I am intrigued by an article by Christopher Howse in the Telegraph of Saturday 17th August. Entitled “Is Chesterton to be made a saint?”
It discusses the great GKC’s particular qualification for this singular honour: his optimism – “no facile cheeriness but a deep conviction that the world was fundamentally good”.
This is a significant attribute.
St Teresa of Avila asked God to preserve her “from sad-faced saints” and you only have to look about you to see that there is a lot of gloom and doom about these days to cause existential anxiety and pessimism.
Sometimes I think that Pope Francis has the only cheerful face in the Vatican.
Under-population has overtaken over-population as a future nightmare scenario, alongside the ever-present fears over climate change; there is the power and confidence of Islam compared with the western collapse of Christian belief; the unerring capacity of the new computer technology to tempt us into moral turpitude and so on.
Chesterton would have understood all this – and indeed he predicted some of the factors that have brought about the moral chaos of the western world.
But, as Howse infers, his almost mystical insight into the power of divine love to transform the world saved him from the temptation of gloom.
I learnt from Howse that Chesterton took the name of Francis of Assisi as his confirmation saint, recognising “an ascetic who fasted and did penance not because he hated the world, but because he loved it.”
Chesterton was a genius – not itself a requirement of sanctity – a prophet and a great-hearted, large-spirited man.
As William Oddie, GKC’s biographer has mentioned in a recent blog, the Bishop of Northampton, the Right Reverend Peter Doyle, in whose diocese Chesterton lived and died, is agreeable for someone to start the process of the writer’s cause for canonisation.
Howse reflects that there might be an impediment here: “One cannot help thinking that Chesterton’s reliance on his wife had an element of self-infantilisation that was unfair on her…Again, this should not debar Chesterton from heaven. But though saints have their faults – which are not to be imitated – canonising Chesterton would risk his faults being imitated by mistake.”
My response to this is to say that Chesterton is inimitable. No-one is going to copy his married life. Continue reading
Image: St Peter’s List