G.K. Chesterton, Candidate for Sainthood?

Gilbert Keith Chesterton died on June 14, 1936. William Oddie argues that GKC should be the next Englishman canonized a saint--as in this article from the Catholic Herald:

The obvious objection to this is that Chesterton was nothing like our idea of how a saint should look or behave. He was greatly given to the pleasures of the table; he was enormously, sometimes riotously funny; he was the opposite of Newman in so many respects (though Newman also had a brilliant sense of humour). The late Cardinal Emmet Carter described him on the 50th anniversary of his death as one of those “holy lay persons” who “have exercised a truly prophetic role within the Church and the world”, but he did not then believe that it would be possible to introduce a Cause for his ultimate canonisation, since he did “not think that we are sufficiently emancipated from certain concepts of sanctity” – though later he change his mind.

The distinguished historian J J Scarisbrick, however, thought that his sanctity was so clear that the opening of his Cause should indeed be seriously contemplated. “We all know,” he responded, “that he was an enormously good man as well as an enormous one. My point is that he was more than that. There was a special integrity and blamelessness about him, a special devotion to the good and to justice … Above all, there was that breathtaking, intuitive (almost angelic) possession of the Truth and awareness of the supernatural which only a truly holy person can enjoy. This was the gift of heroic intelligence and understanding – and of heroic prophecy. He was a giant, spiritually as well as physically. Has there ever been anyone quite like him in Catholic history?”

In the conclusion of this article, he mentions a book titled The Holiness of G.K. Chesterton. It is available in the USA now. In 2009 The Chesterton Society of the UK presented the conference of the same title from which the book was drawn, and William Oddie gave a presentation on the topic in which he introduced some guidance for discussing Chesterton's sanctity:

To begin at the beginning, how do we know a saint when we see one? Is there a checklist, that we can tick off? John Henry Newman once expressed his dislike of hagiographies which in his words ‘chop up a Saint into chapters of faith, hope and charity’. The danger, he thought, was the creation of a notion of sanctity which was somehow bland and conformist. He pointed out that the Saints of the early church ‘rather than writing formal doctrinal treatises…write controversy’. Not only that, they ‘mix up their own persons … with the didactic or polemical works which engaged them’. Newman could almost have been writing about himself; he could also have been describing someone as yet unborn: Chesterton, you will remember denied that he was a real novelist by saying that he ‘could not be a novelist; because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked… and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women. But I could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist.’

The saints of the early church too were controversialists; but though Newman disliked their being chopped up into chapters of faith, hope and charity, they could hardly have been saints without these cardinal virtues: indeed, they became controversialists because of them.

It is this before all else that we need to understand about Chesterton. He never flaunted his personal faith in his writings. . . .

[Yet]Chesterton’s intellect was entirely suffused by his faith; his heart was filled by a hope that welled up from his unfailing gratitude for the gift of life. As for his charity, we can say that Schopenhauer was one of the very few exceptions that prove the rule: nowhere in general do we see it more clearly than in his love for his intellectual opponents. He was, as I have said, like the saints of the early Church, a controversialist. He was a controversialist because he hated heresy: but he had an extraordinary capacity for loving the heretic: he might have come to love Schopenhauer if they had actually met, as he did frequently meet Shaw and Wells: he might even have cheered him up. In controversy, no matter how fierce, as Belloc wrote after his death, “...he seemed always to be in a mood not only of comprehension for his opponent but of admiration for some quality in him.... it was this in him which made him, with other qualities, so universally beloved.”

When he died, there were of course many epitaphs. Pius XI sent a telegram describing him as a "gifted defender of the Catholic Faith". But for most of those who loved him his true epitaph was that lovely verse written years before by the poet laureate, Walter de la Mare, which by the wish of his widow Frances appeared on the service sheet at his funeral Requiem Mass; it’s a verse I love to quote; and I cannot resist the temptation to end these opening remarks by quoting it now:

Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way,
Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;
The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,
Pity and innocence his heart at rest.

England's Saints

Father Alexander Lucie-Smith writes in The Catholic Herald, "England's saints have been written out of history" (HT to Rich Leonardi!):

England was once a land of saints, but the saints of our isle have been written out of the script by Whiggish historians, which is part of a larger trend still much to the fore today to consign all religious people to the dustbin of history, branding them as part of the forces of reaction and enemies of progress. This is a deeply held but irrational belief: the idea that religion is the source of all our ills, and as such to be excluded from the public sphere, and corralled into the realm of the purely private. . . .

This is not the only mistake that secularism of the modern type assumes. Its other error is to deny the importance of our historical roots; but if we do that we lose contact with reality, for we are historical beings. Catholicism, the religion of the Pope, is the historical faith of these islands, something that Professor Dawkins should take note of; Oxford, where Dawkins teaches, is a historically Catholic university; New College, of which he is a fellow, is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Father Lucie-Smith was writing about the early saints of England like Saint Etheldreda of Ely, whose contributions to the history of England are forgotten. I find it a source of endless irony that those saints, whose relics were destroyed, whose shrines desecrated, and whose memory erased by the iconoclasm of the English Reformation often see a revival when it makes good economic sense today. Many of the Church of England Cathedrals feature reconstructed shrines and facilitate modern pilgrimages, for the sake of the price of a guided tour, a visit to the gift shop and a stop in the tea room!

But it must be the English martyrs of the Reformation era, from 1535 to 1681 that the Whig historian really wants to forget. The example of those martyrs, which I'll be featuring for the next few days, is an embarrassment to the claim that progress proceeded unimpeded, especially since the prophets of progress used medieval methods of torture and execution! These martyrs are much on my mind as I am working on a project to tell their story more systematically than I did in Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation. I couldn't write a book about that event without discussing some of them, but I want to tell more of their stories.

William Oddie on Evensong and Benediction

Having just quoted Newman's prayer from Evensong on the post about Sister Mary Christopher Luddens, I was happy to see William Oddie cite it in his Catholic Herald column:

O LORD, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work done. Then, Lord, in thy mercy, grant us safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A brief quote about that prayer:

You may retort, of course, that that’s not an Anglican prayer at all, it’s by Cardinal Newman, and that therefore I can’t claim that as part of the Anglican patrimony the ordinariate is bringing over the Tiber! Well, sorry, but it is an Anglican prayer: just like some of Newman’s greatest hymns (to this day sung just as much by Anglicans as by us) it was written not only when Newman was an Anglican, but also at a time when he was still quite clear in his mind that he could never become a Catholic. Its origins are in the splendidly oratorical final paragraph of a sermon he preached as vicar of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford (they don’t preach sermons like this any more):

But for us, let us glory in what they disown; let us beg of our Divine Lord to take to Him His great power, and manifest Himself more and more, and reign both in our hearts and in the world. Let us beg of Him to stand by us in trouble, and guide us on our dangerous way. May He, as of old, choose “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty”. May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!

Earlier in the article he reminds us of the sources Thomas Cranmer used to compile the Book of Common Prayer:

What the Pope, God bless him, has actually done is to re-appropriate a liturgy whose origins were in the first place entirely Catholic. As the Anglo-Catholic liturgist and divine Percy Dearmer (a friend of G K Chesterton) pointed out, the first Anglican Prayer Book “was not created in a vacuum, but derives from several sources. First and foremost was the Sarum Rite, or the Latin liturgy developed in Salisbury in the 13th century, and widely used in England. Two other influences were a reformed Roman Breviary of the Spanish Cardinal Quiñones, and a book on doctrine and liturgy by Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne.”

The Eucharistic liturgy which emerged was, of course, entirely defective from a Catholic point of view, simply invalid, and deliberately so: it was made brutally clear that this was not the sacrifice of the Mass. But Cardinal Quiñones’s attempt at streamlining the Breviary was adopted virtually in its totality. The Morning Office – a conflation of Lauds and Matins, and the Evening Office, and Evensong – a conflation of Vespers and Compline (thus containing both the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, both of course in wonderful Tudor English) – were thus irreproachably Catholic in their origins and content.