The Knight Who Was Chesterton

July 1, 2022

When G.K. Chesterton entered the Catholic Church a century ago, he had a K of C “sword” ready at hand

By Dale Ahlquist

July 1, 2022

Chesterton sits for a portrait by British photographer Howard Coster in 1935, a year before the author died at age 62. (Photo by Howard Coster/National Portrait Gallery, London)

On Jan. 10, 1921, G.K. Chesterton stepped off a ship in New York City and was greeted by a huge press reception. The Englishman told the many reporters that he had come “to lose his impressions of the United States … to see this country and to talk, to give inadequate after-dinner speeches known as lectures.”

At the time, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was one of the most famous literary figures in the world — an author of epic poetry, plays, novels, detective stories with a priest protagonist, and books on philosophy, art, history and social criticism. He was known primarily as an irresistibly quotable journalist read in daily newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. His speaking tour in America lasted three months, taking him to dozens of cities, where he lectured to packed auditoriums, drawing crowds in with paradoxical titles such as “The Ignorance of the Educated,” “The Perils of Health” and “Shall We Abolish the Inevitable?”

His great strength was amusing and enlightening his readers and listeners by defending the normal in an increasingly abnormal world. The Boston Post wrote, “G.K. Chesterton is a man of enormous common sense. Some say this is what has made him famous.”

On Jan. 26, Chesterton gave a lecture in New Haven, Conn., at Yale University’s Sprague Memorial Hall. He appreciated the “jolly” audience and told them how impressed he was with the university’s Gothic architecture. “I have often thought that if I were a millionaire, I should like to erect a Gothic cathedral, a beautiful work of art, like these buildings,” he said. “And yet, if I were a millionaire, I probably would be so worldly-minded that such an idea would be the last one to enter my mind. There ought to be many more such buildings, but I suppose people are not happy enough to build them.”

During the course of his visit, Chesterton became acquainted with another New Haven institution as well. He met with local Knights of Columbus, led by Edward P. O’Meara, a past grand knight of San Salvador Council 1, and received a gift from them — a gift he so treasured that he chose to have it with him when he entered the Catholic Church the following year, in July 1922.

THE SERPENTINE STICK

A prominent lawyer (later judge) known for his wit and humor, Edward O’Meara would have felt a great affinity toward Chesterton. He had also done his homework. He knew that Chesterton always carried a walking stick.

A walking stick is not a cane. It is a prop. But it does not prop up the walker; it accompanies him. He gestures with it. He points with it. He poses with it. He sits with it as much as he stands with it and walks with it.

Chesterton liked walking sticks. His most famous was a sword stick, which he used to stab the couch pillows in his study while dictating essays to his secretary. (His sword stick now resides somewhere in the British Library, but nobody knows where. It’s been misfiled.) So, apparently aware of this penchant for props, Edward O’Meara presented Chesterton with an unusual “snakewood” walking stick on behalf of the Knights of Columbus.

Snakewood is an exotic hardwood found on the northern coast of South America. It has a distinctive snakeskin pattern and is one of the most expensive woods in the world. But the “snakewood” walking stick that O’Meara presented to Chesterton was not made out of that snakewood. It was most likely maplewood. However, it was certainly an exotic stick because of the way it had been grown. While still a sapling, the wood had been wrapped with a rope in a serpentine fashion so that the shape impressed itself upon the shaft as it grew. Then the rope was removed, leaving a twisted stick that begged to be called “snakewood.”

Chesterton had come to America with one of his own walking sticks, a plain grey affair from the woods of Buckinghamshire, where he lived. It was a stick he had taken with him “like a pilgrim’s staff” to the Holy Land the year before. Now, thanks to the Knights of Columbus, he found himself with an additional walking stick, which is not something one can pack. He did not want to risk losing it, so for the remainder of his American tour, he carried two sticks.

“I bore more resemblance to a cripple with two crutches or a highly ineffectual version of the devil on two sticks,” Chesterton wrote in What I Saw in America (1922). “I carried them both because I valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either of them in my erratic travels.” He then added that he valued the stick from the Knights of Columbus “even more” than the first — “and I wish I could think that their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword.”

Chesterton’s poem “The Convert” — The twisted “snakewood” stick that G.K. Chesterton received from the Knights of Columbus in 1921, pictured here with several of the author’s walking sticks, is now held in the G.K. Chesterton Collection at the Notre Dame London Global Gateway. (Photo by John Cairns/Courtesy of the G.K. Chesterton Collection at the Notre Dame London Global Gateway)

‘A SWORD OF STATE’

Shortly after his visit to New Haven, on Feb. 1, Chesterton wrote to Edward O’Meara from the Biltmore Hotel in New York to thank the Knights of Columbus for the gift (see letter above, from the Knights of Columbus Archives):

Dear Mr. O’Meara –
I feel sure at least that you will not attribute my delay in thanking your society, for the overpowering kindness of their gift, to any indifference; but it is really true that it is due to the very reverse. I have had a scramble of silly lectures & interviews, through all of which I have hoped & promised myself a tolerable opportunity for writing something appropriate to all that this means to me. I would rather write a worthy answer to your letter than deliver a thousand of the greatest lectures ever uttered, to all the crowds of both continents. And after all I cannot do it; and any attempt to say what I really feel would sound, like many sincere things, merely rhetorical & ridiculous. Yet it is true that I feel as if your stick were a Sword of State given me by some great senate or republic at some great historical scene or crisis. About the crisis at least we shall not differ; inadequate as I am as a figure in it. I fear that the Knights of Columbus show not only chivalry but charity, among their Christian virtues, in taking so kind a view of me or my efforts in these times. But that the times themselves are worthy of everyone’s efforts, that the historic moment would be worthy of the most heroic efforts, that at least is terribly and even tragically clear. Some say it is impossible to return to the past; but the truth is that there is now nothing before us but the choice between two paths which both return to the past. We can return to some sort of Catholic fellowship, or we can return to some sort of pagan slavery. There is no third road. It is between the old sort of freedom or servitude that the fight is already engaged; & though I only stood as a stranger among you for a moment, I feel as if you had handed me a weapon.
Yours, with renewed thanks,
G.K. Chesterton

The casual observer might think that Chesterton was being flowery and overdramatic in this letter. But Chesterton always chose his words carefully, even when demonstrating his lightning-quick wit.

He was deeply grateful to the tribute the Knights paid him with their gift, and he paid them high tribute in return, recognizing their role in promoting the noble and lost art of chivalry in the modern world and the equal gift of charity. He shared a fellowship with them in facing a crisis — the loss of faith and freedom. And he was especially moved to be honored by this Catholic Order.

RETURN TO CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP

When G.K. Chesterton received the Knights’ gift, he was not Catholic. One American observer called him “practically the greatest Catholic writer of his day,” and then added, “yet he is not Catholic.”

All of that changed the following year. On July 30, 1922, in a makeshift chapel adjacent to the Railroad Hotel in Beaconsfield, England, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church. The priest who received him was his longtime friend Father John O’Connor, the real-life inspiration for Chesterton’s famous priest-detective, Father Brown.

“I fear that the Knights of Columbus show not only chivalry but charity, among their Christian virtues, in taking so kind a view of me or my efforts in these times.”

Chesterton called his conversion “the chief event of my life.” He said there were 10,000 reasons for being a Catholic, but they all amounted to one reason: that it was true. For the last century, his conversion has continued to have a ripple effect. Countless people from different backgrounds and faiths have discovered that truth of the Catholic Church because they discovered G.K. Chesterton. I am one of them.

A few days after that momentous occasion a hundred years ago, Father O’Connor wrote to an American friend: “It is sure to interest my beloved Yanks to know that when we were setting out for the mission chapel on the morning of July 30th, G.K.C. selected with much more care than usual the beautiful snakewood stick that was given to him by Knights of Columbus on his recent visit to the United States. So fortified he walked even unto the City on the Hill.”

In naming the Knights of Columbus, Blessed Michael McGivney evoked the chivalry of medieval knights. The idea of knighthood and chivalry always appealed to Chesterton, whose book of poetry The Wild Knight was among his first published works. Never knighted by the king of England, Chesterton was knighted by Pope Pius XI in 1934 when the Holy Father named him a member of the Order of St. Gregory the Great. But in a symbolic way, he had already been knighted by the Knights of Columbus years before, when Edward O’Meara gave him the snakewood walking stick that he regarded as a sword.

*****

DALE AHLQUIST is president of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, host of the EWTN series “The Apostle of Common Sense,” and author of several books, including Knight of the Holy Ghost: A Short History of G.K. Chesterton. He is a member of St. Louis Council 3949 in St. Louis Park, Minn.

The Council of Nicaea (18th century) by F. Pavlovskyi, I. Maksimovych, A. Galik, et al. / Holy Trinity Gate Church / Photo courtesy of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Reserve

The Knight Who Was Chesterton

THE SERPENTINE STICK

‘A SWORD OF STATE’

RETURN TO CATHOLIC FELLOWSHIP

Related Articles

Catholic History

‘True God From True God’

‘True God From True God’

Catholic History

Spiritual Lifeboats on the Titanic

Spiritual Lifeboats on the Titanic

Catholic History

A Family’s Heroic Witness of Love

A Family’s Heroic Witness of Love

Catholic History

A Hero Priest’s Return to Kansas

A Hero Priest’s Return to Kansas

Catholic History

Protector of the Afflicted

Protector of the Afflicted

Catholic History

Primate of the Millennium

Primate of the Millennium

Catholic History

Blessed by the Blood of Martyrs

Blessed by the Blood of Martyrs

Catholic History

Getting to Know Joseph

Getting to Know Joseph