With his loathing of sectarianism and his convictions that the culture and faith of a people should be intertwined, he was drawn to the Church of England, but recognized, of course, that that body had an unsatisfactory mixture of Protestantism and Catholicism in its character and observances, being, from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church at least, not Catholic at all.
Eliot’s solution was to align himself with the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England which believed that that Church was part of the universal Catholic Church from which it had been regrettably separated at the Reformation (while still retaining valid orders and sacraments – a view rejected, of course, by Rome) and to which it was aspiring to return in full Catholic communion.
So, a combination of several negative elements led Eliot in this decade (1915-25) to focus his attention, increasingly, on the Catholic faith, in its Anglican form: there was his intensifying personal suffering in a failing marriage, a sense of cultural dissolution in the Great War, the failure to find consolation in philosophy and wide reading in such as the eastern religions, and a long-standing disillusionment with Unitarianism and Protestantism in all its varieties (either as lacking doctrinal and cultural substance or relying too heavily on individual perceptions of the divine at the expense of the teachings of centuries of learning and tradition).