By Ian Hunter - from the National Post
The story of my conversion to the Roman Catholic Church is, in part, the story of four men, only two of whom were themselves Catholic.
The first was named Karol Wojtyla, a relatively obscure Polish Cardinal who astonished the world when on October 16, 1978 he stepped out on the balcony at St. Peter's, announced his new identity as Pope John Paul ll, and declared in a dozen or more languages: "Be not afraid.... Open the doors to Jesus Christ!"
Within a year of John Paul ll becoming Pope, I wrote a feature profile of him for a Canadian newspaper; I concluded it thus:
"Who could have foreseen that in so little time the strongest voice in the Western world would be that of a man uniquely qualified by personal experience to speak to both halves of a world split asunder?"
With growing admiration, I watched John Paul ll discharge the duties of his office, including his worldwide pilgrimages -especially the triumphant homecoming to Poland. Wherever he went, I noticed how he confounded the ecumenists and pluralists. He appeared always cheerful; he listened attentively, he exuded warmth and compassion. But his words were blunt and uncompromising, so much so that they startled even those like me who had longed to hear such things said: "Human life is forever," he said. On the ordination of women? No. On abortion: No. On marriage: Indissoluble. On celibacy: Yes. On priestly vows: Forever. This was a man who clearly knew his faith and his mind, and was not afraid to speak unequivocally about either.
The main reason why Pope John Paul ll was so significant in my conversion is that without his pontificate, I doubt that I would have wrestled with the ecclesiological claims that the Roman Catholic Church makes. Ecclesiology might seem an arcane subject, but for me it was pivotal. Yet nothing in my family background or upbringing would have prompted me to reflect on it. Just the opposite, in fact.
Which brings me to the second influential man in my story, my father. My father, James Hogg Hunter, was born in 1890 in Maybole, Scotland -in the Covenanting district of Scotland where men and women died as martyrs to the Protestant faith. Two of my father's novels (How Sleep the Brave, 1955, and The Hammer of God, 1965) are about the persecution of Scottish Covenanters. My father was a Presbyterian and among his bedrock beliefs was the conviction that Rome was the enemy of the Christian faith. It is difficult to communicate today the depth and sincerity of his conviction.
My father immigrated to Canada in the early part of the 20th century, and he spent the next six decades engaged in Christian journalism, primarily as editor of a monthly magazine called the Evangelical Christian. In its pages, he denounced "popery in all its forms" and, as he put it "sought to expose the shams and deceits of this 'Mystery of Iniquity,' the Roman Catholic Church."
I mention that ruefully, not to mock or disparage my father, a fine and dear Christian man whom I loved, but rather to demonstrate how broad the chasm it was necessary for me to cross in order to come to Rome. Yet when I consider who played a part in my decision, my father is near the top of the list, and I'll tell you why: He took religion seriously. In fact, his faith was the most important thing in his life. For him, Christianity was not a convenience but a life creed; attending church was not a social outing but an opportunity to worship in the presence of Almighty God; religion was not a subject for social chatter, but a lifechanging commitment.
Because he took his faith seriously, because it was the defining feature and centre of my father's life, I wonder sometimes what -had he lived to survey the ruins of Protestantism, where mainline churches like the Anglican and United Church compete in bringing ridicule upon the faith he cherished -he would have done; given this sorry spectacle, might he not have made a similar pilgrimage to Rome? I wonder, but can never know.
The third influence on my conversion could be considered a paradox since he never himself became a Roman Catholic; I refer to C.S. Lewis. All my Christian life I have been reading and learning from C.S. Lewis's books; particularly, to pick three: Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy and The Great Divorce.
The distinguished American novelist Walker Percy once remarked on the countless converts who had come to Catholicism through the writings of C.S. Lewis. Yet Lewis himself never converted; he lived, and died (in November, 1963) a lifelong Anglican.
In 1999 Joseph Pearce wrote a book called Literary Converts, a study of the veritable stampede to Rome of English authors and intellectuals in the 20th century; men like G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh. I reviewed Literary Converts when it came out and nominated it as the best Christian book of the year. More recently, Pearce wrote another book, this one called C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (Ignatius Press), and I reviewed that, too. In this book, Pearce tries to find the answer to the Lewis paradox; namely why has C.S. Lewis influenced so many Catholic converts and yet never himself became a Catholic?
Despite Pearce's diligent research, and his insightful and balanced reflections, the answer, I believe, eludes him. Pearce's answer -that Lewis was never able to shake off his virulently anti-Catholic Belfast upbringing -I consider unconvincing. I know that kind of upbringing: I experienced something not altogether different myself. It is an obstacle, unquestionably, but not insurmountable.
I believe that the answer is much simpler: In the 1940s, '50s and early '60s, when Lewis lived and his influence was at its height, it was still possible to regard the Church of England (particularly in its Anglo-Catholic manifestations) as part of that "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" that all Christians, when they recite the Nicene Creed, profess to believe in.
Today, such a belief requires self-deception, or at least wilful blindness. In his time, Lewis was spared the spectacle of what the Anglican Church has since become.
Walter Hooper, Lewis's confidante, editor and biographer, sometimes Anglican priest, and most assiduous keeper of Lewis's flame, in 1988 converted to Catholicism. He believes, and has said publicly, that Lewis would do likewise were he alive today. And Lewis's longtime friend, Christopher Derrick, wrote in 1996: "It's difficult to imagine what Lewis would make of today's Church of England. The Church of England is such a pathetic ghost nowadays.... You can't agree with it or disagree with it. There's just nothing there."
If C.S. Lewis were alive today, he would almost certainly be a Roman Catholic. That is the short answer -and, I believe, the most convincing answer -to the Lewis paradox. When I discovered that, then my last feeble justification for remaining an Anglican -"If it was good enough for C.S. Lewis, then its good enough for me" -was gone.
This brings me to the fourth and perhaps most important influence, Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 1966, when I was a law student at University of Toronto law school and should have been spending my time immersed in statutes, regulations and cases in the law library, I was more often ensconced in the periodical stacks at Central Library reading Malcolm Muggeridge's prolific journalism.
I had stumbled across Muggeridge quite by chance and was at first struck by his eloquent, wry, effortlessly readable prose, so clear, pungent and often devastating. His skeptical mind and loathing for cant were a welcome purgative to the academic conversations going on all around me.
I soon exhausted what Mug-geridge was available in print. Next came out-of-print books through inter-library loans. Then, via the Index to Periodical Literature, I began working my way backwards through the 1960s, 1950s, '40s, '30s, even into the 1920s, via back numbers of The Guardian, the New Statesman, Time and Tide and other periodicals. In my third year of law school, I could have answered any question concerning Muggeridge; unfortunately, these were scarce, the examiners preferring instead to test my shaky knowledge of close corporations or the remoter slopes of the Income Tax Act.
I first met Malcolm in the autumn of 1968 when he came to Toronto to give a lecture at the St. Lawrence Centre. On this occasion, I asked him about a short story he had written in India in the early twenties. At first, he barely remembered it, then he said: "Nobody has mentioned that story to me in 50 years! Now we really must talk." He went on to tell me how he had sent such early stories to Mahatma Gandhi who had published them in his newspaper, Young India. Thereupon, Malcolm and I fell into real conversation, and then correspondence, which continued, pretty much uninterrupted, until his death in 1990.
The same year we met, Muggeridge published Jesus Rediscovered, which became an immediate, unlikely bestseller; all of his books from then on dealt with religious themes, including Something Beautiful for God, the book that brought Mother Teresa to worldwide attention.
In 1978-79, Muggeridge and I swapped houses, and for that year I lived in his house in Sussex where I wrote the first biography of Muggeridge. Central to the book was charting his religious pilgrimage, from a Fabian socialist upbringing to his reception, at age 80, into the Roman Catholic Church.
"Rome, sweet Rome, be you never so sinful, there's no place like Rome." So, mockingly, Muggeridge had written in the mid '70s. Yet on November 27, 1982, Muggeridge knelt before the alter in a chapel in the village of Hurst Green and was received into the Catholic Church. When I asked him why, he replied: "The day will come, dear boy, when you must decide whether to die within the church or outside the church. I have decided to die within the Church."
From the day that Malcolm Muggeridge became a Catholic, I thought more seriously of conversion. I remembered how difficult Malcolm's struggle had been and how Mother Teresa had written telling him to submerge his hesitations in Christ's unbounded love. I especially remembered one of her letters to him; let me quote it:
"You are to me like Nicodemus 'unless you become as a little child' ... I am sure that you will understand beautifully everything if you would only become a little child in God's hands. The small difficulty you have regarding the Church is finite. Overcome the finite with the infinite."
These were the four most important -albeit four of many -intellectual influences on my decision to convert. Looking back now, I see that three considerations gradually came to dominate my thinking: Rome's authority, historicity and universality. But more even than these considerations, I came to believe not just that truth is to be found within Rome but -something quite different -that in a unique way, the truth is Rome. Incidentally, from within Rome's embrace I did not expect modernity to appear any more comely, but perhaps more bearable. And so it has proved.
I discovered that I had come to believe that only Rome can trace a direct line to the church's rock, St. Peter. It was to St. Peter, after all, and to his descendants, that our Lord promised that the gates of hell would not prevail. Against most churches, the gates of hell seem to me to be prevailing quite well. Only the Roman Catholic Church, the repository of teaching and traditions that date to our Lord's first disciples, "the unmoved spectator of the thousand phases and fashions that have passed over our restless world" (to use Ronald Knox's elegant phrase), has the history, the guts, the inner wherewithal, to survive a postmodern age. Rome's claim to speak with authority in matters of faith and morals is the last refuge, or so I now believe, against the all-corrosive acid of postmodernism.
So, the story of my conversion is, in part, about the pilgrimage of four men: Pope John Paul ll, my father (albeit, an unwitting guide), C.S. Lewis, and Malcolm Muggeridge.
But, first, last and always, it is the same story that conversion always is -a story of God's grace and forgiveness and love. Deo gratias.
? Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University. This is an excerpt from That Time of Year (Justin Press), which is available at www.justinpress.ca.
