The Chesterton Review

Blessed G. K. Chesterton?

—  The following interview by Antonio Gaspari with Paolo Gulisano, Ital-

ian author of the first Italian-language biography of G. K. Chesterton
entitled Chesterton & Belloc: Apologia e Profezia, about the possible
beatification of G. K. Chesterton appeared in the July 14, 2009 issue of
ZENIT, and was translated by Kathleen Naab.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) is well known for his clev-

er and humorous writing, and his thought-provoking paradoxes. But
he might also become known as a saint, if a proposal to launch his
cause of beatification goes forward. ZENIT spoke with Paolo Gu-
lisano, author of the first Italian-language biography of the great
English writer Chesterton & Belloc: Apologia e Profezia, (Edizioni
Ancora) about the origins of this proposal. Here, Gulisano explains
why Chesterton might merit recognition as a saint.

ZENIT: Who is promoting this cause of beatification?

Gulisano: The cultural association dedicated to him, the Ches-
terton Society, founded in England in 1974 on the occasion of the
one-hundredth anniversary of the great author’s birth, with the
idea of spreading awareness of the work, thought and figure of this
extraordinary personality. For years now, there has been talk of a
possible cause of beatification, and a few days ago, during an inter-
national conference organized in Oxford on “The Holiness of G.K.
Chesterton”—with the participation of the best exponents in the
field of Chesterton studies—it was decided to go ahead with this
proposal.

ZENIT: Why a beatification?

Gulisano: Many people feel there is clear evidence of Chester-
ton’s sanctity: Testimonies about him speak of a person of great
goodness and humility, a man without enemies, who proposed the
faith without compromises but also without confrontation, a de-
fender of Truth and Charity. His greatness is also in the fact that
he knew how to present Christianity to a wide public, made up
of Christians and secular people. His books, ranging from Ortho-
doxy to St. Francis of Assisi, from Father Brown to The Ball and the

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Cross, are brilliant presentations of the Christian faith, witnessed

with clarity and valour before the world. According to the ancient
categories of the Church, we could define Chesterton as a “confes-
sor of the faith.” He was not just an apologist, but also a type of
prophet who glimpsed far ahead of time the dramatic character of
modern issues like eugenics. The English Dominican Aidan Nichols
sustains that Chesterton should be seen as nothing less than a pos-
sible “father of the Church” of the twentieth century.

ZENIT: What are his heroic virtues?

Gulisano: Faith, hope and charity: These were Chesterton’s fun-
damental virtues. Moreover, he was innocent, simple, profoundly
humble. Though having personally experienced sorrow, he was a
chorister of Christian joy. Chesterton’s work is a type of medicine
for the soul, or better, it can more precisely be defined as an anti-
dote. The writer himself had actually used the metaphor of antidote
to define the effect of sanctity on the world: The saint has the objec-
tive of being a sign of contradiction and of restoring mental sanity
to a world gone crazy.

ZENIT: What is the cultural, literary and moral contribution that

Chesterton has left to British society and to Christianity?
Gulisano: When Pope Pius XI was informed of the death of the
great writer, he sent a telegram of condolences through his secretary
of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. In the telegram, he mourned the
loss of a “devout son of the Holy Church, rich defender of the gifts
of the Catholic faith.” This was the second time in history that a
Pontiff would attribute the title “defender of the faith” to an Eng-
lishman. Perhaps the secretary of state did not realise the ironic par-
allelism, which would have sparked in Gilbert one of his proverbial
guffaws—but the other Englishman was Henry VIII, the man who
inflicted on the Church in England its gravest and deepest wound.
Chesterton tried to again bring England, and also the world, closer
to God, the faith, reason.

ZENIT: What is your opinion on all this?

Gulisano: Reading Chesterton, whether his novels or his essays,
always leaves the reader with great serenity and a sense of hope,
which certainly does not come from an immature and worldly op-

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timistic vision of life—which in reality couldn’t be farther from the

thought of Chesterton, who carefully denounced all the aberrations
of modernity—but rather from a Christian conception, the virile
strength of the religious experience. Chesterton’s proposal is to take
all of reality seriously, beginning with the interior reality of man,
and to confidently make use of the intellect, that is to say, of com-
mon sense, in its original sanity, purified of every ideological incrus-
tation. One rarely reads pages that speak of faith, conversion and
doctrine that are so clear and incisive, while being free of every sen-
timental or moralistic excess. This comes from Chesterton’s attentive
reading of reality; he knew that the most harmful consequence of
de-Christianisation has not been the grave ethical straying but rather
the straying of reason, synthesized in this critique of his: The mod-
ern world has suffered a mental fall much greater than the moral one.
Faced to this reality, Chesterton chose Catholicism, and affirms that
there are at least 10,000 reasons to justify this choice, every one of
them valid and well-founded, but able to be boiled down to one rea-
son: That Catholicism is true. The responsibility and the task of the
Church then consist in this: In the courage to believe, in the first
place, and therefore to denounce the paths that lead to nothing-
ness or destruction, to a blind wall or a prejudice. An undoubtedly
holy work, and the holiness of Gilbert Chesterton, which I hope the
Church will recognise, already shines and sparkles before the world.

Paolo Gulisano

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