Father Matthew Topham, priest-in-charge of St Mary’s, East Hendred in Oxfordshire, is acutely conscious of the weight of Reformation history that comes with his role.
When Henry VIII broke with Rome, East Hendred was one of only a handful of places around the country where Recusant Catholics remained stubbornly loyal to the Pope, risking death by attending Mass in a secret chapel in the local big house.
That chapel remains part of Fr Topham’s parish, somewhere he says Mass each week. Yet the 36-year-old Cambridge graduate is no die-hard cradle Catholic but rather a former Anglican curate who converted in 2023 and was then ordained. He is one of 491 Anglican vicars who, over the past 30 years, according to a new report, have “headed to Rome”.
Many of them are now fearful that, as it approaches its 500th anniversary, the Church of England’s days may be numbered given it is riven by division amid the appointment of Dame Sarah Mullaly as its first-ever female Archbishop of Canterbury and a row over same-sex blessings that has set conservatives and liberals at loggerheads.
Authored by Prof Stephen Bullivant of St Mary’s University in Twickenham, the report details how former Anglican clergy have accounted for more than a third of all Catholic ordinations in England and Wales since 1992, when the General Synod (the legislative assembly of the CoE) voted to ordain women.
That decision prompted an exodus of clerics who could not accept female priests. When the Vatican held out its hand to them and offered a special opt-out from its compulsory celibacy rule (if they were already married), the path was open to enable them to continue in ministry as Catholic priests.
Fr Topham, for his part, shares his East Hendred presbytery with his wife, Suzie, and their four children, aged from one to seven.
He insists his decision to “come over” to Rome, as it is sometimes referred to, was prompted not by an objection to women priests, but rather by the Church of England’s relegation of scripture and theology in favour of trying to mirror contemporary society. “[That] proved for me that it was not a branch of the true Church,” Fr Topham says.
Today that same tendency, critics say, is once again playing out over the divisive issue of the blessing of same-sex relationships, which was discussed at length by the Church of England’s House of Bishops (the upper house within the General Synod), at a meeting this week.
In 2023, the Anglican bishops had agreed to trial separate blessing services for same-sex couples (instead of integrating them as part of wider services). Dame Sarah, then Bishop of London, was in favour and said she would conduct such services herself, telling General Synod: “Our eyes have been opened to the harm we have done LGBT+ people.”
But opponents argued that such an arrangement made these blessings more like weddings, and pointed to Anglican teaching which remains that marriage is exclusively for a man and a woman. Dame Sarah has publicly endorsed that specific teaching, but defended separate blessing services for same-sex couples, insisting they are not akin to a wedding.
For the time being, those who have raised objections appear to have won out. After much consternation, especially in conservative, Evangelical parishes, the bishops went back on their plans in October of this year – a decision they stuck to in their recent meeting. Once again, blessings of same-sex civil partnerships and marriages must be conducted as part of a regular service, not as stand-alone events.
This U-turn has angered liberal vicars, including the broadcaster Canon Giles Fraser. He has insisted publicly that he will still go “a bit beyond in terms of what I am allowed to do” regarding separate same-sex blessing services.
With both wings of the Church in uproar, some traditionalist parishes have been talking openly about breaking their ties with Canterbury. “While the Church of England does a lot of good,” reflects the good-natured and otherwise essentially moderate Fr Topham, “it picks its own theology to suit a liberal, progressive line, and has no doctrinal authority.
“That leaves a vacuum where there is no Anglican identity. It rolls with the punches.”
Another Anglican cleric-turned-Catholic priest is 51-year-old Father Edward Tomlinson. It was 14 years ago, as vicar of St Barnabas Church in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, that he and 72 of his congregation walked out of the church on Ash Wednesday in despair at the direction the Church of England was taking. They were received as Catholics in Holy Week.
A father of three teenage children with his wife, Hayley, Fr Tomlinson was ordained as a priest shortly afterwards on Pentecost, doing his training part time over the next two years at a Catholic seminary, but largely “on the job”.
His ready-made parish group was allocated by the Catholic archdiocese of Southwark a bland, 1970s church hall in nearby Pembury, which was mostly used as a nursery.
Today, he is proudly priest-in-charge of what is now called St Anselm’s Catholic Church, with a growing congregation of 200 every Sunday, “including plenty of young families”. He has even, he says, “built in a little beauty and permanence” to the existing building.
Looking back at the Church of England, where he ministered for eight years, he laments that it is now “holed under the waterline because it is beholden to the state, and the state no longer likes Christianity”.
He has little time for Dame Sarah, the former chief nursing officer, whom he describes as “the queen of the lanyard class”, and points an accusing finger at her remarks on abortion, where she placed herself somewhere between pro-choice and pro-life positions. “It is all,” he concludes, “a frightful mess.”
On the current row on same-sex blessings, he says it is a typical example of muddled thinking in General Synod. “It votes to pay pensions to same-sex partners of clergy if they die, but Church teaching is that clergy can’t be in same-sex relationships.” (Its rule is that such couples cannot be in sexual relationships.)
The Church of England’s General Synod voted to approve a path for blessing same-sex couples in February 2023 Credit: Leon Neal/Getty
“I’m not anti-women or anti-gay,” he insists, “but you need to do the theology first and satisfy scripture and tradition. That has all been washed away in Church of England, and as far as I can see it is left with just fuzziness.”
Catholicism, though, represents for him more than just a lifeboat. Even when training to be an Anglican cleric, he recalls: “I had this gnawing doubt about the validity of the Church of England because it was run through the state and Parliament. I knew even then that I needed to be Catholic.”
Rome, he believes, represents a more enduring and unchanging approach to Christianity. He was ordained when Benedict XVI was Pope, but from 2013 until his death earlier this year, Fr Tomlinson served in a church led by Pope Francis, who took Catholicism in a different direction that was more about engaging with the world as it is.
Has that changed his mind about his new home? “Not at all.”
Fr Tomlinson confesses he was “not a fan” of the Argentinian pontiff, and speaks of the risk of liberal reformers in his new denomination “Protestantising” their Church, but pronounces himself reassured by what he has seen so far of the new Pope Leo XIV.
There is, he insists, no chance of him going back to the Church of England. But Prof Bullivant’s survey suggests that at least a handful of the 491 convert clergy he has counted have subsequently returned to Anglicanism.
Fathers Topham and Tomlinson both belong in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, established by Pope Benedict in 2011 as a protected space under his personal protection, akin to a separate religious order, where a degree of latitude has been granted to them. Its 2,000 members include both former Anglican clerics and laymen who no longer feel at home in the Church of England.
As well as the exemption for the former vicars from clerical celibacy, all members can take part in the Ordinariate’s own liturgies that bring in something of the Anglican tradition. Its priests are part of the local deanery of Catholic clerics, but their immediate boss is not the diocesan Catholic bishop. Instead it is the head of the Ordinariate, appointed by Rome.
Prof Bullivant’s survey shows that the high-profile Ordinariate has provided only a minority of the convert Anglican clergy who have become Catholic priests over the past 30 years, when compared with the much larger number of former vicars who have been ordained directly into local Catholic dioceses.
However, in the years 2015 to 2024, it has been Ordinariate priests who are in the majority, suggesting that if a new wave of vicars is about to come over as a result of Dame Sarah’s installation in January as Archbishop of Canterbury, and the ongoing same-sex marriages row, the hybrid of the Ordinariate is more likely to be their choice.
One of those vicars from the first wave of conversions in the 1990s – a time that also saw a procession of high-profile lay converts including Tory MPs John Gummer and Ann Widdecombe and The Telegraph’s own Charles Moore – believes that his generation’s motives had more to do with the pull of Catholicism than the push of disillusionment at the direction of travel of the Church of England. Now taking a backseat, he is keen not to create division and so asks to speak anonymously.
“When we were received and ordained, we had a lot of flak for being demon conservatives, putting the liturgy back to square one,” he says.
More recent arrivals, he suggests, risk bringing with them a more entrenched approach, caused by the ongoing battle that has so divided the Church of England.
“Those who came in from around 2010 to constitute the Ordinariate seem to me to be marked by the 20-plus years of internal Anglican fights and thus the polarisation of their pastoral, missionary and liturgical bearings.”
Still, he emphasises that he shares their fear for the future of the Church of England. “I’ve always thought the big divisive issue on which it will stand or fall would be gay marriage,” he says, predicting that Dame Sarah may seek to “kick the can down the road” to avoid a schism.
“The centre cannot hold, but I daresay that, after 30 years of clear-outs, the Church of England can’t afford another one. So an uneasy consensus [on same-sex marriages] has to be to some extent braced or forced.” And that will do nothing to heal the divisions."