Fitch came upon Robert Persons's "The first booke of the Christian exercise, appertayning to Resolution", an important devotional work of the time, and decided to convert to Catholicism, then illegal in England. He went to study at the English Catholic college at Douai in Belgium, a major centre for English Recusants, or Catholics in exile, during the Elizabethan period. He entered the Capuchin order as a Friar in 1587 and was given the religious name of Benoît de Canfeld, "Benoît" the French form of Benedict, but in English he used the older form, Benet.