 Catholic: Kiran Newman
Kiran Newman is a PhD student at Sydney Uni, writing a thesis entitled "Nova est Vetera". It will explore theology as a motivation behind scientific novelty in the 12th century.
Kiran is a regular parishioner of Maternal Heart of Mary Chapel, Lewisham after attending WYD in Köln, this will be his second WYD.
As with falling in love, there are as many reasons for converting, or perhaps many times as many as there are people doing so, and no one person’s reasons are going to fit another perfectly. I can not hope to cover them all. All I can do is to provide some of my own reasons for entering the Church and some of the difficulties I encountered, in the hope that it helps someone else.
I entered the Church in December 2003, but I made the decision to convert almost a year before. I had been baptized as an adult in the Anglican Communion, in 2002, after a long period of searching during which I had been a Hindu, an atheist, and an agnostic.
Christianity gave me what I had been looking for: a reason why I existed, a community, and most important of all, a way of looking at the world that was integral and sensible.
But there were a number of things that were incomplete in the Anglican Communion, or otherwise out of place. Anglicans believe, for instance that you are free to believe that the Body and Blood of Jesus become present at Mass, and that there is a Church which he also left behind. I accepted this, because it made sense to me that God, having visited this earth, was always going to leave us with an enduring presence. On the other hand, these are in no sense requisite elements of the faith, according to the Anglicans.
But for me, if God had indeed come to the earth, left us himself as flesh, and established a Church, it was by far the most stupendous truth on earth, something for which kingdoms could be sacrificed. There were other problems too, which the Anglican Communion struggles with to this day – the lack of a clear principle of authority which can decide on doctrine, and the consequent lack of clear moral teaching, a crucial lack if one takes the view that God took flesh to enable us to live a certain type of life.
All of this contributed to an unease about the Anglican Communion, but didn’t add up to a reason for being Catholic.
That was provided when I encountered Catholics. I was by no means convinced (to begin with) of everything Catholics believed, but I was convinced that this belief could and did produce a change in the way people lived. I also felt (and hence the analogy with falling in love) that, for the first time in my life, I belonged and didn’t want to be somewhere else, even if my questions couldn’t all be answered right now.
And in the end, that was why I converted, not to the God of the Philosophers who could debate me to the ground, but to the God of Israel, who came on earth as man, before whom St. Thomas fell to the ground, who told Augustine to pick up and read, belief in whom sustained Boethius in his prison, Becket in exile, and Thomas Aquinas in his theology, the God behind Campion’s audacity and Chesterton’s paradoxes, “My Lord and my God!”.
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