My Name is Lazarus, and I Live

by Rev. John Saward, M.Litt.

At the time of my reception into full communion with the Catholic Church, thirty years ago this October, I was not conscious of bringing a ‘patrimony’ with me from Anglicanism. What overwhelmed me was a feeling of gratitude to God for the gift of divine and Catholic faith, and of
relief at final inclusion within the One True Fold of Christ. The long dark night was ended: no more struggling to preach and instruct in the dim light of my own knowledge and private judgement, no more clouding of the mind by the doctrinal relativism of a man-made denomination. As Newman says of himself in the Apologia, I was liberated by no longer having to make ‘for myself a Church by an effort of thought’; when I looked at the Catholic Church, I could say, as he said, ‘This is a religion’, and in comparison ‘the poor Anglican Church’ seemed, to me as to him, ‘the veriest of nonentities’. On 10th October 1979, at Campion Hall, Oxford, when I made the profession of faith, received the Sacrament of Confirmation, and made my First Holy Communion, I felt like a pauper made rich, a prisoner set free, a dead man resurrected. What Chesterton wrote on the day of his conversion I, too, could have said, and would still say: My name is Lazarus, and I live. The sense of deliverance has never left me. My name is Lazarus, and I live.

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