Ronald Knox, born into an Anglican family in Leicestershire, England,  converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1917, four years after being ordained in the Church of England. Two years later he was ordained a Catholic priest.

He soon found his new church didn’t know quite what to do with him or other converts like him. He famously observed:

“We’re like a bird who has got into a room where there is a cocktail party. Everyone is delighted we’re there, but no one knows what to do with us.”

Not much has changed since then, or so I would have said before hearing the recent news about the Anglican Apostolic Constitution.

Just last month, in fact, the National Catholic Register offered an article titled The Convert Clergy Conundrum. Telling the story of “Tom,” a former minister — whose story is a compilation of  various Christian ministers/priests who crossed the Tiber — the article begins,

…..He pastored a church with thousands of members, managed a large budget and employed 50 people. A married man with three grown children, Tom held a master’s degree in theology and a doctorate in pastoral counseling. He was a leader within his denomination and, through it, could have advanced to the very top of a nationwide religious group. Then he left it all to become a Catholic.

He occupied the pews in the Catholic Church for two years, knowing that he needed to get used to Catholic ways before exploring how he might serve the Church. He decided to apply for the permanent diaconate. His bishop asked him to wait another year until the diaconal program started, then to start the seven-year course from the beginning. No consideration of his educational and vocational experience was recognized.

Tom soon became discouraged because the well-meaning instructors on the Catholic diaconal training course were making mistakes. He wrote to the bishop with his reason for dropping out: “I’m 60 years old. I kept trying to bite my tongue and not correct the instructor the whole time, but he was getting things wrong. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I used to teach more advanced courses than that all the time. I’ll be nearly 70 before I’m a deacon. I’d better look for other ways to serve the Church…..”

Within this context, then, the recently announced Apostolic Constitution seems to be a long-needed step in the right direction, a formal attempt to welcome converts while minimizing their culture shock and maximizing the process by which they can utilize their gifts for the good of the Catholic Church they have chosen to enter.

For more information on men and women who have traveled the path to Rome, you might look into Marcus Grodi’s TV program, The Journey Home, carried weekly by EWTN. Grodi, a former Presbyterian minister, holds half-hour conversations with his guests, conversations often intense and always knowledgable.

Not all conversions come our way, of course. In the U.S. liberal Catholics regularly become Episcopalians, at what rate, however, I do not know.

In England, though, something of a very different nature is going on, a thorough secularization of English society which is emptying Anglican churches.

I have observed this rapid secularization from near and from afar for four decades now, and just the other day ran across as piercing and sad a description as any.

The source, oddly enough is from the popular book, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox. Author Fox titles her last chapter Rites of Passage:

I’ve called this chapter Rites of Passage, rather then Religion, because religion as such is largely irrelevant to the lives of most English people nowadays, but the rituals to which Church of England vicars irreverently refer as ‘hatchings, matching and dispatchings’, and other less momentous transitions, are still important…..

…..In any case, the Church of England is the least religious church on Earth. It is notoriously woolly-minded, tolerant to a fault and amiably non-prescriptive. To put yourself down as ‘C of E’ (we prefer to use this abbreviation whenever possible, in speech as well as on forms, as the word ‘church’ sounds a bit religious, and ‘England’ might seem a bit patriotic) on a census or application form, as it is customary, does not imply any religious observance or beliefs whatsover — not even a belief in the existence of God. Alan Bennett once observed, in a speech to the Prayer Book Society, that in the Anglican Church ‘whether or not one believes in God tends to be sidestepped. It’s not quite in good taste. Someone said that the Church of England is so constituted that its members can really believe anything at all, but of course none of them do’.

I remember eavesdropping on a conversation in my GP’s waiting room. A schoolgirl of about 12 or 13 was filling in some medical form or other, with intermittent help from her mother. The daughter asked ‘Religion? What religion am I? We’re not any religion, are we?’ ‘No, we’re not,’ replied her mother, ‘Just put C of E.’ ‘What’s C of E?’ asked the daughter. ‘Church of England.’ ‘Is that a religion?’ ‘Yes, sort of. Well, no, not really — it’s just what you put.’ Like the automatic Christian funeral, ‘C of E’ is a sort of default option. A bit like the ‘neither agree nor disagree’ box on questionnaires — a kind of apathetic, fence-sitting, middling sort of religion for the spiritually ‘neutral’.

It is hard to find anyone who takes the Church of England seriously — even among its own ranks. In 1991, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, said: ‘I see it as an elderly lady, who mutters away to herself in the corner, ignored most of the time’. And this typically Eeyorish comment was in an interview immediately following his appointment to the most exalted position in this Church. If the Archbishop of Canterbury himself likens his church to an irrelevant senile old biddy, it is hardly surprising that the rest of us feel free to ignore it. Sure enough, in a sermon almost a decade later, he bemoaned the fact that ‘A tacit atheism prevails’. Well, really — what did he expect?