St. GKC?

Tim Jones looks at the question of canonizing the Prophet Chesterton.

I’m all for it, but it won’t happen in our lifetime. Why? Because Chesterton, like all saints, was imperfect, but his imperfections lay in areas which subsequently have become intensely sensitive: namely, his rather typically Edwardian attitude to Jews. He was not an “anti-semite” as the phrase goes today. Indeed his views on Jews and Judaism are remarkably complex. He is in favor of a Jewish homeland movement because he favors the notion that a people should have a land in which to live. So he is sometime invoked in favor of Zionism. On the other hand, he gives )(measured) credit to the idea that there is something to the blood libel legends of the medieval period. On the other hand, he also regards the Jews as carrying the future of humanity about with them in the Ark of the Covenant. He is absolutely and implacably hostile to the various notions of Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, or Germanic racial superiority that are circulating around England and Europe in the interwar years, regarding them as nothing but Prussian pride, bullshit “science” and, ironically, an act of theft from the Jews, who are the only people with a legitimate claim to being something like a “Chosen People”. A born arguer, he regards Judaism as but one of a host of alternative religious schemas to the Catholic faith and argues with it as he would argue with Fabian Socialists, eugenicists, theosophists, Calvinists, vegetarians, and his own brother. As the Hitler regime begins, he sees (almost before anybody else) what it intends and where this will all lead. In his Autobiography, he quips that in his youth he was accused of anti-semitism and in his old age, he will probably die charged with being far too philo-semitic.

None of which will be taken into account in the slightest should somebody seriously put him forward for canonization. Instead, the headline will simply be “Church to canonize Anti-Semitic Writer”. Right now we are still living in the shadow of the Holocaust, coupled with the fact this is also an era where people desperately in need of Insenstivity Trainng can get their undies in a bunch over stories like this. There’s very little hope that a person as complex as GKC will pass muster with a culture give to jerking the knee instead of sober thought.