(LifeSiteNews) — The former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II tells the story of how he converted from Anglicanism to the Catholic faith.
On today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show, I interviewed Gavin Ashenden to talk about his conversion from the Anglican Church to the Catholic faith and why he chose to speak out on controversial issues and forfeit his position at the Queen’s Court.
Ashenden became well-known for objecting to a Muslim reading from the Koran at an Anglican cathedral. “The problem is that because I’d been a chaplain to the Queen for 10 years, there was a certain association between me and the palace,” the former Anglican priest said. “And therefore, I did have to be fairly careful of things that I said in public. But it was put to me, and I wasn’t surprised that if I really wanted to speak out on issues as sensitive as this, then I needed to distance myself from the Queen.”
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One of the issues that drove Ashenden to the Catholic faith was “the relationship of gender to revelation and the importance of the Catholic tradition.” The consecration of women as bishops in the Anglican Church was a big problem for him. “I became more and more convinced that the only safe position was the Catholic one.”
Ashenden also realized that “Anglicanism didn’t work” because it does not have a uniform Magisterium like the Catholic Church.
He ultimately attributed his conversion to the Virgin Mary, though. “And I’d been becoming Catholic for a while, partly because I’d experienced some satanic attacks which drove me into the arms of Our Lady. I had a very good friend who was a Catholic diocesan exorcist. And in the middle of these attacks, well, I thought either I was losing my mind or I was engaging in a degree of spiritual warfare I wasn’t ready for. He said, well, you have to use the rosary.”
Ashenden was astonished by the power of the rosary, and he started to look into the Marian apparitions, especially the apparitions of Garabandal, as well as recorded Eucharistic miracles.
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“The Buenos Aires [Eucharistic] miracle, this is not a matter [of] overwriting. [The] laboratory told us that Jesus was alive and well in the Mass,” he stated.
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Ashenden’s wife had become Catholic two years before he did and she told him, “Look, the problem is when I go into an Anglican church, the Lord is not there. And when I go into a Catholic church, he’s there. So I don’t need degrees in theology to tell me I’m in the wrong place.”
The former chaplain to the Queen said that “I’ve become a Catholic because it’s a way of getting closer to Our Lord and Our Lady, the Theotokos, and … the saints and the angels. I mean, to have Padre Pio as a fellow traveler … why would you not want to be a Catholic?”
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