Can you explain it?"

“Yes, Judith, I think I can,” Edmund replied. “You see, Father McE. and myself have much in common. We are both cradle Catholics who have taken the certainties of our religion for granted. Moreover, he is a Jesuit priest and I am Jesuit-educated. The Jesuit system tried to rationalize these certainties in an attempt to drive them home. This, I think, was fair enough as far as it went, but I rather doubt if it went the whole way. It tended to reduce certainty to its intellectual formulation. In your notes I seem to remember that McEnery equated ‘believe-belove.’ It is true, but I do not think that it is typically Jesuit. The emphasis tended to be that ‘to believe equals to act’. Our actions, consequently, became very closely linked to our certainties.

“That is perhaps why you, as a convert, can have little idea of the impact it made on people like McEnery and myself to have all our certainties questioned – and questioned, if not exactly by the Church, at least in the Church. The moment they were even allowed to be questioned, they ceased to be certain. And this all along the line: it was certainty itself which had become doubtful. There could no longer be certainty between truth and error, between good and bad. And our actions, so closely wedded to our beliefs, lost all sense of direction. There was no longer any purpose in anything; nothing seemed worthwhile.

“I express myself badly, but do you follow me?”

Bryan Houghton, Judith’s Marriage