I was born in Montreal in 1960, on the eve of the sexual revolution. My life from the start reflected in many ways our society's overt rejection of the Christian Church as the bearer of good news. With the exception of one experience I can vaguely recall in a Sunday school class, Christian worship and meaningful references to God were absent from my childhood formation. The vows taken at my baptism were not taken to heart.

Our young family traversed the country more than once following Dad's promotion on the corporate ladder. I absorbed the market culture, unaware that there was a Lord of the economy who once said you cannot serve both God and mammon (see Matt. 6:24). With my younger brother and two younger sisters, I grew up ignorant of the great stories of the Bible and so was uninformed about my purpose for existing: to glorify and love God.

But no human heart can survive in a moral vacuum. To be sure, I lived in middle-class material abundance, and I'm grateful for growing up with more than enough food, shelter, clothing, education, vacation, sport, and recreation. But something was missing in my life, and it took some restless exploration to identify that it was the God who created me for the sake of love.

A phrase in a recent declaration of the Congregation for the Clergy describes my former spiritual condition with uncanny accuracy: "There are some, although baptized, who have never received a foundation in the faith and live in 'practical atheism'" (The Priest and the Third Christian Millennium, 1999). I was indeed a practical atheist: Hardly sophisticated enough intellectually to be a reasoned atheist, yet in my late adolescence I lived as if there were no God.

In due course, God's rightful place in my life was usurped by self as I pursued eros, mistaking it for agape; the power of money, substituting it for purpose; and popularity, as a misguided replacement for divine devotion. My high school life increasingly reflected a materialist hedonism with a philosophy informed by a combination of Playboy and Fortune magazines. The rock 'n' roll rabbis of the age helped solidify my religion with songs such as "Lookin' Out for Number One" and "All We Are Is Dust in the Wind."

In particular, the once-popular Ricky Nelson song "Garden Party" provided me with something of a moral framework as I desperately searched for meaning. The words of the chorus became a creed I painted on the wall of my bedroom: "But it's all right now; I learned my lesson well. You see, you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself."

With a robust vision of becoming rich, I entered the business faculty at the University of British Columbia when I was eighteen, following in the footsteps of my father, who had graduated there in 1960. Little did I know that God Almighty would crash into my life, crush the god of mammon, and make me far richer than I could have ever imagined.

A TERRIFYING GOSPEL

Into my adolescent passion for pleasure came some missionaries practicing a form of what John Paul II would later call the "new evangelism." They were members of the evangelical Protestant organization called Young Life, with a mission to reach youth beyond the reach of the local church. Young Life was an interdenominational fellowship of Christians with an evangelical zeal matched only by their compassion for teenagers.

Now it would be misleading to imply that my initial interest in this group was grounded in a desire to be holy. At the outset my motive for participating in the group's clubs, ski weekends, and camps could be summarized in one word: girls. But somehow the talks about Jesus that accompanied every Young Life activity, by people who offered me genuine friendship to exemplify Christ's love, began to sink in.

Gospel stories of Christ's courageous interaction with Pharisees, His tender compassion for adulterers and tax collectors, and His power to convict listeners about the absolute truth of God's kingdom startled me. This message was nothing less than terrifying! A good and loving God who sent His sinless Son to die for my sins was well and good if true; but it was hardly compatible with the religion I'd created - with myself at the center.

While traveling in Europe for half a year after high school, I had the almost eerie feeling that God was pursuing me with a holy and purifying love. In the famous words of the English poet Francis Thompson, the "Hound of Heaven" was after me. From habitual sin, my conscience was calloused to many wrong behaviors, including varied ways of cheating. But God began to prick my hardened heart.

One day on the Paris subway, I jumped the turnstile to avoid paying the fare, as I'd done many times before. Once smugly settled on my seat, I was strangely overwhelmed with guilt and suddenly convicted that I was accountable to a God who was just and holy. Why that reality confronted me on that particular subway ride, I wasn't sure, but I was convinced I was in trouble. To my horror, once off the subway I discovered two huge security guards checking for tickets before passengers left the station. I was caught red-handed and knew that God had sent me a clear message that His love couldn't be resisted indefinitely.

The pressure of God's pursuit intensified. Like a child playing hide-and-seek who could no longer stand the mounting thrill of waiting to be caught by his daddy, I finally leapt out of hiding and blurted out a prayer while on a train in Switzerland: "God, if You're there, and You have something to do with Jesus, I'm tired of running from You. I turn my whole life over to Christ!"

Nothing was the same after that. To be sure, the event took place without fanfare. No Billy Graham crusade counselor was present to offer guidance, no gathering of Christians to celebrate my new life. Yet the "gospel of life" began to have its effect on me immediately.

I could no longer use the name of the Lord in vain. Girls were no longer mere objects of pleasure to me, but rather human beings made in God's image. I was properly demoted from a self-worshipped idol to a needy creature. Like antiseptic on a fresh cut, my conversion hurt in a wonderfully healing way.

Sojourning Among the Denominations

Among the many transformations God would introduce in my life, one of the more perplexing was a new life of worship. In my confident allegiance to Jesus joined with ecclesiastical ignorance, all I knew for sure was that I should be committed to weekly worship, and that I was some kind of Protestant because I had no connection to the Catholic Church. For regular weekly worship, a small, informal community church in Vancouver seemed to fit the bill for a new eighteen-year-old Christian.

Dayspring Fellowship, as they called it, had some Mennonite roots. It offered a lively fare of Bible preaching and upbeat musical praise in the heart of Vancouver's former hippie district. The people were friendly and facilitated growth in my newfound faith.

Meanwhile, my changing lifestyle provided evidence that I really was a new creation and that "the old [had] passed away, behold, the new [had] come" (2 Cor. 5:17). The high value I'd placed on financial well-being was slowly being replaced by new appreciation for human service. I eventually switched my educational specialization from Commerce to Social Work at the University of Victoria, much to the surprise of friends and family.

My parents wondered whether I'd been brainwashed by a cult as they struggled to comprehend my religious zeal. Perhaps I was a little overbearing when I called Mum and Dad into our living room one night for my version of a Young Life meeting, complete with songs, skits performed by my young siblings, and my proclamation of the gospel. As I recall they appeared a little stunned by it all.
With a freshly completed degree in Social Work in Victoria, I sensed that the Lord was directing me toward theological education at Regent College, an interdenominational evangelical Protestant graduate school in Vancouver. I remember thinking that I needed to make up for the lost childhood years of Sunday school instruction and Christian formation. While I was there, God made it clear that the lost people of my generation wouldn't believe in Jesus "without a preacher" (Rom. 10:15), and that my life was somehow meant to fulfill this call. So I pursued a Master's degree in theology. The Lord made clear the mission to which I was called, but not the Church within which to accomplish that mission.

The move to Vancouver also provided me with a grand opportunity to pursue a friendship with Linda, a nursing student I'd met in Victoria, who was now at the nearby University of British Columbia. After much prayer and affirmation of our common love for Christ, Linda accepted a proposal of marriage in 1986. She'd grown up in a Catholic home but had lapsed from the Christian faith by the time she entered the university. Shortly before I'd met her, she'd been inspired to commit her life to Christ under the influence of evangelical Protestant friends.

After I graduated we married, and we moved back to Victoria. Then I began to preach the good news to high school youth. Looking for a spiritual home to begin our married life together, we settled in an Anglican Church with a robust emphasis upon evangelical, charismatic, and Catholic spiritual traditions. It provided me with an introduction to a sacramental and liturgical worship style that I found refreshingly contemporary.

The Anglican Church also gave me a sense of historical mooring in the turbulent seas of change in which so many Protestant denominations were being split apart at the time. The United Church of Canada was being rent asunder by its decision to ordain practicing homosexuals, a capitulation to the prevailing culture that I couldn't square with the plain reading of Holy Writ. Under the mentoring of a faithful and friendly Anglican priest, I concluded that God wanted me to serve Him within this church.

Anglican examples of intellectual rigor, missionary zeal, and social concern attracted me toward the pursuit of holy orders in this most "Catholic" of Protestant denominations. In 1998 Linda, our baby son, Neil, and I set off to the prairies for my seminary training, which culminated in another degree and my 1990 ordination in Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria.

Ordained Ministry and Mounting Anglican Anxieties

After years of pursuing our education, and enduring the mobility that it required, Linda and I found ourselves settling into a community of faith. We put down roots into the rich soil of family, neighborhood, school, and parish. Following a curacy in Parksville, we followed the growth of the parish's mission congregation in Nanoose Bay, where I cut my teeth in pastoral leadership.

Ministry there proved to be exciting, challenging, and successful. But beyond the parish, I encountered diocesan spiritual chaos, and I increasingly feared the apostasy of the national church. Small cracks of Anglican theological conflict I'd noticed in seminary were developing into abysmal chasms of moral and doctrinal incoherence.

Serving in several denominational positions provided me a national perspective on the declining institutional health of Anglicanism. With a mounting sense of anxiety, I realized that we were suffering from a spiritually cancerous malady whose symptoms were identified in part with intense debates about altering traditional sexual morality (homosexual practice being the most intense subject of debate), controversy over the unique identity of Jesus in salvation history, and furor over feminist revisions of language in hymnody and liturgy to expunge the traditional masculine references to the Godhead. The liberal regime that had dominated the institutions of the Anglican Church since John Cardinal Newman's day had given way to a new generation of leadership that displayed little in common with the faith of the historic Anglican Church.

Many bishops were the champions of these revisionist agendas, and I found myself in print battles over theological issues on a recurring basis.

Other Anglicans joined me in fearing the loss of the very essence of Christian orthodoxy (namely, its Trinitarian and Incarnational character). A national movement was founded at a seminal 1994 conference in Montreal called "Essentials." I became a diocesan and national organizer of the movement, convinced through prayer that the heart of Christianity within Canadian Anglicanism was at stake.

A 1995 Vancouver Island Diocesan conference under the "Essentials" banner drew six hundred participants who were keen to know more about the underlying meaning of the skirmishes evident to all within the Church. What became clear in this meeting was that the Anglican Church's fragmentation in post-Christendom society could be boiled down to a single, fundamental question: By what unifying authority did the Anglican Church speak in the name of Christ about the kingdom of God? It was a daunting question that had plagued the Church of England since its inception when King Henry VIII rejected papal authority, claiming that the monarch of England was the supreme ruler of the Church.

Clearly, the present Queen of England was not the infallible head of the contemporary Anglican Church.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, traditionally recognized as the leader of the Anglican Communion, was limited in his jurisdiction to the United Kingdom, and he served only as a figurehead for the rest of the Communion. The Anglican Church had diocesan bishops, but they often acted like autocrats claiming personal infallibility as they battled among themselves over faith and morals.

Even the Scriptures themselves were subject to the myriad of interpretations represented in the Protestant denominational chaos and preached by local Anglican pastors as personal opinions. Without a definitive source of authority, the Anglican Communion was in a state of anarchy.

Hope for unity appeared elusive if not impossible. Where, I frequently asked myself, was the authority to preach the truth of the gospel within Anglicanism?

I slowly realized that for all practical puposes, the answer was . . . myself.

Stumbling Romeward

For years in Nanoose I was able to enjoy the relative peace of fellowship with the ecumenical Christian community in the Parksville/Qualicum area. A few of my lay and clergy friends and I gathered monthly for an early breakfast in order to read authors who would help us both understand our post-Christian culture and direct our efforts to proclaim the gospel. Despite differences of Church tradition, we commonly struggled to live faithfully within orthodox Christianity while our denominations were shaking loose of their foundational convictions based upon Scripture and Tradition.

In this setting, a United Church minister friend regularly encouraged us to read several of the pope's encyclicals, such as Faith and Reason, The Gospel of Life, The Splendor of Truth, and That They May Be One. We also tackled Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? I often thought we were an odd sight: Protestant ministers and a couple of lay Catholics dissecting the work of John Paul II over bacon and eggs. In fact, each of the clergy in that little pastoral group owned a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and referred to it often in preparation for Sunday homilies.

The issue of joining the Catholic Church actually came up within the group on several occasions. One member, an Anglican physician, developed a spiritual friendship that eventually led him to seek instruction in the R.C.I.A. and reception into full communion. Our admiration for the celebrated Oxford "Inklings" (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers and others) led us to serious reflection on whether Lewis would have sought reception by Rome had he lived today. (This question, by the way, was answered affirmatively by Lewis' friend and biographer Walter Hooper - himself now a Catholic convert - in a 1997 Oxford lecture entitled "Is Mere Christianity Enough?")

It was really those wonderful breakfast conversations, absorbing the impressive writings of Pope John Paul II, that inspired me to open my mind and heart to the claims of the Catholic Church. I found myself reading the Holy Father and exclaiming with relief that I'd actually found a true father in God, a true bishop, and a man who boldly proclaimed the totality of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The constant and coherent witness of the Roman Catholic Church to doctrinal essentials, her relentless commitment to the sanctity of all life, and her tireless witness to the dignity of the family - all of which were sadly missing in Anglican institutional witness - were maintained and preached by the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Often when reading an encyclical I would fill with excitement that I'd found someone who believed what I did.

As I surveyed the landscape of the Protestant denominations, the fragmented remnants of a once-unified Church appeared more and more like the pluralistic post-Christian culture from which they came.

I had witnessed the Anglican Communion rapidly capitulate to societal norms with a superficial theological justification. The denomination's pension fund, for example, changed its definition of "spouse" to include common law partners of employees. Not long after, the same fund changed the definition again to include same-sex couples. Women's ordination was championed on the basis of equality and justice, but as women deacons paved the way for women priests and finally women bishops, the pillars of Scripture and Tradition were being judged patriarchal impediments to progress.

These moral issues revealed a deeper theological crisis as notorious Anglican bishops undermined the relevance and authority of everything from the Ten Commandments to the resurrection of Christ. Not only did I begin to question the dubious direction of the Anglican Communion; I began to wonder whether the entire Protestant Reformation had run out of gas. As bishops warred over theological, juridical, and moral authority in the Anglican Communion, I began to think we were in need of the very papal office we had rejected in the Reformation.

Linda, however, was much more ambivalent about the political and theological controversies within the Anglican tradition. She certainly lamented the absence of passion for defending the dignity of all life, and she admired the Catholic Church's official position. But on the local parish level, we embraced a vision of God that motivated us to missions which included a pro-life witness. Her life was nestling into a fantastic community of faith in which to raise our children, and my fears about the Anglican Church's imminent departure from Christian orthodoxy seemed far removed from her daily experience.

In other words, if I was prepared for a denominational move, she certainly wasn't. There was unquestionably a huge amount at stake: Family stability, financial commitments, denominational influence, parish vitality, continued opportunity to preach the gospel - all militated against our even thinking about leaving Anglicanism for Rome. But the thought persisted. The tension was mounting as I sought the Lord's guidance and strength to reform a denomination that I began to realize had no intention of embracing its Catholic and evangelical roots.

Searching for the Church in Oxford

When a diocesan board of education offered me a sabbatical leave in Oxford, England, I took it as a divine gift, although it came with an obligatory two years of service beyond the sabbatical. The year, I thought, would provide me a serious academic opportunity to explore the problems of contemporary Anglicanism and just perhaps offer me a way to stay within it while remaining faithful to Christ. In 1996 Linda, our three children, and I went off to the center of Anglicanism's intellectual history, the home of such luminaries as John Wesley, John Newman, and C. S. Lewis.

As a member of an evangelical hall at the university, I took advantage of the institution's breadth of courses, such as an Eastern Orthodox bishop's lectures on the early Church, a Franciscan's lectures on the development of early doctrine, and an Anglican's lectures on the Trinity. There were a number of pivotal spiritual incidents during the year. One occurred at a lecture on Anglican integration of "Scripture, Tradition and Reason" by a prolific and influential Oxford Anglican theologian.

When talking about Luther's Reform-ation solas, the speaker was asked what he made of the fact that Scripture actually teaches that one is not saved by sola fide (faith alone), but rather by works as well: "You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone" (James 2:24). The learned scholar gave no answer at all except to point out awkwardly that Luther sought to expunge what he called that "book of straw" from the canon. I was shocked by the evident intellectual inconsistency: the Protestant Reformation was founded upon an unbiblical principle?

My Protestant world was starting to crumble. From what I knew of Luther's opposition to the abuses of the medieval papacy, I concluded he would have little if anything to complain about in the Roman Catholic Church that I was beginning to know. Even if you argued that the Protestant split had been justifiable then, I began to ask myself, was the separation justifiable now?

One of my faint hopes for an "Anglican solution" when I had come to England was that the denomination might achieve doctrinal reform through a renewed commitment to the authority of the communion's Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Not only was the BCP unsurpassed in its beautiful English prose; it had served as the Anglican Church's defining liturgical and doctrinal document for nearly five centuries. But this book, long revered as the unifying core of Anglican essentials, had been effectively retired and replaced in Canada in 1985 with the Canadian Book of Alternative Services.

My hopes were dashed when I attended a Lambeth Palace worship service presided over by the Rt. Rev. George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not a single copy of the BCP was in sight. Ironically, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had compiled the prayer book in that very chapel during the English Reformation. But our contemporary worship was guided instead by a liturgy hot off the photocopier.

I soon realized that I was hoping for a living magisterial authority, something a book alone could not provide apart from a magisterial Church. I communicated with the Rt. Rev. Carey on a couple of occasions about my distress within the Communion. His reponses confirmed that he was incapable of creating Christian unity out of the chaos of Anglican diversity. Strict limitations upon his episcopal authority prevented it.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, a moral storm was brewing. The government of my Canadian province, British Columbia, was preparing a legislative change to the definition of "spouse" in order to accommodate the demands of homosexual couples. Through email I was able to sign an interfaith declaration of the historical, religious, and cultural importance of preserving the understanding of marriage as life-long, self-giving, and procreative - and therefore intrinsically heterosexual. My signature appeared in a large Vancouver newspaper ad along with leaders of evangelical Protestant, Anglican, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities.

Another religious letter appeared shortly after, however, only this one endorsed the government's proposal. All five Anglican bishops within the province of British Columbia signed it. My opposition to my own bishop was now very public, and my support for the Catholic archbishop whose named appeared with mine was evident. The time for making a decision was getting closer, but the sabbatical leave required two more years of service in the diocese, and I had to learn to live with the inner turmoil that only intensified.

The Anglican bishop of Vancouver had made a name for himself by publicly supporting homosexual advocates of "same-sex blessing ceremonies" and the ordination of practicing homosexuals within the Canadian Church. He had also published a book promoting a religious pluralism that abandoned the historic Christian doctrine of the Incarnation for the sake of peace among religions. In both cases, I simply couldn't believe that someone would renounce the faith once delivered to the saints while remaining a bishop who drew a healthy salary from the offerings of faithful Christian people.

Once I returned to Canada, then, it was inevitable that my controversy with the hierarchy would pick up where I had left off before Oxford. I knew I was on a collision course with the Anglican Church of Canada. But I continued to make my concerns about the church public. After completing the two-year obligation in my diocese, the time to make the move had come. By now Linda and I had four children, and it was no small task to envision how we would feed them once my livelihood as an Anglican priest was gone. Nevertheless, with both fear and holy hope, I began to pray for a ministry within the Catholic Church that would provide the income to survive.

God provided the perfect position, which I negotiated and prayed about in total secret. The Catholic Church in Courtenay, an hour up from Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island, offered me a position as a lay assistant and youth director. I accepted it as a match made in heaven.

Crossing the Tiber

On June 6, 1999, after preaching on the Genesis account of Abraham's call and his costly obedience, I announced to my congregation that I would be leaving the parish and the Anglican Church to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in Courtenay. My words were received like the news of a sudden death. I was so overcome with emotion that I nearly collapsed in tears over the pain that I was causing the flock Christ had given me.

These were the very people in whom I had invested a decade of my life to protect from spiritual harm, and it felt as if I were abandoning them to the false shepherds whom I had so vigorously opposed. It especially broke my heart to see an older priest who had served as my "honorary assistant" and long-time mentor now beside himself with grief. I think he cried for three days.

Nevertheless, the way ahead had clearly been marked by Christ. So I had to trust them all to the Lord's gracious care and press on in allegiance to His body on earth under the primacy of John Paul II.
Ten days later I was in my Anglican bishop's office to sign documentation that relinquished my orders (a resignation he received without protest). After some private instruction, on July 4th Linda, our two youngest children, and I were received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. A few months later, after receiving special catechetical instruction, my older boys were also received into the Church. On August first I began to minister as pastoral assistant to Fr. John Laszczyk, taking responsibility for youth and family ministry, evangelism, catechesis, and parish ecumenical relations.

Over a year now has passed now since my Catholic reception. I have a deep sense of peace about our life in the Mother Church. I've been relieved finally to find the true Church, a Church to which I can commit myself for life.

The process of Catholic reception has been similar to my conversion to Christ in my late teens. I was struck then by C. S. Lewis' assertion that Jesus' claims to divinity left only three possibilities: He had to be either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Similarly, the Catholic Church makes such bold and outlandish claims for itself that it has to be either despotic, demented, or divinely instituted.

Although I have no regrets about the move, I do have moments of grieving the loss of my previous ministry. I miss wearing the clerical clothing that identified me in public as a man of the Church and facilitated marvelous introductions for Christian witness. In my Anglican years I not only preached and presided at worship in my own parish; I also received occasional speaking and preaching engagements across the country. These days, I only make the announcements at one of our weekly Masses. I've lost income and found it necessary to secure a supplemental part-time position as a hospital chaplain. Many friends and colleagues in the Anglican Church, feeling betrayed, never call any more.

All these losses hurt. But the pain doesn't compare to the deep joy that comes from being in communion with the one holy, Catholic and apostolic Church. In the words of St. Paul, "whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ" (Phil. 3:7).