A New Poster-boy for Catholicism? Conrad Black: Why I became a Catholic

Conrad Black: Why I became a Catholic - Holy Post:

"As a nominal Anglican, I had always had some problems with Henry VIII as a religious leader. The Anglicans, moreover, have never really decided whether they are Protestant or Catholic, only that they “don’t Pope,” though even that wavers from time to time. Luther, though formidable and righteous, was less appealing to me than both the worldly Romans, tinged with rascality though they were, and the leading papist zealots of the Counter-Reformation.

The serious followers of Calvin, Dr Knox and Wesley were, to me, too puritanical, but also too barricaded into ethnic and cultural fastnesses, too much the antithesis of universalism and of the often flawed, yet grand, Roman effort to reconcile the spiritual and the material without corrupting the first and squandering the second. Fanatics are very tiresome, and usually enjoy the fate of Haman in the book of Esther; of Savonarola, Robespierre, Trotsky, Goebbels, and Guevara...

...Though there are many moments of scepticism as matters arise, and the dark nights of the soul that seem to assail almost everyone visit me too, I have never had anything remotely resembling a lapse, nor a sense of forsakenness, even when I was unjustly indicted, convicted, and imprisoned, in a country I formerly much admired."