On Chesterton's "Catholic Church and Conversion"

ZENIT interviews Marco Sermarini, chairman of the Italian Chesterton Society, who wrote the introduction for a new Italian edition of The Catholic Church and Conversion, which Chesterton wrote in 1922, the year he entered the Catholic Church. (The Ignatius Press edition of the book, published in 2006, includes the foreword written by Hilaire Belloc and a new foreword by Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society):

ZENIT: Why have you backed and introduced this book?
 
Sermarini: It is one of the works that succeeds best in making one understand Chesterton's thought on the religious event, better still, the full adherence of his reason and heart to Catholicism; and above all because it is very useful today for persons who will read it.
 
<snip>
 
ZENIT: Is Chesterton still current today? What works and concepts are relevant in our modern day?
 
Sermarini: I believe I already answered in part. So many times among friends we find ourselves saying that we would like to have a Chesterton around (and I assure you that there isn't currently anyone of his stature, may no one be offended: so intelligent, so likable, so light and serious at the same time, so combatant and distant from the seductions of "right left center"), but then we discover that if we ourselves were more Chestertonian, going out and about to make his thought known, it would already be quite something.
 
In other words, if we succeeded in making his thought increasingly known, everyone would be greatly helped.

In fact, in a seemingly inexplicable way, we often find while reading his works that there are things in them that are happening today, which he saw and understood a hundred years ago.

The inexplicability is only apparent, because Chesterton had a very acute intelligence illumined by a crystalline faith, and so he succeeded in reading much farther than so many others what was already written in the events he was living and the ideas of his time.
 
The most representative among his works are "Orthodoxy," "The Everlasting Man," the "saga" of Father Brown and still others.

Read the entire interview.



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