Two Converts to Romanism
Two former Anglicans have recently given their reasons for becoming Romanists. One of them, Mary Wakefield, is the wife of Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s special adviser, and works for The Spectator magazine. She became a Romanist ten years ago. The other, Gavin Ashenden, used to be a Royal Chaplain, resigning in 2017 over the reading of the Koran in St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow. Before that he had been a university lecturer on theological subjects at the Universities of Sussex and Brighton. After consecration as a bishop in a break-away Anglican denomination, he was received as a Romanist in December 2019.
Mary Wakefield’s reasons are not very substantial. She had been a nominal Anglican by upbringing, but she started to take an interest in Romanism, and found it not as absurd and gloomy as she had believed: “Transubstantiation, celibate priests, active saints, venerated bones, the dominance of Mary: from a distance, to me they all seem absurd, distasteful. But take a few steps towards them, and they begin to make frightening sense. Oddly, the more baroque [ornate] the belief, the more easily I found it slid, on closer inspection, into a coherent bigger picture.”
Gavin Ashenden gives more detail, but his reasons are broadly similar. On the one hand, the Anglicanism to which he had formerly committed himself had capitulated “to the increasingly intense and non-negotiable demands of a secular culture”. On the other hand, he was attracted by three things in Romanism: the apparitions of “Our Lady” from the third century through to the present time; the “eucharistic miracles” (supposed miracles connected with the mass, such as healings, radiance or levitation of the host); and the “Magisterium” (the power of Romanism to give an authoritative interpretation of Scripture). “You can find a different Anglicanism for each day of the week – almost each hour of the day”, he said. “I came to realise that only the Catholic Church, with the weight of the Magisterium, had the ecclesial integrity, theological maturity and spiritual potency to defend the faith, renew society and save souls in the fullness of faith.”
In both cases there seems to be a mixture of naivety, superstition and delusion, with no mention of either sin or Christ. The apparitions and eucharistic miracles are the usual “lying wonders” that crop up in many false religions, and the things that Mary Wakefield mentions as absurd and distasteful are even more so when they are seen close by.
The “Magisterium” is a nose of wax which turns this way and that according to convenience. Anglican orders were declared “absolutely null and utterly void” in 1896 by Pope Leo XIII, but Bishop Ashenden’s episcopal consecration is “considered to be valid in the line of Catholic apostolic succession, though not licit”. When the former Anglican Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, became a Romanist in 1994 he was re-ordained sub conditione (conditionally) owing to there being “prudent doubt” about the invalidity of his previous Anglican ordination. Such hair-splitting manoeuvring is devious and puerile inconsistency, not “theological maturity and spiritual potency”. But the Papal show goes on, and it will continue to entrance and ensnare poor sinners and keep them from Christ until “with violence” the whole system is thrown down (Rev 18:21). DWBS