… But the Lord hears the cry of his faithful, and granted this converted writer, after all his suffering, to fall asleep in His peace on Easter Day.
When we saw the story of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, we commented that we would dedicate some of these texts to people who had suffered immensely from the liturgical reforms stemming from the Second Vatican Council and had fought for the traditional liturgy . Following this thread, today we are going to see the sad but luminous story of Evelyn Waugh .
Waugh, born in England in 1903, converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1930 , a time of numerous conversions of English writers and artists to the Church of Rome; following the conversion of St. John Henry Newman at the end of the 19th century. In the 1930s there were about twelve thousand annual conversions to Catholicism just in England.
Adriano Erriguel describes the way in which, “one fine day, Evelyn Waugh converted to Catholicism . It was not a mystical crisis, nor a ‘fall from the horse.’ Waugh’s conversion was, it seems, cerebral and discreet . He himself explained that ‘through a firm intellectual conviction, but with very little emotion, I was admitted to the Church .’
Martin D’Arcy, a Jesuit and Waugh’s spiritual director, wrote: ‘I have never known a convert who based his assents so firmly on the truth .’ This pragmatic and practical approach to his faith served Waugh ‘through the trials of his life.’ And this is one of the great lessons that Evelyn Waugh can teach today’s Catholics:
sentimentality has never been part of our faith. Faith, in its traditional definition, is an assent of the intellect to the truth revealed by God . Therefore, once the Truth is known, the fact that one may ‘feel nothing’ in prayer for long periods of time is of the least importance.
The magnificent Joseph Pearce delves into the background of Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism and the reason he remained faithful to the Church and its Tradition : on August 21, 1930, Waugh had written to the Jesuit Martin D’Arcy that he had come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church was ‘the only genuine form of Christianity (and) that Christianity is the essential and formative component of Western culture’ . Six weeks later, on September 29, Father D’Arcy received Waugh into the Church.
As a result of his conversion and the controversy it aroused, Waugh wrote an article for the Daily Express in which he explained his reasons for converting to Catholicism: ‘It seems to me that, in the current phase of European history, the essential question is no longer between Catholicism, on one hand, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and chaos . Today we can see it everywhere as the active denial of everything that Western culture has represented. Civilization —and by this I mean the entire moral and artistic organization of Europe— has no power in itself to survive. It arose through Christianity and, without it, has no meaning or power to demand loyalty .
The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequent lack of confidence in moral and social norms has been embodied in the ideal of a materialistic and mechanized State… It is no longer possible… to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests.’ Affirming that ‘Christianity is essential to civilization and needs more combative strength than ever in centuries,’ Waugh argued that ‘Christianity exists in its fullest and most definitive form in the Roman Catholic
More: https://x.com/infovaticana/status/2040272360402551234?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w
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