The Catholic Church and conversionChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Catholic Church and conversion
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Conversion -- Catholic Church
Yet even that one trivial or incidental caution carries with it a
reminder of what has been already noted: I mean the fact that whatever
be the Catholic’s worries, they are the very contrary of the
Protestant’s warnings. Merely as a matter of personal experience, I have
been led to note here that it is not generally the priest, but much more
often the layman, who rather too ostentatiously compasses sea and land
to make one proselyte. All the creepy and uncanny whispers about the
horror of having the priest in the home, as if he were a sort of vampire
or a monster intrinsically different from mankind, vanishes with the
smallest experience of the militant layman. The priest does his job, but
it is much more his secular co-religionist who is disposed to explain it
and talk about it. I do not object to laymen proselytising; for I never
could see, even when I was practically a pagan, why a man should not
urge his own opinions if he liked and that opinion as much as any other.
I am not likely to complain of the evangelising energy of Mr. Hilaire
Belloc or Mr. Eric Gill; if only because I owe to it the most
intelligent talks of my youth. But it is that sort of man who
proselytises in that sort of way; and the conventional caricature is
wrong again when it always represents him in a cassock. Catholicism is
not spread by any particular professional tricks or tones or secret
signs or ceremonies. Catholicism is spread by Catholics; but not
certainly, in private life at least, merely by Catholic priests. I
merely give this here out of a hundred examples, as showing once again
that the old traditional version of the terrors of Popery was almost
always wrong, even where it might possibly have been right. A man may
say if he likes that Catholicism is the enemy; and he may be stating
from his point of view a profound spiritual truth. But if he says that
Clericalism is the enemy, he is repeating a catchword.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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