Staying with the old firm

There have been many books over the years with titles that approximate to Why I Am Still a Catholic. In the Fifties a dream team would have included, I suppose, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene with Alec Guinness, received into the Church in 1956, as a promising newcomer. In 1955 my mother Elizabeth Pakenham, later Longford, another postwar convert, edited a book called Catholic Approaches which was described as ‘a sincere attempt to face the most disturbing questions of our time with boldness and honesty’; the fairly dreamy team included Father D’Arcy on the problem of evil and the great poet-artist David Jones on the arts and ‘the Christian commitment to Sacrament in contemporary technocracy’; Elizabeth Longford herself wrote on marriage and the family; she defended, incidentally, the Church’s teaching on contraception, a position she certainly abandoned in later years.

The title of the challenging series of ‘Essays in Faith and Perseverance’ edited by Peter Stanford is in itself the first statement about the way the Church has changed in 50 years: Why I Am Still a Catholic.