G.K.'s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1928.
IN 1932, WHEN Gilbert had been in the Church just ten years and Frances six, my husband and I met them at the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. They were staying at the Vice-Regal Lodge and were very happy in that gathering of the Catholic world brought about by the Congress. It was this thought of the potential of the faith for a unity the League of Nations could not achieve—only dogma is strong enough to unite mankind—that gave its title to the book Christendom in Dublin.
In the crowd that thronged to that great gathering he saw Democracy. Its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: it was Self-determination of the People. "A whole mob, what many would call a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted; and what it wanted was to be Christian." The mind of that crowd was stretched over the centuries as the faint sound of St. Patrick's bell that had been silent so many centuries was heard in Phoenix Park at the Consecration of the Mass: it was stretched over the earth as the people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the time Rome or the Christian Centre.
During the Congress an Eastern priest accosted G.K. with praise of his writings. His own mind full of the great ideas of Christendom and the Faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the allusion to himself. And when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it flashed through G.K.'s mind that he had heard in the East that an idiot was supposed to bring luck. This sort of humorous yet sincere intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the spiritual humility of the saints. We have to accept it in the same kind of way—without in the least understanding it, but simply because we cannot fail to see it.
But the world could fail even to see it. It could and did fail in imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of Infinite Greatness that its own pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather it seemed an affectation—none the less an affectation and much the less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as well as against himself.
There is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and become a monk, found himself inapt at the offices of Choir and Scriptorium so he went before a statue of Our Lady and there played all his tricks. Quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue and said, "Lady, this is a choice performance." There is more than a touch of Our Lady's tumbler in Gilbert. He knew he could give in his own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the great body of the Catholic Church, who could forgive sins and offer the Holy Sacrifice, he truly felt "something disproportionate in finding one's own trivial trade, or tricks of the trade, amid the far-reaching revelations of such a trysting-place of all the tribes of men."*
[* Christendom in Dublin, p. 35.]
His awe and reverence for priests was, says Father Rice, enormous. "He would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous." His comment on the bad statues and fripperies which so many Catholics find a trial was: "It shows the wisdom of the Church. The whole thing is so terrific that if people did not have these let-downs they would go mad."
Yet it may have been a fear of excess of this special let-down that made him reluctant to go to Lourdes. Lisieux he never liked but he was, Dorothy says, fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to go. He went several times to the torch-light procession and he said as he had said in Dublin, "This is the only real League of Nations."
The thing he liked best in Dublin was the spontaneous outburst of little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the city. The story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said when on the last day the clouds looked threatening: "Well, if it rains now He will have brought it on Himself."