A great convert and Catholic author

Rev. Fr. Owen Francis Dudley

Born in 1882.

Became Anglican minister in 1911.

Received into the Catholic Church in 1915.

Ordained a priest in 1917.

Chaplain of British Army.

Saw service on the French and Italian fronts and was wounded.

Active in Catholic Missionary Society after that war.

Elected Superior of the Catholic Missionary Society 1933.

World Lecturer. Novelist.

Died 8 December 1952

In his own words

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.

The time came when I decided to become a Church of England clergyman. For this purpose I entered an Anglican theological college. And there I must confess I began to get somewhat muddled; for I could not find out what I should have to teach when I became an Anglican clergyman. Even to my youthful mind it became abundantly clear that my various tutors were contradicting each other on vital matters of Christian doctrine. My own fellow students were perpetually arguing on most fundamental points of religion. I finally emerged from that theological college feeling somewhat like an addled egg, and only dimly realizing that the Church of England had given me no theology. I appreciated later that it had no system of theology to give. It was during that period at college that I first of all went out to Rome, on a holiday. And while there I managed to see no less a person than the Pope of Rome himself. It was Pope Pius X — being borne into St. Peter’s on the "sedia gestatoria". He passed quite close to where I was standing, and I could see his face very clearly. It was the face of a saint. I could only suppose that somehow he had managed to keep good in spite of being the Pope of Rome. That incident left a deeper impression on my mind than I was aware of at the time. I kept a diary of all that I saw in Rome, and wrote in it: "I can quite imagine a susceptible young man being carried away by all this, and wanting to become a Roman Catholic." I myself was safe from the lure of popery, of course. [Pope Pius X has, of course, since been canonized.]

As a full-fledged Anglican clergyman I first of all worked in a country parish. At the end of a year, however, my vicar and I came to the conclusion that it would be wiser to part company; for we were disagreed as to what the Christian religion was.

I then went to a parish in the East End of London, down among the costermongers, hop pickers, and dock laborers. I went down there full of zeal, determined to set the Thames on fire. I very soon discovered, though, that the vast mass of East Enders had no interest at all in the religion that I professed. Out of the six thousand or so in the parish not more than one or two hundred even came near the church. Our hoppers’ socials in the Parish Hall were well patronized, however. Great nights, and a thrilling din of barrel organ, dancing, and singing. I found the Donkey Row hoppers immensely lovable and affectionate. We had wonderful days with them each September in the hop-fields of Kent. It was social work. The mass of them we could not even touch with religion. I grew somewhat "extreme" in this parish under the influence of my vicar, to whom at first I was too "Protestant." I remember he disliked the hat I arrived in — a round, flat one. The vicarage dog ate the hat, and I bought a more "priestly" one.

For a year or two things went fairly smoothly and I suffered from no qualms about the Anglican religion. How far I sincerely believed that I was a "Catholic" during that period I find it difficult to estimate now. Sufficiently at any rate to argue heatedly with Low Church and "modernist" clergy in defense of my claim. And sufficiently to be thoroughly annoyed with a Roman Catholic lady who, whenever we met, told me she was praying for my conversion to the "True Church," and a Franciscan friar in the hop-fields who told me the same. I felt like telling them they could pray until they were black in the face. I remember, too, that whenever I met a Roman Catholic priest I experienced a sense of inferiority and a vague feeling of not quite being the real thing, or at least of there being an indefinable but marked difference between us. It was when I could no longer avoid certain unpleasant facts with which I was confronted in my work as an Anglican clergyman that the first uneasiness came. One day I was in the house of a certain dock laborer who lived exactly opposite our church but never darkened its doors. I chose the occasion to ask him why not? His reply flattened me out; it was to the effect that he could see no valid reason for believing what I taught in preference to what the "Low Church bloke down the road" taught. I could not give a satisfactory answer to his challenge. I don’t suppose he believed in either of us really; but he had placed me in a quandary. We were both Anglican clergymen, and we were both flatly contradicting each other from our respective pulpits.

It set a question simmering in my mind: "Why should ANYBODY believe what I taught?" And a further question: "What authority had I for what I was teaching?" I began, for the first time with real anxiety, to examine the Anglican Church. And with that examination I found I could no longer blind myself to certain patent facts, which hitherto I had brushed aside.

The Established Church was a church of contradictions, of parties, each of which had an equal claim to represent it, and all of which were destructive of its general claim to be part of the Church of Christ — directly one affirmed its unity. As far as authority was concerned, it was possible to believe anything or nothing without ecclesiastical interference. You could be an extreme "Anglo-Catholic" and hold all the doctrines of the Catholic Church except the inconvenient ones like papal infallibility; you could be an extreme modernist and deny (while retaining Christian terms ) all the doctrines of the Christian religion. No bishop said yes or no imperatively to any party. The bishops were as divided as the parties. For practical purposes, if bishops did interfere, they were ignored, even by their own clergy. If the Holy Ghost, as claimed, was with the Church of England then logically the Holy Ghost was the author of contradictions: for each party claimed His guidance.

To be continued