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.]

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