All of the foregoing was written during 1984, and the book was first published in that year.

At the Easter Vigil in 1985, I was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

A note of explanation may assist readers who might well ask what prompted such a move, when throughout the text of the book I have spoken of “the apostolic churches” in an undifferentiated way, assuming under that heading Rome, Anglicanism, and Orthodoxy—the churches, in other words, which claim an unbroken lineage of bishops stemming from the apostles.

It would strike a partisan note which I have no wish to strike here if I were to embark on a detailed account of the steps which took me from Canterbury to Rome. Perhaps the simplest way of putting the matter would be to say that it is the same old story which one finds in Newman, Knox, Chesterton, and all others who have made this move. The question, What is the Church? becomes, finally, intractable; and one finds oneself unable to offer any very telling reasons why the phrase “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,” which we all say in the Creed, is to be understood in any way other than the way in which it was understood for 1500 years. I am sharply aware of the fissure between the Latin and Orthodox churches in this matter, and on this point I must dodge behind a manifestly flimsy shield, namely, that I, as a solitary layman, cannot untangle what these churches have been unable, for 1000 years, to untangle. I am a Western Christian, for good or ill. But I have no quarrel—no quarrel at all—with anyone who will own the name “Christian” with all that that noble name has meant since the Day of Pentecost.

Yes—I believe that the Roman Catholic Church is the Ancient Church. I accept its claims. I believe that here one finds the fullness (“catholicity”) of the Faith. Hence, I mourn the splintering in Christendom. I pray daily for the reunion of Christ’s Church.

Thomas Howard
Beverly Farms, Mass.
April 1988