Ten years ago this month, I became a Catholic.
It happened in the attic of the guest house at Ealing Abbey. There was just me, a friend and a monk, and the operation took about an hour.
Afterwards we went for cocktails. I started things as I meant to go on.
I guess the two big questions to ask a convert are: why did you do it and are you happy? Answering the first point is hard.
It’s like asking a man why he married a woman. There’s a temptation to invent a narrative – to say, “this happened, that happened and before we knew it we were where we are today”.
But the simpler, yet more complex, answer is this: I fell in love.
I was lucky to grow up in a household open to religious belief. My grandparents were Christian spiritualists; Grandma advertised as a clairvoyant.
Mum and Dad became Baptists in the 1990s. I remember the pastor one Sunday telling us that evolution was gobbledygook. The teenager in me came to regard the faithful as fools, but I was wrong. I couldn’t see that they were literate, inquisitive, musically gifted and the kindest people you’d ever meet.
But I went my own way and embraced Marxism.
By the time I arrived at Cambridge University I was a hard-left Labour activist and a militant atheist. I saw life as a struggle. Salvation could only come through class revolution. The life of the individual was unimportant.
Mine was unhappy. Very unhappy. I disliked myself and, as is so common, projected that on to a dislike of others. I’m ashamed now to think of how rude and mean I was. Perhaps I was ashamed then, too, because I had fantasies of obliterating myself from history. Continue reading
- Tim Stanley is a historian and writer for the Daily Telegraph.