When the Church of England's general synod voted on November 11th, 1992, to ordain women to the priesthood, the Rev Mark Elliott Smith was at St Stephen's House, Oxford, training for the ministry. He was ordained deacon in 1994, the year the first English women priests were ordained.
As the time approached for his own ordination to the priesthood, he came to realise that perhaps Rome rather than Canterbury was his spiritual home. In 1995 he was received into communion with Rome and accepted as a candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood.
But today at the age of 38 he is back in the Church of England's ministry. He returned early in 1996, was ordained priest a year later and is now curate of St Paul's, Tottenham, in north London, "a most wonderful parish where I couldn't be happier".
Nor is he the only one to have gone over and come back. Last July the synod was told there had been 38 such cases: 17 in the full-time stipendiary ministry, 12 non-stipendiary, and nine retired.
"My doubts stemmed from the realisation that I still had a real love for the church of my birth, and I also wanted to maintain a Catholic sense within that," he said. "And I just had a sense that perhaps I'd made the wrong decision."
It was an overwhelming sense of missing where he had been. "I wouldn't go so far as to say I'd made a mistake," he said. "That wouldn't be fair to either church. It was a question of continuously working out what my vocation was."
Another Anglican priest who has gone over and come back is the Rev Peter Bolton (39), priest-in-charge of the Church of the Ascension, Lower Broughton, Manchester. For him it was basically a question of loyalty. He found that in order to come into communion with Rome he had broken communion "with people who had taught me the faith, people whom I had taught the faith to, members of my own family, my friends.
"That seemed a nonsense. I had denied what they are, and I had denied what I'd been, somehow," he said. "I think, I know, I caused an awful lot of hurt."
As someone for whom it had always mattered to be able to identify himself as a Catholic Christian, he came to the conclusion that it was absolutely right "to desire to be in communion with Rome. But after the Second Vatican Council it doesn't make sense for a baptised Christian to do that in any other way than as part of an ecclesial body", in other words, through corporate reunion. "To be in communion by breaking communion is to make nonsense of communion," he commented.
Although he comes from Kent, Mr Bolton has worked in Manchester for the past 11 years. The decision to become a Roman Catholic followed soon after the ordinations of the Church of England's first women priests. But for him two separate decisions were involved: the decision to go over to Rome; and the decision whether to seek ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, something he felt "very uncertain" about.
"The whole thing was very difficult," he said. "I had to get used to the fact that I wasn't a priest, and that was much more difficult than I think I knew it would be . . . I think probably deep down I knew that God wanted me to be a priest, but I had to make two separate decisions, and I tried not to make the second decision before I made the first."
He discussed the matter with the Roman Catholic authorities, but about the same time that he began to raise the question of joining the Roman Catholic priesthood he found himself facing other questions about where he really belonged, questions that within a year were to lead him back into the Church of England.
In both cases what is clear is that the Church of England's decision to ordain women priests made many clergy on the Church's Catholic wing - 3,000 to 4,000 of the 10,000 full-time clergy - start questioning where the roots of their identity lay: whether they were basically Anglicans who understood their tradition in a Catholic sense, or basically Catholics for whom the unilateral decision by one part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church to make a change unacceptable to Rome, Constantinople and Moscow revealed where their deeper loyalties lay.
So far only some 400 clergy (there are no exact statistics) have come to this latter conclusion and gone over definitely to Rome.