Oscar Wilde, Eleventh-Hour Convert

Most people don’t know that Oscar Wilde converted to Catholicism on his deathbed after a lifelong fascination with the Church. Born to a Protestant family in Ireland, many of his closest friends either were Catholic or become Catholic during the course of their acquaintance with Wilde. One of them was his Oxford friend David Hunter-Blair, a convert, who paid for Wilde’s trip to Rome that included an audience with Pope Blessed Pius IX, in the hopes of converting him. But Wilde said at the time: “To go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great Gods: Money and Ambition.” During his famed stay in Reading Gaol, his reading included St. Augustine, Dante, and Cardinal Newman. Scholars agree that the writing that followed this experience was a lot different from what went before, especially with its emphasis on the need to find meaning amid suffering. When he was released from prison, he asked the Jesuits for permission to make a retreat at one of their London houses, albeit unsuccessfully. During his travels in Europe, he attended Masses and papal audiences, and even received a blessing from Pope Leo XIII. He admired Catholic art and ritual, but he still wasn’t ready to make the jump across the Tiber. Then on November 28, 1900, in Paris, as Wilde was on his deathbed, a Catholic friend called a priest in, an English Passionist named Father Dunne. Wilde was given conditional Baptism and anointed; he died a Catholic on November 30, 1900. Wilde’s courtroom opponent, the Marquis of Queensberry, died the same year, also a deathbed convert. The Marquis’s son and Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose association with Wilde led to the famous trial, converted in 1911. One writer sums it up when he describes Wilde as “writer, wit, voluptuary, gay man, failed father and husband, sensitive soul, laughing stock, broken heart, eleventh hour Catholic convert.”