Have there ever been cases of a higher-up in a religious hierarchy converting to another religion/irreligion? I’m talking in terms of Bishops and the like. I’m reasonably sure I can remember a Bishop converting from one form of Christianity to another, but I haven’t heard of anyone changing religions entirely.
http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2002/0212clas.asp
Chief Rabbi of Rome Israel Zolli converted to Catholicism in 1945.
The Bishop you are thinking of is probably John Henry Newman, Anglican to Catholic, in the late 1800’s.
Newman was never a bishop. He was an Anglican minister who subsequently converted to Catholicism, was ordained a priest and later made a cardinal.
There was, of course, Archbishop Cranmer, but that might not be the sort of thing you’re thinking about.
How do you figure Cranmer fits into this (unless you count his brief recantation under torture just before being martyred)?
He’s not a cleric, but Francis Beckwith, formerly the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, recently announced his return to the Catholicm of his youth: link to interview
Even better(?), Sabbatai Zevi was a rabbi who founded a Jewish religious movement, proclaimed himself the Jewish Messiah, then converted to Islam.
He started out Catholic, took the English Church out of Catholicism/union with the Pope under Henry VIII (1 change), reformed it in a Lutheran direction under Edward VI (2 changes), recanted his earlier opinions after he was arrested (3 changes, and I’m not sure he was tortured in prison), and then recanted his recantation when he was taken out to publicly renounce his Protestantism (4 changes, and that led to his execution).
I don’t think that would really count. Not only was Sabbatai Zevi a heretic by Jewish standards even before his conversion to Islam, that conversion was under duress.
Whoops!
Well, there’s the whole Visigoth court of Spain converting to Catholicism as a result of the Council of Toledo - basically they’d been a different Christian church of their own until then.
But that gets into the question of what is meant by conversion. The classic Anglican position is that the break with Rome was a break over church governance, not over the fundamentals of the Christian faith. The Reformation was a period of re-evaluation and re-assessing how the Church should be organized, but not a renunciation of Christ, nor a fundamental switch in how He was perceived by the Church of England. Under Cranmer, the liturgy was Englished, but was still based on the older liturgies, and the three basic Creeds (Apostles, Nicene, and St. Athanasius) continued to be the bedrock statements of theology).
The Right Rev. William Herzog, the retired Episcopal Bishop of Albany, was received into the Roman Catholic Church (as a layman I believe) soon after his retirement last year.
Again, whether or not a change from Anglicanism to Catholicism counts as a “conversion” is debatable. I don’t really think it does.
The Anglicans have an interest in claiming doctrinal continuity with the church in England prior to Henry VIII. But regardless, I don’t thnk it’s really possible to say that the position that Cramner set forth in his 42 Articles wasn’t doctrinally different than the Catholic position on the same topic, or wasn’t influenced by Lutheran theology. It may have continued to rely on the three basic Creeds, but the practices and beliefs of the Church of England at that time were still significantly different than those of the Catholic Church in, say, France or Itally, and also significantly different than those of the English Church 100 years before, for instance.
Saul the Pharisaic Jew becoming Paul the Christian.
Regards,
Shodan
You can argue this at whatever length you like. The point is that on day X Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of England, the chief leader of the Church of England in communion with the Pope, and on day Y Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of England, the chief leader of the Church of England, which by the Act of Supremacy was no longer in communion with the Pope.
Typically, a “conversion” consists in somebody quitting some group, going somewhere else and joining them. It does not consist in keeping the same ecclesiastical job in ministry to the same people while other people get into arguments.
By the way, Skammer, Bp. Herzog’s given name is Daniel. He was for several years prior to his election as Bishop rector of Christ Church, Morristown, and a personal friend of my wife and me. I haven’t talked to him in years, however.
No mention of the “conversion” of the Emperor Constantine in the 4th c. CE? Wasn’t Constantine as Emperor the official head of the Roman pagan religion in some way?
I know it’s debatable what Constantine’s personal views were on pagan religion even before his “conversion”, but I think this might fit the OP’s criteria.
Thanks for the correction Poly. I couldn’t remember his first name, so I googled “Bishop Herzog” and the first link was this article in The Living Church, which incorrectly refers to him as William.
I guess it’s relevent to this discussion that the article points out that Bp Herzog is one of four retired Bishops to leave the Episcopal Church this year - the others being Andrew Fairfield of North Dakota (joined the Church of Uganda); William Cox of Oklahoma (Church of the Province of the Southern Cone); and David Bena of Albany (Church of Nigeria). Of course these three are all still Anglican and so are even further from “conversion” than Bishop Herzog’s joining the RCC.
While Paul got in on the ground floor of Christianity and made it big, I don’t think anyone could claim that Saul was a major figure in Judaism.