Becoming Catholic at Oxford

Christine Niles tells of her student days at Oxford:

I would often cycle past St. Aloysius Church, home of the Oxford Oratory, my bicycle groaning past its yellow stone façade, never knowing or understanding what took place on the High Altar within: that the Lord of heaven and earth, the One for Whom I was created to know, love, and serve in this life in order to share in His eternal happiness in the next, was daily called down from heaven by the priest to hide Himself in the form of a piece of bread, so that – in what St. Catherine of Siena called the “love unto madness” – He might unite Himself to us body and soul. 

It would be several years before I would acknowledge this stupendous truth about the Catholic Faith, the central point, one could say, distinguishing Catholic from Protestant.

Hilaire Belloc was among the first historians to challenge the assumption – taught as fact to schoolchildren everywhere – that the English Reformation was a noble protest based on the desire to protect theological purity. It was, he argued, much more a land grab driven by a king whose coffers were empty from war, and who purchased the loyalty of powerful patrons by offering them titles and newly seized Church lands. (Read more.)

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