Canada’s noisiest Catholic on switching to the other team.
Until his recent conversion to Anglicanism, the broadcaster and author Michael Coren was one of Canada’s bestknown Catholics. He has a Catholic wife and four Catholic children and is the author of books that include “Why Catholics Are Right.” So when he was formally welcomed into an Anglican congregation in Toronto the other day, after worshipping with them privately for a year, the news caused a stir in the Catholic world. False rumours were circulated about his motives. Old scandals from a career in punditry were dredged up. The uproar cost him several speeches to conservative American Catholic groups, and his regular column in the Catholic Register was pulled. As he tells the National Post’s Joseph Brean, he was driven to Protestantism by a growing sense of hypocrisy.
Q Some people see you as a Catholic champion against an amoral, secular world. How have they reacted?
A It’s brought out the worst in the Catholic right. If you look at some of the comments, there’s a little tinge of antiSemitism there (Coren’s father was Jewish), a lot of very sectarian hatred. The Catholic right is very frightened and very aggressive right now, because they have a pope who they no longer think is one of theirs, and so they’re feeling very defensive.
Q Even as Pope Francis is welcomed with unprecedented vigour by the popular culture?
A That’s one of the main reasons they can’t stand it. They don’t want to be accepted.
Q You say Anglicanism is similar to Catholicism, with many shared beliefs, but the split between the Vatican and the Church of England is longstanding, deep and wide. How did you come to cross it?
A Yes, of course, otherwise, logically, why would I have bothered? … My father was Jewish, I was raised in a very secular home, sort of semi-culturally Jewish, but no religion. I became a Christian in 1984 and I’ve never wavered. I was received into the Catholic Church in 1985 when I was 26. I’d been interested in Christianity since I was a teenager, actually, and I think I just kept on crawling further and further. It was sort of two feet forward and one foot back the whole time. There was a certain inevitability about it. There was no bunker experience, there were no bullets flying over my head. I think I’d achieved quite a bit early. I’d always wanted to be in literary London, and have books published, and I had all that by about age 24. They were very bad books, but they were published. I was in literary London and there was a certain emptiness.
Q Was that discovery of faith an intellectual experience? Had you read the grand old Christian apologists like G.K. Chesterton (who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism) and C.S. Lewis (Anglican)?
A I had. Actually, I sometimes think the seed was planted very young, because I remember when I was about six years old, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (by C.S. Lewis) was read to us, and I had no knowledge at all of the Christian metaphors, or more than that really, the Christian substance. It wasn’t taught in that way, but I’m sure something was set at that point.
Q You left the Catholic Church for three years in the 1990s, worshipping in various evangelical and Anglican churches. Why did you leave?
A Not really for particularly good reasons. I had written a piece about (the late) Cardinal (Aloysius) Ambrozic for Toronto Life, and that’s a very long story, and I still don’t really think I did anything wrong, but it was a very difficult time. I was being sort of personally attacked by the cardinal and his people. I quoted him saying things that were not very Christ-like, I suppose. He had called someone a name. He was a very harsh man .… I just thought I needed a closer relationship with Christ at that time. I just wanted something simpler, a relationship rather than a religion. Q What brought you back? A It was really the pull of the Eucharist. It really was that. That is a centrepiece of worship for me.
Q It is not exclusive to the Catholic Church. The same sacrament is given elsewhere.
A That’s why I’m now in the Anglican Church.
Q You say you could no longer worship with integrity as a Catholic. Why not?
A I could not remain in a church that effectively excluded gay people. That’s only one of the reasons, but for someone who had taken the Catholic position on same-sex marriage for so long, I’d never been comfortable with that, even though I suppose I was regarded as being a stalwart in that position. But I’d moved on, and I felt a hypocrite. I felt a hypocrite being part of a church that described homosexual relations as being disordered and sinful. I just couldn’t be part of it anymore. I could not do that. I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful. I felt that the circle of love had to be broadened, not reduced.
Q How did you receive Pope Francis’s famous “Who am I to judge?” comment on homosexuality?
A It’s not what it says. He was referring to one gay priest who abandoned the gay lifestyle to be celibate. Francis has also gone to the Philippines and referred to “gender theory,” which is Catholic code really for same-sex issues, and compared it to the Hitler Youth. The Catholic Church is not going to change its teaching. Believe me, the Catholic Church cannot.
Q So you left. You were not lured away.
A It’s not about superiority or inferiority. I needed to find a place for me where I could worship God, where I could be given the Eucharist, but I didn’t have to buy into some of the social and moral teaching that I had not been able to embrace for more than a year.
Q Catholics are called to be faithful and obedient, to defer to authority that goes back through the popes to Peter. Were you a good Catholic?
A I don’t think I’m a very good Christian. I try my best. It’s very hard. If you mean was I completely obedient, I certainly tried to be.
I could not remain in a church that effectively excluded gay people