Chesterton Knew The Importance of Ecumenical Dialogue

Chesterton Knew The Importance of Ecumenical Dialogue

Saturday 22 October 2022

Fr Brett's Sermon On The 12th Annual GK Chesterton Pilgrimage

 

Chesterton wrote Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1908) long before he was Received into the Church on July 30th 1922, 100 years’ ago. Truth, orthodoxy, excludes error. There is no room for half-truths in Chesterton:

“There is something to be said very error, but whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.” (Orthodoxy).

The great encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis was published in 1907, On The Doctrines of The Modernists: “the synthesis of all heresies” as St Pius X summed up Modernism. It was promulgated between Heresy and Orthodoxy. Loisy was perfectly clear: a Modernist "is ruled by the single wish to be one with Christians and Catholics who live in harmony with the spirit of age". 

Chesterton wrote: “It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.” How much longer are we going to allow this age to have it's head? When a blasphemous parody of the prayer Our Saviour gave us can be taken into the intimacy of our very schools to groom our Catholic children to perversity and the sin that cries out for vengeance. 

When “practising Catholic” political leaders can promise to reverse the first victor over the evil of abortion which the US has seen in 50 years. When the Church in Germany, amidst the roar departing adherents, desperately offers Modernists everything they want of the spirit of the age. When the beauty of the traditional Mass is supressed despite those words: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sac and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

What scope for t pen of Chesterton, incisive, thrusting between chromosome and cross-dressing! Not wielded with the intent of cancelling person but of cancelling the cancer of error. 

“It is easy to be a modernist; as easy to be a snob. To have fallen in those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the path of Christendom – it would indeed be simple. It is always simple to fall: there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.”

Chesterton looked deep into the history of this country to inspire us to fight the pagan onslaught. He went back to 878: the struggle of Albert the Great against the Danes. He locates it, with poetic licence, in the valley of the White Horse, focused on a fork in the road, a place of decision and fate. Things go badly, the mighty Guthrum routs the men of Wessex. With many stout warriors slain, Albert survives the rout to witness the enemy confident in victory:

“On a dark horse at the double way

He saw great Guthrum ride,

Heard roar of brass and ring of steel,

The laughter and the trumpet peal,

The pagan in his pride.” 

We too know the pagan in his Pride. The message of the Battle of Ethandune is that victory can be won from the jaws of defeat. That is the way of the Cross. 

“… Alfred in the fern hard by

Set horn to mouth and blew.”

The men of Wessex found new heart, and in the carnage which followed, Guthrum was humbled. And an even greater miracle occurs: his conversion:

“In Wessex in the forest,

In the breaking of the spears,

We set a sign on Guthrum

To blaze a thousand years.


Far out to the winding river

The blood ran down for days

When we put the cross on Guthrum

In the parting of the ways.”

Just when the new pagans think they have it all on their side, and can relax in their Pride, then the Church will muster once more. Respond to the call. In the contradiction of the Cross which is at the core of all the paradoxes which Chesterton made his hallmark.

How will victory look? The conversion of the human heart. One by one. That’s always the battle. The recognition of sin, the need for repentance. It will be the blood of Christ which will bring cleansing from sin, healing and new life.

May Chesterton be our inspiration. No half-truths here, in the parting of the ways: “there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” We stand at the angle of the Cross. 

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Sponsorship over the years, of some of those walking 27 miles on the GK Chesterton Pilgrimage has raised over £20,000 for the Pro-Life work of The GoodCounsel Network. You can donate to support them here, www.justgiving.com/fundraising/gkcwalk22

Find the GK Chesterton Prayer in over twenty languages on our website. CatholicGKChestertonSociety.co.uk

Email CatholicGKCSocety@yahoo.co.uk to recieve a copy of GK's Meekly which will contain a full report of the Pilgrimage itself.