Father Albion strongly advised her to go for spes conversionis, “hope of conversion,” which he described as “always popular.”

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 154.

As our wedding day approached in the summer of 1952, Anne and I were conscious of a problem. The Cliffords were Roman Catholics, one of the oldest recusant families in the country. Anne’s parents for their part never went to church except for weddings or funerals; but the head of the family, Sir Bede’s elder brother Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, seemed to have come straight out of one of the more improbable novels of Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene. (When his daughter had married a Protestant, I was told, she was never again permitted to sleep under the family roof. On their occasional visits she and her husband would eat with her parents, but as their relationship was in her father’s eyes openly adulterous they always had to return at night to the local pub.) One day Sir Bede took me aside and told me how much he loved his brother and how distressed he would be if our marriage were to provoke a split in the family. He knew he was asking a lot, but would I therefore please accept whatever was required of me with regard to the wedding arrangements? 

Naturally I agreed. I loved his daughter and wanted to marry her; it seemed a small enough price to pay; though myself rather half-heartedly C of E, I certainly had no bias against Roman Catholicism. I reassured him that I was perfectly ready to do whatever was asked. Little did I know what that would entail. First of all I was presented with a statement, written entirely in Latin, beginning “Ego, Johannes Julius Cooper, apud. . . .” with, at the bottom of the page, a footnote in English reading “Insert full postal address.” In this I undertook to accept Catholic instruction, to marry in a Catholic church according to the full Roman rite and to bring up all our children as Catholics. All this I was more than happy to do—though as it turned out I never got the instruction—and I signed without hesitation. Then it was Anne’s turn. She was given a form, similarly in Latin, to fill in stating exactly why she wanted to marry me. There were, as I remember, seven possible reasons: true love was not one of them. She could marry me for my money; she could marry me to avoid a scandal; she could marry me because I obviously represented the last chance she would ever get (necessitas); but she could not marry me for love. The local priest, Father Gordon Albion—he had a press cutting from some racing newspaper pinned to his office wall, bearing the headline father Albion—second in the novice chases—strongly advised her to go for spes conversionis, “hope of conversion,” which he described as “always popular,” so that was what she did—though I am glad to record that throughout our married life she was to make not the slightest effort to bring me to the light.