CT: Is it a little bittersweet too - you must feel a little sad to have left the Church of England? Or is it more a sense of happiness in joining the Catholic Church?
Dr Ashenden: It's quite complex because it's a bit like the breakdown of a relationship. I've been a member of the Church of England since I was baptised. I was confirmed in Canterbury Cathedral and ordained in Southwark. I've loved it and worked for Jesus within it for the whole of my life.
But over the last 10 to 15 years the Church has changed itself, and it's been this change in the Church of England that is difficult. I've heard other people say this but it's also true of me: it's not that I have left the Church of England but the Church of England has left me.
And there was a period when one could believe the same things as other Christians, such as Catholic, and still be within the Church of England, but as the Church of England has moved, so it's left those of us who have taken our inspiration from the Catholic Church bereft and ultimately forced to choose, either to change directions ourselves and go with the Church of England in its more secular direction or as I've done - and many others have done too - and formally ask to be reconciled to the Catholic Church.
CT: When you cast your mind back to when you were a young man training for ordination, could you ever have imagined a day like this? Has it come as a shock to you how the Church of England has progressed?
Dr Ashenden: That's a very difficult question. When I was training, I spent some time at a Greek Orthodox monastery and I was enthralled to see how rich the Christian tradition was. I think what I really liked about the Church of England and welcomed in those days was that it really was inclusive in a very real sense and part of my difficulty is that the secular culture that has developed very fast in the last 30 or 40 years has used words like 'inclusive' when actually it means exclusive.
So part of the problem is that the Church of England genuinely was inclusive in those days and it now calls itself inclusive but it's become exclusive. And this change has been really quite disorientating and distressing.
It would have been very difficult in the 1970s and 1980s to believe that a Church that was really quite so expansive and so genuinely welcome to the breadth of Christian tradition could have narrowed itself down under the influence of secularism.
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