michelangelo at sunset. The giant crucifixes front-and-centre in the meandering homely villages of Bavaria. Rural Spain had radiated- yes, even in the 21st century- a peaceful tranquillity my restless Protestant background had never let me yet encounter.

Magnificence, awe, purity, and grace. That which elevates us from the sordid and depraved. Which tells us where we go wrong rather than giving us a banal thumbs up. Which shows us what makes for real life, as intended to be. All cathedrals require such transfigured murals and sculptures.

So, I wanted and had been moved by forgiveness. I wanted order. I wanted beauty and purity. I wanted goodness and charity. My heart was being converted. Now the last pillar to fall- or be erected, rather- was my intellect.

But, what I want has no bearing on reality. I could admire and investigate Catholicism, but in the end I could have never given my life to it had it all been a fancy.

Lockdown proved a providentially fortunate time to sit under blue skies in the blessed, sunny garden in my family home, listening to the blackbirds beside me as I plunged into G.K. Chesterton, St Augustine, the Catechism, and Hillaire Belloc (I know it was not that way for many). Indeed, it was Belloc who saw off my Protestantism by simply pointing out the ahistoricity of the word ‘Christianity’.

I ploughed through reading, as the months flew by. Whilst writing my dissertation, I discovered incredible documents such as Pope Leo XIII’s great encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum. Here, I found a total and intelligent evisceration of the modern and Enlightenment ideal that true freedom is found in merely ‘doing as one pleases’. Revolutionary to a self-gratifying 20 year old embedded in a hedonistic culture- nay, counter-revolutionary.

The philosophy the Church provided me was true. It made more ethical sense than anything else. It made more epistemological sense than all else. The early Church was a tapestry woven by the blood of martyrs- souls willing to renounce all and die for their certitude of Christ (beginning with the Apostles themselves)- and history confirmed it. The New Testament could be dated to within a lifetime of Christ’s death. The Apostolic Church was the Catholic Church and its growth, coherence, and development could be in much detail traced and verified. Later, the Latin Mass and metaphysical realism would reassure me I really was home.

My intellect found enough substance to grant me the docility and humility the Church asks us for in Faith. It was reasonable. This great, divinely ordained thing knew much better than I do. My intellect was convinced, and the flying buttresses, which prop up the whole cathedral’s structure, were put in place.

Finally, as Englishmen it always feels crass to talk about such things, but mysticism and prayer sustained me. No cathedral is complete without a beating heart. Life-bearing sacraments, heavenly liturgy, and divine love. As the vulgar modernist monstrosity Clifton cathedral shows, even things with nothing close to the exterior grandeur of Chartres can (technically) be a cathedral.

A few months before my confirmation, I knelt down in my room to routinely begin my rosary, and I received my first real ecstasy. I had been reflecting on my past sins and unworthiness before the greatness of Our Lord, when I was suddenly lovingly enveloped and gripped by someone. Something within my soul resolved with certitude that I was being tenderly embraced in the arms of the Mother of God. What presented itself as unmistakably supernatural overcame my entire being.

Marian devotion had once been a stumbling block to me. I had not always had the best relationships with the women in my life. I hadn’t treated the ones who had come my way with love or care; in turn I hadn’t seen a great deal to revere. So I explained this to Our Lady, I prayed about it. I knew I was wrong. This was her answer. 

On my knees, I chuckled as my eyes joyfully teared. How could I ever doubt again? Of course with the next passing days, my zeal for purity and gratitude faded with the distractions and difficulties of everyday life. I was appalled at myself. But I would not forget that experience. Nor would it be entirely the last.

My cathedral was intact. And I have ever since been trying, poorly, to make it more ornate, fill it with more life, and extend its spire ever closer towards the heavens. This grand structure would never have stood had I not heeded Christ’s instruction to place it on the firmest of grounds- St Peter. I resigned to the Pope and Church’s authority early, and never had to worry about structural instability again. This is how Our Lord had drawn me, and guided me in construction.

The Gothic cathedrals really are like nothing else man has ever built; because man alone has not built them. Let me end on this, to drive the point home… Are you aware that Lincoln Cathedral overtook the Great Pyramid of Giza as the world’s tallest structure in 1311? 

It’s worth we reflect on that for a moment, and really appreciate it. The grandest structure that human civilisation had ever coughed up was a slabbish burial mound and tomb for a deceased monarch in the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’, built most likely by slaves, in fear.

In the 14th century, however, we see it uncrowned by something different. In an obscure region of an obscure European land, we see a structure erected.

Souls flock here. Rather than beholding death from afar, they behold life from within. This thing is not blocky and primitive, but ornate and magnificent. It is built by free men, in significant part by voluntary donations by local tradesmen and parishioners, in love. Fitting.

(Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

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