Newman noted that one of the problems converts had was with the reality of the Catholic Church. Most of them, like him, had had very little do to with the Catholic Church in its parish form before conversion. They had, as he had, studied a good deal, prayed a good deal, and had a good idea from the available sources of what it was they were joining. They were joining the Church founded by Christ. That was all true at the level of the ideal; in practice they found, as Newman himself did, things were somewhat different. People were often perfunctory in the performance of their religious duties, familiarity had bred if not contempt, then the sort of ‘by rote’ practice which had been an irritating part of his original church. As one Archbishop has put it, writing about the 1940s, there was:

mumbled Latin, rushed hurried gestures, half genuflections…