Until his recent conversion to Anglicanism, the broadcaster and author Michael Coren was one of Canada’s best known Catholics. He has a Catholic wife and four Catholic children and is the author of books that include “Why Catholics Are Right.” So when he was formally welcomed into an Anglican congregation in Toronto the other day, after worshipping with them privately for a year, the news caused a stir in the Catholic world. False rumours were circulated about his motives. Old scandals from a career in punditry were dredged up. The uproar cost him several speeches to conservative American Catholic groups, and his regular column in the Catholic Register was pulled. As he tells the National Post”˜s Joseph Brean, he was driven to Protestantism by a growing sense of hypocrisy….
Q: You say Anglicanism is similar to Catholicism, with many shared beliefs, but the split between the Vatican and the Church of England is longstanding, deep and wide. How did you come to cross it?
A: Yes, of course, otherwise, logically, why would I have bothered? ”¦ My father was Jewish, I was raised in a very secular home, sort of semi-culturally Jewish, but no religion. I became a Christian in 1984 and I’ve never wavered. I was received into the Catholic Church in 1985 when I was 26. I’d been interested in Christianity since I was a teenager, actually, and I think I just kept on crawling further and further. It was sort of two feet forward and one foot back the whole time. There was a certain inevitability about it. There was no bunker experience, there were no bullets flying over my head. I think I’d achieved quite a bit early. I’d always wanted to be in literary London, and have books published, and I had all that by about age 24. They were very bad books, but they were published. I was in literary London and there was a certain emptiness.
Read it all from the National Post.
I read this with a heavy heart. I do understand that we have to follow our conscience, and what Newman called the illative function means that we sometimes realise that we have moved on in our mind without having consciously made a decision. Still Coren has not been afraid to resist popular culture in the past. See, for example, his book on H. G. Wells which highlights Wells’s sinister belief in government-sponsored euthanasia centres (back in the 1930s). A book, then, that spoke to our times. Yet here is Coren saying that he could not resist the pressure of popular culture on gay marriage. The ultimate implications of gay marriage are profound, so I am surprised at his decision. I would wish for him what I would wish for myself, namely a deeper relationship with Christ, and the Holy Spirit’s gift of discernment.