It was through Protestant spectacles that I first saw Rome in 1929. I was very remote from the Church but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that Christianity was probably true.
Rome attracted and repelled me. I was faintly shocked by two Italian women who chattered to each other just inside a famous Church, only pausing in their excited gossip for the precise period of the elevation, but I had enough sense to realize that there is a kind of reverence which is associated with skepticism, for the reverent agnostic takes off his hat with the same respectful gesture to a funeral and to a religion which he believes to be dead. These Italian women were at least at home in the house of God. Again the vestigial relics of inherited Puritanism were stirred into uneasy activity when the Pope was carried into St. Peter’s to an accompaniment of trumpets and cheering crowds.
Rome annoyed me because Rome made me feel provincial. Not surprisingly so, for Rome is the only spot on earth which is not provincial. The world is a collection of provinces of which some do and all should acknowledge the spiritual capital of the human race. Rome depressed me because I did not want to end as a Catholic, but the mental climate of Rome was having a subtly disintegrative effect on my vague hope of a return to the church of my baptism.
On the day before I left Rome I wandered up to the Janiculum to think things over. I was beginning to suspect that St. Augustine was right. “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts cannot find rest until they rest in Thee.” An academic assent to the fact that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead was not enough. If this were true, it was a truth which it was one’s duty to proclaim. But in what context? Catholic or Anglican? Rome I could not accept, and yet I had at least learned one thing during my long journey through the valley of skepticism, that on one point at least most atheists were right. The only coherent and logical form of Christianity is the Catholicism of those who are in communion with Rome. Was it really impossible to return to Anglicanism? The Alban Hills were crested with a dusting of autumn snows, snows which were flecked by the pearl gray shadows of slow-moving clouds. I looked across the Tiber to the shallow cupola of the Pantheon, the only complete roof which survives from the Rome of the Emperors, and I knew that for me the effective choice was between agnosticism and the Church which was born when the Pantheon was young.
The years passed. Father Knox and I argued the Catholic claims in letters published under the appropriate title Difficulties. I reread this book recently when the publisher asked Monsignor Knox and me to contribute one more letter apiece for a new edition. It was not easy to think myself back into the state of mind when I had written with such conviction about the difficulties which kept me out of the Church. Not that these difficulties were fictitious or that Father Knox’s answers were always completely convincing. I became a Catholic not because there was a slick and easy answer to every objection but because I was tired of remaining suspended like Mahomet’s coffin between heaven and earth. The Catholic key certainly unlocked most locks, and if the key stuck in a few locks perhaps the fault was not in the key but in my use of it. To enter the Church was a gamble. To remain outside the Church was an even deadlier risk. I decided to gamble on the hope that the practice of Catholicism might slowly transform the water of uneasy conviction into the wine of unquestioning faith.
In the holy year of 1933 I returned to Rome as a Catholic, but the fact that it was Holy Year was a coincidence. One of my major difficulties had been the doctrine of indulgences and on this difficulty Father Knox had seemed less convincing than on many other points. But he registered one notable score. I had argued that the struggle for virtue would be a waste of effort if the most abandoned of sinners could escape all purgatorial pains by a visit to the four basilicas during the Holy Year or by the ascent of the Lateran Stairs. Father Knox countered by telling the story of St. Philip Neri, to whom it was revealed while he was actually preaching the Jubilee indulgence that of those present in his church only the preacher and a pious old washerwoman would actually gain the indulgence.
I joined the pilgrims without enthusiasm. My Protestant prejudices against the whole doctrine of indulgences revived. It was a very hot day, and by the time I had visited three basilicas I felt that St. Paul’s was much too much “without the walls,” and that as I was neither a saint nor a pious washerwoman my hope of gaining the indulgence was too slight to be worth bothering about. So I went home feeling vaguely ashamed of myself. I felt that I was no more a real Catholic than a German who has just taken out papers of naturalization is a real Englishman. I was a pro-Catholic but I did not feel like a Catholic, at least not so far as Holy Year was concerned. On the contrary I felt faintly ashamed of myself as if I had given way to a superstitious practice. The spectacles through which I looked at Rome had ceased to be Protestant and had not become Catholic.
It was through Catholic spectacles that I saw Rome in the Holy Year of 1950. As I joined the unending procession of pilgrims through the basilicas which war had spared, I remembered the cemetery of Huesca which I had entered with the advancing army, and the pornographic drawings on the walls and the obscene desecration of the chapel. In Spain the forward march of militant atheism had been arrested, but elsewhere great Christian countries had been betrayed to the enemies of God and man, and among those pilgrims there were many who were exiles from their homes, and who could only return by the road of apostasy.
And as I joined the pilgrims I realized that Catholic doctrine has depths which the mere controversialist can never understand. The act of trying to gain an indulgence is not merely an attempt to shorten purgatorial pains. I do not think that I felt much more sanguine than in 1933 of my hope of graduating into the class of pious washerwomen, but I was profoundly grateful for the chance of taking part in a great corporate act of loyalty to the Vicar of Christ and of affirming with countless other pilgrims our faith in the one power on earth against which the gates of hell will not prevail. And as we prayed for the Pope’s intentions we were praying for all those who are living in the catacombs and above all for those to whom the new tyrants deny even the dignity of an unshrinking martyrdom. And today martyrdom is no longer something which one merely reads about in history or even something which is taking place in remote lands. There is nobody, at least in the old world, who may not before he dies be offered the choice between martyrdom and apostasy, and there must have been many among the pilgrims who were praying for constancy should they in the not-too-distant future be faced with those grim alternatives.
Nothing in my life as a Catholic has moved me more than those hours which I spent visiting the basilicas. Nothing has given me a greater sense of the universal nature of the Church than the stream of pilgrims of so many different countries and different races. And nothing has done more to reinforce the conviction which finally brought me into the Church that there is only one household in which the tormented spirit of man can find rest and certitude.