Until his recent conversion to Anglicanism, the broadcaster and author Michael Coren was one of Canada\u2019s best known Catholics. He has a Catholic wife and four Catholic children and is the author of books that include \u201cWhy Catholics Are Right.\u201d\u009d 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\u201d\u02dcs Joseph Brean, he was driven to Protestantism by a growing sense of hypocrisy….<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
A: Yes, of course, otherwise, logically, why would I have bothered? \u201d\u00a6 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\u2019ve never wavered. I was received into the Catholic Church in 1985 when I was 26. I\u2019d 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\u2019d achieved quite a bit early. I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n