Thursday, July 1, 2010

Reader - Are You Like Douglas Hyde?

THE ONE-TIME LEADER in British Communism, Douglas Hyde, astonished his twentieth century colleagues by seeing his name across national newspapers as having resigned his job as news editor of the Daily Worker and the Communist Party. He was becoming a Catholic.

Shortly before, he and his wife "outed" to one another and discovered that the Holy Spirit had been leading them in parallel direction. Joseph Pearce relates the events in his nonpareil must-read/own book, Literary Converts:

Hyde: "Are you becoming a Catholic or something?"

"I wish I were," she replied.

Hyde's heart leapt: "And I wish to God I could do the same."

For the first time in months they came clean with each other. Hyde told her exactly how far he had travelled. How he believed that the culture of the Middle Ages had not died with feudalism but was still alive in the modern world, 'a living Catholic culture' (243ff).

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If you are tired to death of the sham party politics of America, the present 'pharoah' who knows not Joseph (or Biblical faith and values from his progressivist place of power, only from afar); if you are like Douglas Hyde (though not so officially), exhausted by the mere human projects that keep ending, like those of the dark twentieth/twenty-first centuries, in Gulags, gas chambers, killing fields, Caliph-justified vitriolic violence, and Gulf water disasters ...


The July/August issue of The Saint Austin Review (StAR), July/August is entitled, The Middle Ages. I recommend strongly that you pick up a copy, or, better yet, subscribe to this journal that clear-sightedly views global events and culture from a stance faithful to the Magisterium of the Church.

What you yearn for and want most deeply may - just may - still be quite alive and flourishing in a world that you see, quite rightly, that has gone mad. "Well, that's your opinion," you say? I paraphrase Evelyn Waugh:

... the Church is not, except by accident, a little club with its own specialised vocabulary, but the normal state of man from which men disastrously exiled themselves.

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