Father Rumble Explains

In yesterday’s Readings, I gave the link to the Australian writer R. J. Stove’s conversion story, in which he mentions the help he needed and got in understanding the Faith and the reasons for it.

Here was what I needed. The traditional Catholic priest, Father X, who lent it [a book of convert stories] to me, must have detected how needful it was, in my overwhelmed condition, that I be impressed with the sheer of faith. Hence my use of Wallace Stevens’s best-known line, “blessed rage for order,” as the present document’s title. . . . [T]o the adult mind — even the adult mind as uninformed on vital issues as was my own — emotion is not enough: it is pitifully, painfully not enough. It can be, to a mind periodically disordered anyway, a lethal drug. What such a mind needs is a solid diet: neither the thin watery gruel of quasi-New-Age “spirituality”, nor the pure tabasco of fire- and-brimstone threats.

He had read all the major apologetic writers, like Chesterton, Belloc, Dawson, Sheen, Sheed, and Lunn, but the writer who most helped him with his specific questions was Father Leslie Rumble, whose apologetic radio show was published as Radio Replies in three volumes. Stove writes: “Those who have had the privilege of reading Radio Replies will know how nourishing it is, how fair-minded its author is, and how incapable he is of intellectual sharp practice for the sake of making a cheap point. Those who have not yet read it, are in for a great and sustaining pleasure.”

Here are some of Father Rumble’s articles arranged by subject. Here’s a biography of Father Rumble from the Australian National Biography.