A Tale of Anglican Prejudice
September 22, 2014
OWEN FRANCIS DUDLEY became an Anglican minister in 1911 and worked in an East End parish in London for several years before converting to Catholicism. “What I Found” is his essay on his conversion. It is the best description of the common mentality of Anglicans toward Catholicism that I have ever read. He begins:
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. My next was at a magic-lantern entertainment to which I was taken by my mother. In the course of it there appeared on the screen the picture of a very old man in a large hat and a long white soutane. I must have asked my mother who it was, and been informed briefly that it was the “Pope of Rome.” I don’t quite know how, but the impression left in my mind was that there was something fishy about the “Pope of Rome.” At school, I learned in English history (which I discovered later was not altogether English and not altogether history) that there was something fishy not only about the Pope of Rome, but about the whole of the Pope’s Church.
I gathered that for a thousand years or more the Pope had held all England in his grip, and not only England but all Europe; also that during that period the “Roman,” “Romish,” or “Roman Catholic” Church had become more and more corrupt, until finally the original Christianity of Christ had almost disappeared; that idols were worshipped instead of God; that everywhere superstition held sway. No education; no science. Everything and everybody priest-ridden. I read of how at last the “Glorious Reformation” had come; how the light of the Morning Star had burst upon the darkness; how the Pope’s yoke had been flung off, and with it all the trappings and corruptions of popery; of the triumph of the Reformation in England; of the restoration of the primitive doctrines of Christ and the “light of the pure Gospel”; of the progress and prosperity that followed in the reign of “good Queen Bess”; of the freeing of men’s minds and the expansion of thought released from the tyranny of Rome. All this, as an English schoolboy, I drank in. And I believed it. Next I did a thing that we all have to do: I grew up. And I grew up without questioning the truth of what I had been taught. [cont.]