A tale of loss and gain: why don't the Anglicans crow about Catholic converts? (& don't forget the money and sex)

Catholics becoming Protestant are not the symmetric mirror image of Protestants becoming catholics. A journey of discovery one way, and disbelief the other.

Once upon a time, when I was discussing my intention to become a Catholic, an Anglican bishop I knew well, sniffed, with some practiced episcopal elegance and said

“I get just as many coming the other way, it’s just that we don’t crow about it.”

In the last few days the Catholic Church issued a press release informing the world that former Catholic priest Fr Stephen Maughan had, after a long period of discernment, decided to become an Anglican, and was being given a job ‘to continue his ministry’ in the Anglican diocese of York.

This has raised a few questions.

One notable observation was that he was not exercising his priesthood amongst the Anglicans, but ‘continuing his ministry.’

I have no doubt that Stephen Maughan is an excellent man and a first rate Christian, but the movement from being Catholic to being Protestant raises some very different questions from the movement from Protestant to being Catholic.

It seems that one is a journey of discovery and the other a journey of dis-illusion or disbelief.

For example, going one way, becoming Catholic, you find that you are motivated by the discovery that the Mass is more than a memorial service and that a supernatural act of transformation takes place in response to the prayers of the Catholic priest.

So what does it mean to go the other way? It cannot be an additional belief….so it has to be a loss of belief.