“All the Jews have been hounding me as a result of my ‘New Jerusalem.’ I am not a little hurt and puzzled about their unreasonable attitude because in that work I have honestly tried to be objective, fair, and understanding, but they won’t see that.”
Mr. Vincent de Paul Fitzpatrick first met Chesterton at the Belvedere Hotel, Baltimore, in February, 1921, and recalls that he praised the persistency of the Irish in struggling for their rights:
“When you hear of an organization in England fighting for liberty, you must find whether or not that organization contains much Irish blood. It means all the difference in the world. If you hear in this country of a strike in the Cycle Valley, it is nothing to get worried over. But if you hear of a strike in Glasgow, you may expect something exclusive and exciting. The reason is that a mass of the Irish poor is found in that city, and the Irish will not submit meekly when any person or any group tries to trample upon them.
“We see the English people grumbling at the perpetual interference with their rights and at the various restrictions to which they are subjected, but they are not organized. There are plenty of old radicals in England, who, as individuals, are sincere defenders of liberty, but they are isolated. Take, for example, old Dr. Johnson. With the Irish Catholics things are different. Their love for liberty seems to have been created by the Catholic Church—their only corporate defender of liberty today—is the Catholic Church. Liberty means much to her—something to be protected. She defends it with her powerful organization. When we speak of the English Labor party in England fighting for its rights, we do not mean the English labor party, at all, we mean the Scotch-Irish Labor party.”
On December 7, 1930, Mr. Fitzpatrick had a long talk with Chesterton at the St. Moritz, New York City. It was the eve of the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and Chesterton was thinking of his newly found Faith,
“It stands to reason that Christmas means more to me now that I am a Catholic than it did before I was converted to the Faith. But Christmas has meant much to me ever since my boyhood. I believed in Christmas before I believed in Christ. In the years immediately before my conversion I naturally thought much more seriously about Christmas, my thoughts became more consoling and Christmas was more beautiful as the passing days drew me nearer to the Church.
“I believed in the spirit of Christmas and I liked Christmas, even when I was a boy filled with radicalistic tendencies when I really thought I was atheistic. In those days I wrote a poem to the Blessed Virgin. I was quite young and the poem, God help me, must have been a rather wretched thing, though I imitated Swinburne, or at least, tried to imitate him when I wrote it.
“From my early years I had an affection for the Blessed Virgin and for the Holy Family. The story of Bethlehem and the story of Nazareth appealed to me deeply when I was a boy. Long before I joined the Catholic Church the Immaculate Conception had my allegiance. That allegiance has been intensified steadily.
“Aside from the teaching of the Church on the subject, a doctrine which we as Catholics accept, the thought that there was in all the ages one creature, and that creature a woman, who was preserved from the slightest taint of sin, won my heart.”
Mother Mary St. Luke recalls that during Chesterton’s visit to Rome in the late Autumn of 1929, he went several times to the Convent of the Holy Child, where he lectured one day before a crowded audience on “Thomas More and Humanism.” At the conclusion, a Father Cuthbert thanked the speaker and expressed the appreciation of the audience, remarking on the mental resemblance of More and Chesterton, saying that he could quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some of them VERY good, and some of them VERY bad.