I was delighted to learn that the writer, Ian Hunter, best known perhaps as the biographer of Malcolm Muggeridge, has been received into the Catholic Church. Hunter writes of those people who were the major influences on his conversion, including John Paul II, C. S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge, in an article in last Friday’s edition of the Canadian National Post. His measured criticism of my book, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church notwithstanding, Hunter’s conversion story makes for truly encouraging and edifying reading. Here’s the link to the article:
http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/path+Rome/5099247/story.html
Following Malcolm Muggeridge into the Church
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About the Author: Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is a Catholic author and biographer who has written about subjects as various as GK Chesterton, economics, and Shakespeare.
A fascinating and moving conversion story! I thought his reflections on the “gates of hell prevailing quite well ” among other religions both witty and accurate.
While I would side with Joseph Pearce on the Lewis controversy regarding his unwillingness to swim the Tiber (after all, I think the 1930 Lamberth (sp?) Conference would have shattered any of the illusions Hunter cites about Anglicanism), I certainly respect his dignified response to the book. Since apparently Lewis never addressed the subject directly, none of us can ever know with certainty why he didn’t become a Catholic, leaving room for reasonable disagreement among fair-minded people.
Like Hunter, Pearce believes that if Lewis were alive today, he’d be a Roman Catholic. He disagrees with Pearce only partly in his theory about why Lewis didn’t convert at the time. There is something about Lewis in both his fiction and his non-fiction that he never focuses on directly. Fidelity. It’s not intellectual fidelity, but emotional–which is probably why he never focused on it, despite the fact that it always seems to be there. I’ve suspected that he was bound to his Ulster formation by an emotional habit of fidelity, which he never examined. He was quite willing to analyze his thoughts, but not always his emotions–as he himself confessed.