It was 1996. I’d been in a parish for about five years and I was looking to move. But nothing seemed quite right. And then it became clear to me that the problem wasn’t the parishes but, actually, that I was in the wrong place. I couldn’t be both an Anglican and a Catholic. I needed to commit myself to one thing or the other.
It was about the time of the whole ruckus about the ordination of women. That wasn’t really the problem for me, but it did make it harder to be both. Because if you persuade yourself, as Anglo-Catholics do, that the Church of England is a bit of the Catholic Church that has somehow, historically, become detached, and then that bit of the Church does something radically different from the rest, it’s much harder to maintain that image. You end up thinking, “Maybe it isn’t part of it. Maybe it is just a completely separate institution that’s doing something totally different.”