I came across the conversion story of Fr. Owen Francis Dudley the other day and I thought that some of you might like to see it. It is posted at various places, so I imagine that many of you have seen it before; still, in light of the recent hopes for the conversion of some Anglicans inspired by the decision to ordain female “bishops”, there might be someone you know who would benefit from reading it for the first time.

As I read through it, it struck me how similar these conversion stories are many times, especially among the ex-Anglicans. The inroads into Anglicanism of that synthesis of all heresies, Modernism, was the last straw for many Anglicans, including Dudley (received into the Church 1915) and Ronald Knox (received 1917). But long since Modernism did its worst to the Anglican Communion, many are still waiting for that last straw; for some, it was the “ordination” of women, and now for others, it is the “ordination” of female bishops. Just think, though, what Newman and Dudley and Knox would have thought if they could see where Anglicanism was in 1998 or 2008 - would not the decision have been blindingly obvious?! In their day, they all agonized, but could they have agonized today?

Here are some excerpts from Fr. Dudley’s conversion story that I liked.

Nothing like having a saint show you the way home:

My first introduction to the Catholic Church was being spat in the eye by a Roman Catholic boy at school. He was bigger than I; so I let it pass. But I remembered he was a Roman Catholic. . . .

It’s amazing, but it’s true: though the sedia gestatoria is long gone, the ritual, even of fairly liberal Novus Ordo Masses, can be impressive to the protestant mind, even to one used to fairly conservative protestant services. Simply the fact that daily Mass was offered, and in the same way (albeit liberalized, protestantized) very much encouraged me in my decision to convert when I was in the last year of my undergraduate education. Perhaps I should have been less impressed; but it remains that I was and I’m sure that there are many other yokels around now like I was then.

It was during that period at college that I first of all went out to Rome, on a holiday. And while there I managed to see no less a person than the Pope of Rome himself. It was Pope Pius X - being borne into St. Peter’s on the “sedia gestatoria”. He passed quite close to where I was standing, and I could see his face very clearly. It was the face of a saint. I could only suppose that somehow he had managed to keep good in spite of being the Pope of Rome. That incident left a deeper impression on my mind than I was aware of at the time. I kept a diary of all that I saw in Rome, and wrote in it: “I can quite imagine a susceptible young man being carried away by all this, and wanting to become a Roman Catholic.” …

How often do we find persons today who are willing to be so frank, or who even believe, as Catholics, that the Catholic Church is the mystical body of Christ?

How far I sincerely believed that I was a “Catholic” during that period I find it difficult to estimate now. Sufficiently at any rate to argue heatedly with Low Church and “modernist” clergy in defense of my claim. And sufficiently to be thoroughly annoyed - with a Roman Catholic lady who, whenever we met, told me she was praying for my conversion to the “True Church,” and a Franciscan friar in the hopfields who told me the same…. I remember, too, that whenever I met a Roman Catholic priest I experienced a sense of inferiority and a vague feeling of not quite being the real thing, or at least of there being an indefinable but marked difference between us. . . .

If the following was true of the Anglican church then, how much more is it true now!

The Established Church was a church of contradictions, of parties, each of which had an equal claim to represent it, and all of which were destructive of its general claim to be part of the Church of Christ - directly one affirmed its unity. As far as authority was concerned, it was possible to believe anything or nothing without ecclesiastical interference. You could be an extreme “Anglo-Catholic” and hold all the doctrines of the Catholic Church except the inconvenient ones like papal infallibility; you could be an extreme modernist and deny (while retaining Christian terms ) all the doctrines of the Christian religion. No bishop said yes or no imperatively to any party. The bishops were as divided as the parties. For practical purposes, if bishops did interfere, they were ignored, even by their own clergy. If the Holy Ghost, as claimed, was with the Church of England then logically the Holy Ghost was the author of contradictions: for each party claimed His guidance.

Where did a saavy fellow like Fr. Dudley go when he decided to approach a Catholic priest? Well, of course, he made straight for the Brompton Oratory! Then he says that he was surprised that the priest there, when Dudley revealed his intention, didn’t make much of him, as though Dudley were some spectacular catch for the Church. Dudley not being a prince of the blood, how could a Father of the Brompton Oratory have made much of him?! ;)

Fr. Dudley puts the protestant mentality in a nutshell:

I have no intention of hurting feelings, but I am convinced that the supreme difficulty for most Anglicans who would “like to go over to Rome” but do not, is their (unconscious perhaps) inability even to contemplate submission to the one Church that demands it. When the late Archbishop of Canterbury publicly proclaimed that he and the adherents of the Established Church would never pass under a doorway upon whose lintel was inscribed the word “Submission” he was precisely expressing the Protestant mind.

Dudley has a number of books that are still in print via various traditional Catholic presses. You might look here and here and here.