Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why G.K. Chesterton shouldn’t be made a saint

He’s one of my favourite writers. But canonising Chesterton would hurt his reputation – and that of the Catholic church

Hulton Archive

The bad news for fans of G.K. Chesterton is that there are moves afoot to make him a saint. The Catholic bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, is reportedly looking for a priest to promote his canonisation. Pope Francis is an admirer, too; he supported a Chesterton conference in Buenos Aires and was on the honorary committee of the Chesterton Society.

So why is this a bad idea? Chesterton was, among other things, probably the most engaging apologist for Catholicism, long before he became a Catholic. His little book Orthodoxy is the best personal account of the faith you’ll come across — unabashedly subjective, wildly romantic, fundamentally right. His Napoleon of Notting Hill is a riotous magnificat of the small things which are great things. He was a polemicist for Christianity, and other things, against the likes of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw — both friends — and there is little in what passes for our culture of public debate to come near those encounters. He wrote lots about Christianity, but his extraordinary output was from first to last invested with a Christian take on the world, chiefly respect for the poor and disrespect for the rich. No one who knew him seems to have had a bad word to say about him. There was, by all accounts, colossal kindness and humility in the man as well as the effortless, paradoxical humour which makes him more accessible to modern readers than most of his contemporaries.

The first argument against making him a saint is that he was a journalist (the profession he called the easiest in the world); it’s a contradiction in terms. And canonising the man would make his output unreadable. It would invest all the pieces he wrote in railway waiting rooms and Fleet Street bars with the leaden quality of official sanctity.

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