Catholic Herald: Having grown up as an Evangelical, how did you become a Catholic?
George Farmer: There is a long answer to this and a short answer. The short answer is, to quote Newman, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” In my education, I was steeped in history, and as I matured in my theological life, Catholicism became increasingly apparent to me.
The longer answer is that I grew up in a deeply theological home. My parents, to this day, are rigorous observers of low church Evangelicalism, and growing up, their faith was inculcated into us. In this kind of upbringing, there are lots of things that are very easy to understand, but by the age of 12 or 13, I was starting to have more questions than there were answers being provided.
One of my big questions was around the pre-Reformation Church and the apparent rejection of its theology and practice since the Apostolic period. It didn’t make sense to me that we were saying that the Church, which had spread throughout vast parts of the world, was not evangelical, didactic, polemical, active and all these things we would want it to be until 1517.
The question of how we view this part of Church history became increasingly important, alongside many others, such as the role of Church hierarchy and who spoke authoritatively on moral matters. The big issues in my family’s Evangelical Church were homosexual marriage and whether we could have female pastors. If there was no central body that could teach effectively and authoritatively on these matters, how could we answer these difficult questions?
I ended up getting to a place where Protestantism was not making sense. At St Paul’s, I would have quite animated discussions with the school Chaplain, who, as an Anglo-Catholic, often represented the Catholic position. Up until this point, I had imbued a lot of criticism of the Church without giving it a proper hearing, but I started to find that some of what this priest was saying made a lot more sense than what I was saying.
I started to read a lot, particularly Ratzinger, and then at Oxford started studying the pastric period and the mediaeval Church. After this it didn’t take me long to be convinced of Catholicism, so I went into instruction and became a Catholic through the university chaplaincy.