When he was preparing for ordination as an Anglican priest in London in the late 1950s, Geoffrey Jarrett used to sneak into Westminster Cathedral on Saturday mornings to attend a Catholic Mass.
“Years and years later,” he mused to The Catholic Weekly – speaking as the emeritus bishop of Lismore, in northern New South Wales – “I found myself at Westminster Cathedral invited to celebrate a pontifical Mass on a Sunday morning.
“I was there in the pulpit, preaching, and my eye turned to the third seat from the back where, as a 19 or 20-year-old, I had sat there wondering about all of this, and here I was celebrating Mass on that same high altar and preaching with a mitre on my head.
My goodness…”
Bishop Jarrett is far from being the only Anglican priest who ended up becoming a Catholic priest.
He entered the Catholic Church in 1965 but in recent years, a flood of Anglican clergy has made the same journey.
A recent report by Professor Stephen Bullivant, of the University of Notre Dame Australia (UNDA), found that about 700 former clergy and religious of the Church of England, the Church in Wales, or the Scottish Episcopal had converted between 1992 and 2024.
This figure includes 16 former bishops in the Anglican Church and two bishops from the dissident “Continuing Anglicans.”
Not all of them have become Catholic priests. However, there were an estimated 486 ordinations of former Anglican clergy in the Catholic Church as priests and five ordinations as permanent deacons.
They formed a significant proportion of all ordinations in England and Wales in that period – about 29 per cent.
“The sheer scale was a slight surprise,” Professor Bullivant told The Catholic Weekly in an email.
“I knew that hundreds of Anglican clergy and religious had become Catholics since the early 1990s, but I don’t think I’d have guessed it would be quite so many.
“I suppose the biggest surprise, for me as well as everyone else (including both bishops and ‘convert clergy’ themselves), is how large a proportion they are of all priestly ordinations in England and Wales.
“A third! Imagine if they weren’t there?”
The report, “Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain” found that in any given year about 11 Anglican priests enter the Catholic Church and the same number are ordained as Catholic priests.
But there were two huge spikes in the three decades covered by Bullivant’s research –around 1992, when the Anglican Church allowed women to be ordained as priests, and around 2009, when Pope Benedict XVI established Anglican ordinariates which are in full communion with Rome but preserve Anglican traditions.
Could last year’s appointment of Dame Sarah Mulally as Archbishop of Canterbury trigger a similar wave of conversions? Bullivant thinks not.
“I certainly don’t foresee a third big wave on the horizon,” he said.
“Women bishops have been a fact-of-life in the Church of England for some years, and even where ‘alternative episcopal oversight’ has been arranged for those opposed, these are often still suffragan bishops (‘auxiliaries’ in Catholic terms) of overarching dioceses with women bishops.
“So I doubt this is the kind of ‘red line’ one might think it might be.”
Bishop Jarrett said that the situation is quite different in Australia, in his experience.
“Basically, there’s not a great deal of traffic from Anglicanism to Catholicism in Australia, as it is in England, largely because the Anglican Church, while certainly greatly diminished in England, is even more greatly diminished here in Australia,” he said.
“And I say that with a certain sadness, because what it means is that the total Christian witness in Australia is diminished when the once great Anglican Church in this country, which had so much more influence than the Catholic Church and accounted for pretty well half or more than half of Australian Christians has now just diminished.
“It diminishes the whole Christian witness in our country.”
For him, the fading of High Church Anglicanism is a melancholy story.
“I grew up as an Anglo-Catholic in Australia. I had strong connections through my theological education in England and my ordination as an Anglican priest with that huge movement in England of Anglo-Catholics.
“But that movement of 1833 is virtually gone. It’s dead, and precisely as [St John Henry] Newman had seen happening in the future, when once you abandon the apostolic tradition, you can only be diminished. And that diminishment has taken place stage by stage by stage across that 150 years. So there’s really nothing left.
“I can tell you about wonderful clergy that had a great influence on me when I was growing up, and really were part of the formation of my Anglican vocation,” he recalled. “They were devout and prayerful people, and they were serious about their Christian witness. But it’s all gone.”
The report was written for the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion, Ethics and Society, a joint initiative of UNDA and St Mary’s University in Twickenham, London.
It was commissioned by the Barnabas Society, a group which supports Anglican clergy who have “crossed the Tiber.”
“It really is worth stressing the significant sacrifices that convert clergy face; it usually is a case of ‘casting off your nets’ (i.e., one’s means of earning a living) and following where they’ve become convinced Christ is leading them,” said Bullivant.
“That’s hard enough to do as a single person; all the harder with a wife and kids (or indeed, a husband and kids – it’s important to remember that there are female Anglican priests and deacons who convert to Catholicism, too), especially when the family home is tied to the church. At a purely practical level, it’s a huge step into the unknown.”
The report does show the powerful gravitational pull of the Catholic Church on Anglicans in the High Church tradition, but its message is by no means triumphalist.
As Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, writes in a preface to the report, conversion for Anglicans is more like a homecoming than a divorce.
It is “not so much a turning away or rejection of their rich and precious Anglican heritage but an experience of an imperative to move into the full visible communion of the Catholic Church, in union with the See of Peter. “