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A convert . . . must try to retrace his steps out of that shrine back
into that ultimate wilderness . . . It is a thing exceedingly
difficult to do . . . The difficulty was expressed to me by another
convert who said, "I cannot explain why I am a Catholic, because now .
. . I cannot imagine myself as anything else."
{The Catholic Church and Conversion [CCC], NY: Macmillan, 1926, p.27}
{Michael Ffinch, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1986, p.201}
he had made up his mind to be received into the Catholic Church, and
that he was only waiting for Frances [his wife] to come with him, as
she had led him into the Anglican Church out of Unitarianism.
{Ibid., p.201}
{John A. O'Brien, Giants of the Faith, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image,
1957, pp.213-214}
Chesterton saw Catholicism as the only tenable Faith bearing the (Nicene
Creed) characteristics of "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic." He detested
the fast-creeping theological liberalism of Anglicanism:
We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with
the world. We want a Church that will move the world . . . It is by
that test that history will really judge, of any Church, whether it is
the real Church or no.
{Ibid., p.277}
The fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent
must now be waged by the one fighting form of Christianity . . . I
have thought this out for myself and not in a hurry of feeling . . . I
believe it is the truth.
{Ibid., p.289}
Nothing for years has given me so much joy . . . Space and freedom:
that was what I experienced on being received; that is what I have
been most conscious of ever since. It is the exact opposite of what
the ordinary Protestant conceives to be the case . . . It is perhaps
the only act in my life, which I am quite certain I have never
regretted. Every day I live, the Church seems to me more and more
wonderful . . . the Sacraments more and more solemn and sustaining . .
. her liturgy . . . her decisions in matters of Faith and Morals more
and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right . . . There
I have found Truth and reality and everything outside Her is to me
compared with Her as dust.
"GKC" wrote in 1923 about some of the reasons for his recent conversion:
{Ibid., p.234}
The Church is a house with 100 gates; and no two men enter at exactly
the same angle . . . I accepted for a time the borderland of
Anglicanism; but only on the assumption that it could really be
Anglo-Catholicism . . . I did not start out with the idea of saving
the English Church, but of finding the Catholic Church.
{CCC, pp.30-31}
{Ibid., p.44}
{Ibid., pp.85-87}
A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism,
and not deeper and deeper into difficulties about Catholicism . . .
Conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and
even adventurous life of the intellect . . . To exalt the Mass is to
enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all
the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most
impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections . . .
It is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring, that
are intellectually interesting.
{The Thing, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1929, pp.212-213}
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