Unam, Sanctam, Catholicam

‘It is useless for me to try to minimise the fact that for one in my position it would have been much easier in some ways to die that to have changed my allegiance. Change my Faith I could not, for Catholic in desire I have always been; what was given me [in Anglicanism] was a vitally different conception of the Divinely constituted authority of the Church… I had no choice, but to do what was obviously right.
 
[I]t is a personal spiritual experience, and I can only say that on February 18th [1913], the whole position became clear to me; and I was profoundly convinced that the Divine authority and unity of the Catholic Church were to be found nowhere else but in union with the Holy See. In Bishop Gore’s own words, I was thrown back “upon the strictly Papal basis of authority,” and I realised with a clearness that will never leave me what the words Unam, Sanctam, Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam really meant’.  

Abbot Aelred Carlyle OSB, 1874-1955
founder and Abbot of the Anglican Benedictines at Caldey, 1895-1912
received into the Catholic Church 1913 and Abbot of Caldey, 1912-1921
from The Benedictines of Caldey, 1940, by Peter F. Anson, 1889-1975