Roads to Rome – one fold, many gates

For some young converts the path to God is lengthy and tortuous, for others it is instinctive and quick; some travel in the company of others, others prefer one-to-one instruction from a priest. But every journey shows the excitement, variety and unexpectedness of life in the Holy Spirit.

“Becoming a Catholic is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” wrote Rose Lyddon in the first of our series of testimonies by young converts. The 10 pieces that followed, in the weeks between Easter and Pentecost, echoed this sentiment. All of them were thrilling to read, and heart-rending. More than once, in the Tablet offices, we wiped away tears as they landed in our inboxes. It wasn’t quite as we’d anticipated. When the series was mooted, we wondered whether there were enough millennial converts to make it work – and where would we find them? Only quite recently did we discover that, this Eastertide, more than 350 people were received into the Church in the Westminster diocese alone.After we had kicked off with Rose’s piece, emails began to roll in from men and women in their twenties and early thirties longing to share their road-to-Rome journeys. The series could have run and run. “Our” converts came into the fold through many different gates. One was a Marxist lapsed Muslim, who never even knew she was searching for faith: “I didn’t find God,” she writes, “I had no inkling I was looking for him.” There was a Buddhist musician lured by plainchant, and a Nigerian Pentecostalist doctor yearning to be able to share a prayer life with her Catholic husband. Some were brought up in different Christian denominations, others completely without religious faith. Cameron Garden “never thought about God at all” as a teenager, and was addicted to videogames, until his father’s sudden death when he was 17 jolted him to start searching.

For some, the process of conversion was lengthy and tortuous. Could one really buy into a faith “costing not less than everything” that might require one “to do away with the most human kinds of happiness” and to worship in hideous 1960s buildings with sparse post-pandemic congregations? And how could anyone with any feeling defend a Church mired in abuse and clericalism? Two couldn’t bear the smell of incense – “it was hate at first scent” – and many lost friends along the way. Rose Lyddon had close chums who “felt betrayed by my apparent complicity with homophobia and misogyny”. “If you had to become religious,” a friend asked Rabia Al-Shidyaq, “why on Earth did you choose the worst one?”

But for others the experience of conversion was almost instantaneous – or Damascene. Rose Lyddon, kneeling in the Oratory in Oxford, felt suddenly “able to pray for the first time in years”. At his infant daughters’ christening, Levi Roach – “brought up without any sense of spirituality” – was seized with the conviction that the girls were embarking on a voyage, and that he wanted to join them on it. “Before I knew it,” he writes, “the Holy Spirit had begun working on me … Once the spirit begins work on you, it does not abandon you.” Several expressed a sense of homecoming and embrace: “This was a Church I could join,” writes Cameron Garden, “because she had absolutely no hesitation in joining me.” Whether by straight or circuitous paths, all eventually reached a point where “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt”.

Fitting, since of the many converts named as inspirations – Dorothy Day, Edith Stein, Israel Zolli – Newman was the most popular. Newman, and C.S. Lewis – not a convert, of course, and not a Catholic, but a man who, 60 years after his death, seems still to cast enchantment over “mere Christianity”. How, practically, did the converts prepare for reception? About half took one-to-one instruction from individual priests, some of whom glowed with holiness: Edward Ramsden says of Fr Edward Corbould at Ampleforth, “I had a real sense of his representing Christ on Earth.” And about half were prepared through the RCIA (the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). At its best, this involves those moving towards reception with fellow searchers, and with lay people from their parishes. “As someone who has participated in RCIA groups for the last three and a half decades,” one parish priest told me, “I have witnessed the process of ‘conversion’ visibly at work in individual lives again and again.”

For prospective sponsors, who follow the courses with their candidates, they can inspire a great renewal of faith. Most of our contributors wondered, for a while, whether they were called to religious life – but, so far, none seems to be. Instead, they look forward to living out vocations in secular communities. Jack Nicholson will shortly start training as a neighbourhood police officer. Art Wangcharoensab, assistant music director at Brentwood Cathedral, is drawn by the sermon on the mount and the washing of the feet: “Love to the loveless shown.” “Since becoming a Catholic,” he says, “I’ve become more conscious of people who are suffering.” Of all our converts, Cameron Garden, received eight years ago, has been a Catholic longest. How does he feel about it, looking back? “The more I learn,” he writes simply, “the more I love.” This might be a refrain for the rest of the group. Whether driven more by their heads or their hearts, love is what propels them all forwards. “In the end,” writes Levi Roach, “I’m tempted to rephrase the old Beatles refrain as theological truism: to find God, all you need is love.” “When I chose to believe,” writes Rabia Al-Shidyaq, “I made a wager that love moves through the world more profoundly than power.” Can’t we keep the series going, one reader has asked. We’re tempted! It has been, another reader writes, “a reminder that the spirit is alive and active in our world”. And those of us lucky enough to work on it have been surprised by joy.