Anglican convert: Church is “pillar and ground of the truth”

With a discreet post on X (formerly Twitter) on February 14, Canon Robin Ward announced that he has been accepted into the Catholic Church. Ward, who is married with two children, was a member of the Anglican clergy (“canon” is an honorary title loosely analogous to “monsignor”) until his conversion. He cites St. John Henry Newman, recently named a Doctor of the Church, as a key influence.

Asked how he was handling the transition, he told Aleteia that he is still adjusting: “At the moment I am learning to live peacefully within the household without knocking over the furniture!”

While still perhaps finding his feet, he’s not looking back. “I have been tremendously encouraged by the kindness of so many,” he told National Catholic Register, “not least those who for many years have been praying for me, and I rejoice without regret or hesitation to find myself in this place.”

Ward is an expert in patristics and Church history who studied at Oxford and King’s College London. It was at Oxford’s St. Stephen’s House where he studied for Anglican ministry, and he later became the principal there, stepping down last year after 19 years. Ordained in 1992, he served in various parishes. His bishop made him an honorary canon of Rochester Cathedral in 2004, and he even represented his diocese in the governing body of the Church of England, the General Synod. 

St. Stephen’s House, where Ward was both student and principal, has close ties with the Oxford Movement, of which St. John Henry Newman was a key member. This movement emphasized and restored aspects of spirituality, theology, and worship that the Church of England has in common with the Catholic Church.

Ward told the Register that this Anglo-Catholicism, which he discovered while at Oxford, “captivated and inspired” him. And he ended up following the intellectual path of its most famous exponent: “‘What is the Church?’ That has been the fundamental question (as it was in 1845 for Newman),” he told Aleteia, when asked what the key to his conversion was. 

The answer to that question reached by the Oxford Movement, and which Ward also has come to see, was that the Church should be “a true sacramental body, visible and teaching the Catholic faith with authority.” At the same time, he told us, “Newman was right in discerning that in fact the Church of England does not want to see itself in that sense,” but rather defined itself “by its relationship to the political Establishment.”

“Catholicism in the end cannot be a ‘party’ or a ‘movement’ within a Church,” as the Oxford Movement was, Ward tells us. Rather, he explains, “it is the mark of the Church herself.  So to become a Catholic is to discern that ‘the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth’ is to be found in communion with the see of Peter” (see 1 Tim 3:15).

Although he was already well-acquainted with Catholicism, “crossing the Tiber” has still been a profound change. “Anglo-Catholics are odd converts, in that all sorts of Catholic practices and prayers are familiar to them and so don’t need to be learned from scratch,” he told us. “But the way in which they are lived and experienced after conversion is evidently different, as it is in full communion with the Universal Church [...].  It takes time and docility to make that reorientation.”

Some Anglican clergy who have joined the Catholic Church have become Catholic clergy. The Catholic Church doesn’t recognize the validity of Anglican ordination, and in the Latin rite, it doesn’t allow married men to be ordained to the priesthood. Consequently, Ward would need to get special permission from the Vatican and receive the sacrament of Holy Orders in the Church to continue priestly ministry.

Despite this situation, clergy conversions from the Anglican Church to the Catholic Church are not an uncommon phenomenon in recent years. More than one third of the Catholic clergy ordained in England and Wales from 1992 to 2024 have been former Anglican clergy.

For his part, Ward hasn’t decided yet whether to take that step. “The Popes have asked convert Anglicans to preserve their patrimony in the Ordinariates,” he says, referring to Benedict XVI’s provisions made in the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus. They also “have been generous in granting dispensations for married Anglican clergy to be ordained,” he explained.  “But I must see how best to discern the future with those responsible, in my own case.”

This doesn’t mean he plans to be passive or uninvolved. “It was a particular intention of mine in receiving the sacrament of Confirmation, to ask for the right disposition to live as a responsible witness in the Church,” he told us.

At a time when there is often debate or disagreement about some issues within the Catholic Church itself, he intends to live “not immured in the agitation that comes from endless online commentary,” but also “not indifferent to failings that I might be in a position to put right (beginning with my own)!”