The Cause for a Modern Prophet
The Cause for a Modern Prophet | Michael Coren | CWR
Prolific and paradoxical, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was as witty as Wilde, as original as Joyce, and as clever as Kafka
When even mass-circulation British newspapers cover a story about the Church and beatification, you know it matters. The Daily Mail recently reported that, “Author G. K. Chesterton, best known for his Father Brown stories, has been put on the path to sainthood – with the blessing of the Pope. Just days before he was elected Pope in March, the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, wrote to a Chesterton society in Argentina approving the wording of a private prayer calling for his canonization.”
I wrote a biography of Gilbert Keith Chesterton in 1988, and it was at a conference about the man’s life and work in 1986 at the University of Toronto that I met the woman whom I would marry, obliging me to leave Britain and come to Canada. We also named our first child Gilbert in honor of the man. (Our son’s middle name, though, as romance must not lead to cruelty!)
Should the great GKC be acknowledged as a saint? I'm not sure, really, but I do know that we are generally not well served by journalism today. Catholic journalists in particular sometimes seem more intent on pleasing their secular friends than in defending the Church. Oh, for another Chesterton, who wrote the truth of permanent things, of first things, of Catholic things. His cause has been discussed and promoted for some time, and in many ways it’s never been so fitting.
Born in 1874 in London, England, he enjoyed the best in British private education but chose not to go to university, which partly explains his visceral refusal to adopt convention and think and write within partisan definitions. He drifted into journalism but once afloat he sailed perfectly, and often against the wind.
On the fashionable nationalism of the Edwardian age, for example: “My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, my mother, drunk or sober.” On literature: “A good novel tells us the truth about it hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” On being controversial: “I believe in getting into hot water, it keeps you clean.”
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