The bishop said in his letter that there is no local cult of Chesterton veneration, which is the usual thing for a new saint, and therefore a problem for GKC. Second, the bishop found no sustained evidence forSo Dreher was Catholic for a while on the same denominational carousel we've seen recently, even among men ordained to the Catholic priesthood by Houston. According to Wikipedia,heroic sanctitywhat the bishop called “a pattern of personal spirituality” in Chesterton’s character. And third, the bishop was concerned about allegations that GKC was anti-Semitic.
Raised a Methodist, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993. He wrote widely in the Catholic press, but covering the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, starting in 2002, led him to question his Catholicism, and on October 12, 2006, he announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.But of course, he still thinks Chesterton should be a Catholic saint. After all, Dreher is an important guy, huh? Indeed, it sounds as if this is a project of the American G.K. Chesterton Society, which doesn't sound like it's a Catholic organization. So this is probably just a bright idea by a bunch of people who think this should be something the Catholic Church oughta do, whether they're Catholic or not. If I were the bishop, maybe I'd ask Dreher if he'd come back to the Church if the bishop changed his mind. Somehow I doubt it.
So far, the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society hasn't weighed in on this important issue, which may be reason to see a glimmer of hope. There's clearly a strain of thought in the ordinariates that takes Chesterton as a standard bearer for a clubby, cigars-and-whiskey, Wind in the Willows sort of Anglican Catholicism, the same sort of people who think Anglicanorum coetibus means the Church is finally seeing the light and becoming more Anglican (or as a waggish commenter put it on a blog, more gay).
Maybe some folks are starting to serious up.
