“What beauty was once ours,” I said to my wife as we drove along the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, looking beyond the waving salt marsh grasses to the ocean and the blue sky stretching above. For thirteen years my wife and I had lived on this coast, first in a city called Beverly and then in a small town called Ipswich before I was called to serve at an Episcopal seminary outside Pittsburgh, which for me was the Midwest.
Driving around our old home, we felt a deep, almost painful ache of homesickness. I had loved the salt marshes especially, but almost everything I saw made my heart ache: the clapboard houses, the old barns, the rolling fields, the stone walls running through the woods, the old library where my wife had worked, the stream where our firstborn had fed the ducks—even the little seafood restaurant shaped like the paper box, complete with handle, they give you to take home your clams.
We were not where we should be. We were estranged from something that should have been ours. The feeling passed, of course—we had a home to go back to, and friends, and a job, and a church—but I expect it will come back just as strongly the next time we visit.
Almost everyone has felt this longing to be home. It is the closest experience I know to that longing for the Catholic Church that Anglicans call “Roman fever.” When you suffer this fever, you feel that you are not at home, that you are living in exile, and that you cannot be happy until you go home. You feel a great, aching desire to be a Catholic.
My Fever
Roman fever was, at least for me, much like malaria. It came and went unexpectedly. When you had it you felt it was going to take you off, but when you got better you could almost forget it. When you didn’t have it, you tended to think of it as a chronic illness to be suffered until it went away and you could get back to doing what you thought you were supposed to be doing.
The Roman fever most Evangelicals suffer is different. It keeps them sweating through sleepless nights, feeling themselves to be out of their senses, afraid that they will get even worse. They suffer for years without a break till it finally takes them off. They do not seem to feel this on-again, off-again interest in the Catholic Church. Once interested, they stay interested, even when they do not want to be. I suspect Anglicans suffer the malarial type because modern Anglicanism can look so much like Catholicism. In some forms (but not others) it looks and feels and sounds Catholic, and it lets you feel Catholic even when you aren’t. It is Catholicism lite.
It is the style, I know, for converts to say how much they loved their old churches and how much they learned from them. I am sure this is true for me, but I feel now, three months after becoming a Catholic, that Anglicanism’s main effect upon my life was to help me avoid becoming a Catholic. Anglicanism allowed me to suffer Roman fever without seeking the obvious cure.
Someone who knows more about converts will have to decide how many people suffer this form of Roman fever. My story, which is that of many other Anglicans I know, is a different story than many converts tell.
These converts were dragged into the Church with their arms flailing and their heels dug in. I walked quite happily at the edge of the Church, occasionally looking in a door or window but telling myself that being outside was as good—and in some ways rather better—than being inside. My Roman fever was of course a good thing: It reminded me that I was not where I ought to be. But it was also a bad thing in that I knew I had only to wait it out and then I could go back to my life without having to change. And in a perverse sort of way, which I can’t explain, the fact that I felt it made me feel that I didn’t have to do anything else.
The Anglican who suffers from Roman fever does not struggle with the Catholic claims like his Evangelical brethren do. While the Evangelical finds the path to Rome covered with stumbling blocks, the Anglican finds it smooth. He will often think (I certainly did) that the Evangelical is stumbling over pebbles.
I knew saintly Evangelicals who were horrified by the idea of liturgical worship but also horrified by how much they liked it. They would trot out, with an urgency that betrayed a guilty conscience, all the usual arguments, mainly that such services were insincere and bound the Spirit in human forms.
I had spent enough time in Protestant churches to know that their worship was as liturgical as anyone else’s. Move the prayers in a Baptist service, and half the congregation will revolt. And not from mere conservatism, either. The prayers, they would say, are there for a reason. The service has a logic to it. There are reasons that it begins with a hymn and that the Bible readings come before the sermon.
Given this, I never understood why written liturgies upset my Evangelical friends, unless they disliked them because they were Catholic and therefore bad. I thought that the Catholic Church worshiped liturgically because people were liturgical creatures. This was not, as people say, rocket science.
Saints and Sanctity
My Evangelical friends were even more horrified by the idea of saints—not just by the idea of praying to the saints but of having anyone set off from the rest of us as a superior kind of Christian. Two very sweet little old ladies, hearing me refer to St. Paul, gently reprimand me by saying, “We’re saints too.” The only answer, which I did not make, having been taught to respect my elders, was “No, you’re not.” It struck me then—I was a barely Christianized high school student—that they were presuming to a status they did not have and had not earned.
The same Evangelicals lived on biographies of great Protestant heroes, especially missionaries. Their magazines were filled with stories of great men and women doing great things for God. If anything, they tended to hero-worship. And yet they would sometimes get quite angry to hear anyone from the past called “saint.” They gave Mary no special place in their systems, and when they did mention her, put her far down the list of Evangelical heroes, behind Hudson Taylor and Billy Graham and any Christians among the NFL’s active quarterbacks.
Nor was I bothered by the scandals Evangelicals described with horror. Having grown up in a New England college town, and having absorbed in high school what was then called humanistic Marxism, I had some sense of history, and thought it obvious that an institution as old and as big as the Catholic Church would be full of bad members and good members who made bad mistakes. When one of her critics would shriek “Galileo!” I would answer, “Yes. And . . . ?”
They thought that because certain Catholics had lied or murdered or slandered or cheated, had hated black people or women or the poor, had preached celibacy while having a mistress, or had committed some horrifying crime in the name of the Church, the Church was a sham. I found the stories yet more evidence that God works in mysterious ways. Once you admit that God has given his authority to fallen men, as the Evangelicals did, you had to expect the scandals.
What moved me was finding—among the supposed horrors sinful Catholics had committed—sign after sign of sanctity that could not be explained except as the special work of grace. There were Catholic Nazis, of course and alas, but there were also Edith Stein and Franz Jagerstaetter. Catholic businessmen cheated the poor, but Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day lived in poverty to serve them. Catholics in central Europe shot their neighbors, but the Holy Father forgave the man who shot him.
Even in high school, I always looked for these inexplicable signs of God’s grace—the saints, the ordinary godly people, the pope, the counter-cultural teaching, the wisdom, et cetera—rising above the general indifference and turpitude, like peaks above the smog. These I found in abundance in the Catholic Church. The fact that the Fall does not have the last word, when every human consideration says that it should, reassured me.
At any rate, it seemed to me that the Evangelicals were winning the argument by sleight of hand. (Liberals and secularists did this as well.) A bad Catholic is still a Catholic, and every other Catholic is stuck with him, but an Evangelical simply disowns anyone in his crowd who goes bad by claiming that he is no longer an Evangelical. (Some years later, when I got to know something of the inside of Evangelicalism, I found that they had no right pointing fingers at the Catholic Church—and I was not then even thinking of their approval of contraception and remarriage after divorce.)
As I said, none of the things that bothered my Evangelical friends bothered me. Not the Mass, not the invocation of the saints, not purgatory, not the Pope, not indulgences, not the scandals. All of them seemed to me true. I had a few questions about the pope’s universal jurisdiction, but even these were more academic than personal.
Why then, I am sure you are asking, didn’t I become a Catholic?
Why Not Catholic?
I can give four reasons, in descending order of defensibility: (1) a genuine conviction that the church in which I lived was a Catholic one, if not the fully Catholic one; (2) a feeling that I had work to do where I was; (3) the need to support my family; and (4) sloth.
I will admit to having never felt entirely convinced of the first three. I also admit that the fourth was a greater hindrance than I then realized. As a friend wrote of her family’s move to the Catholic Church, “For eight years it was just a flirtation; the last two were serious courtship.” It is embarrassing to have been a flirt and to have flirted with something as noble and dignified as the Catholic Church, but I have to confess to not having been so truly serious as I ought to have been. Now I think: How, oh how, could you have thought being an Episcopalian worth not being a Catholic, when becoming a Catholic was so easy to do?
In the end, two insights brought me over the line I had been unwilling to cross. The first was the simple realization that I had to fish or cut bait, lest (to mix metaphors) I harden my heart one too many times and never get Roman fever again. I knew that although the Catholic Church looked kindly upon her separated brethren, those brothers who knew better had no right to remain separated. This insight was, as far as I can tell, the work of the Spirit.
If the first insight pulled me into the Church, the second insight pushed me in. About eighteen months ago, I sat for several days in a conversation about divorce and remarriage with twelve Evangelicals—all learned, all biblically conservative, all holding more or less the same hermeneutic, who came to (I think) nine different and to some extent deeply opposed positions.
The decision they came to was a now-familiar appeal to a shared ideal (lifelong marriage) with a range of views on the acceptable ways to fail to reach the ideal. Most of them would have said the Bible is not clear on the question of divorce or can be read in different ways. At which point one has to ask quite what use is it, if it fails to teach clearly on this matter?
This diversity bothered me, but what bothered me more was that no one but me thought it was a problem. Here were learned and godly men who read the Bible the same way, who could not agree on what it said about a matter crucial to the Church’s life and to human happiness, but thought God had left the issue open, the sole evidence of which was that they did not agree with each other.
I thought God could not have meant us to live in such confusion and with such an effectively minimalistic doctrine—which had already grown and would grow ever more minimal as the self-identified Evangelical party broadened in theology. But this minimalism, I suddenly realized, was one of the principles of the church to which I belonged, as held by its finest servants. This, I realized, was not the Catholic Church.
“Well, duh,” some of you are thinking. I had known this for years, but only with the earnest discussion of my friends, showing that those with the highest view of the authority of Scripture could not tell you authoritatively what it said, did the insight become a reason to move.
The Deeper Reason
I do not want to give the wrong impression in explaining the seductions of Roman fever. If it kept me from becoming a Catholic when I should have, I had it in the first place because I began to love the Catholic Church. I began to love her saints and great men like the John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger; and saw that she alone fought for the things I was fighting for, like the lives of the unborn; and found in her leading minds a commitment to reason found nowhere else; and found in her also a pastoral wisdom which understood human frailty without giving up the call to sanctity; and so on, and so on.
But in the end, I began to love the Catholic Church for the Mass, because in her my Lord and God came to me. My Roman fever finally broke when I could no longer stay outside the place where God could be touched and tasted.