From the Cambridge School
I'm told that this break would be of interest to some of our more literate readership....
In his new study of the fall of the British Empire, After the Victorians, the social commentator A.N. Wilson makes a stunning accusation about one of the most famous figures of 20th century English Catholicism.
According to one of our more prominent Anglo-Catholics who has seen the book, Wilson cites "private information" in reporting that the sudden exile of the legendary Jesuit author and scholar Martin D'Arcy from Cambridge to the United States was precipitated after the suicide of a Jesuit scholastic whom D'Arcy had "introduced to different ways of love," as my source put it....
Interesting.... So it wasn't just the dioceses that did the laundry in strange and sinister ways.
-30-
In his new study of the fall of the British Empire, After the Victorians, the social commentator A.N. Wilson makes a stunning accusation about one of the most famous figures of 20th century English Catholicism.
According to one of our more prominent Anglo-Catholics who has seen the book, Wilson cites "private information" in reporting that the sudden exile of the legendary Jesuit author and scholar Martin D'Arcy from Cambridge to the United States was precipitated after the suicide of a Jesuit scholastic whom D'Arcy had "introduced to different ways of love," as my source put it....
Interesting.... So it wasn't just the dioceses that did the laundry in strange and sinister ways.
-30-
posted by Rocco Palmo at 16:58
2 Comments:
Shocking if true. D'Arcy is one of the major figures of the mid-20th century English Catholic literary revival, and the author of the classic study The Mind and Heart of Love. He was the priest who received Evelyn Waugh into the faith. If true, this is one of the biggest bombshells for the image of the English Church since the revelation of Eric Gill's pansexual appetites.
Caveat Wilson, however. He is a bitter lapsed Anglican known for his literary hatchet jobs, including a very unfair one on C.S. Lewis.
I went out and bought this book this afternoon along with a few others for good measure. I think Martin d'Arcy was at Oxford, not Cambridge.
Here is the selection about Fr. d'Arcy (at page 313).
"Friends with such luminaries as Belloc and and Chesterton, Father McNabb was nonetheless the reverse of a socialite or intellectual's darling. That role was chiefly occupied by Father Martin d'Arcy, SJ, who managed to convert a number of well-known people to his faith, including Evelyn Waugh and the future Earl of Longford. 'Are you rich and nobly born?' asked Betjeman,
'Is your heart with sorrows torn?
Come to me, I'll heal them all
Martin d'Arcy, Campion Hall'
"But in the event, it was his own sorrows which were poor Father d'Arcy's undoing. His life was clouded by a hidden tragedy. Not for nothing was he a Jesuit, so the matter was all hushed up, and the famous Master of Campion Hall was spirited away to the Jesuit house in Boston, Massachusetts. No one in his lifetime ever knew what had happened. A Jesuit scholastic, a very young man, little more than a boy, had committed suicide when d'Arcy had revealed, by propositioning the youth, a darker side to 'The Mind and Heart of Love.'"
Post a Comment
<< Home