INTRODUCTION By the mere chance of a speaking engagement in Hartford, I was the first Catholic to whom Oliver Barres talked of joining the Church. He was then a Congregational minister, his wife a Congregational minister too. With his conversion I had nothing whatever to do: he had thought or read or prayed his way through to every one of the conclusions of this book before we met: no one talked him into a single step of the way: there never was a more impersonal conversion, humanly speaking.
That goes with the basic quality of his mind. He has a hunger and thirst for reality, for the objective. That a creed stimulates or consoles or quiets the conscience, that it meets one's desires or felt needs---all that is splendid, but secondary. Unless it is true, he will have none of it. "Who," he cries, "looking into the deceitfulness of his own heart, can hope to cast anchor in subjectivity?" Subjectivity can run shallow or deep, as mere desire for peace of mind or as anguished search for "the continuity of the experiential note"; but, so long as man's reaction is the test, "truth falls by the wayside, a maimed, battered and broken wreck." Truth is not what appeals, truth is what is: only reality nourishes.
Everyone sees the division of sects as a scandal, but where most see it as a clouding of love, Oliver Barres saw it also as a despair of truth. Despair is the precise word. It is not simply that the Churches are divided now as to what Christ meant, it is that the divisions cannot be healed ever. Even if they re-united, they could not stay agreed, for the same root principles-private judgment in the individual, a Church not seen as speaking with the authority of Christ---which caused the fissuring in the past, would still be there to start the fissuring process all over again.
If that is the whole story, then clearly truth must not matter---anyhow it did not matter enough for Christ to provide for our getting it. That was the point Oliver Barres had reached when his diary opens. Either there is a voice here upon earth telling us Christ's meaning with Christ's authority, or we cannot know His meaning, we can but make our own choice among the thousand guesses of men. Since there was a voice upon earth claiming to be that Voice, he must see if its claim was true. He came at last to accept the Catholic Church, not from a weak man's need for authority but from a sane man's need for truth, which is reality known.
The diary, written to clarify his own mind but in the awareness that it might be needed to explain his action to others, covers the period from March to December 1954. By the end of it, he had no doubts left. But he did not resign his ministry till the following Easter: he must be certain of his certainty, sure that he was not casting anchor in subjectivity after all.
It would be a wonderful thing if Marjorie Barres had kept a diary too. It would, I think, have been very different. She started later than her husband, and moved along a different road. They were received into the Church together, their two small girls with them, on the Vigil of Pentecost. The day of their first Communion was Pentecost Day.
F. J. SHEED
Introduction, by F. J. Sheed
PART ONE: THRESHOLD THOUGHTS
21 March 1954---9 December 1954
PART TWO: CATHOLICISM OR CHAOS
I. Test All Things Afresh
II. Scrupulosity's Fruit
III. Revolt against Authority
IV. Christ as God
V. Peter's Primacy
VI. Impregnable Rock
VII. Freedom in Truth
VIII. Dissolving Difficulties
IX. Theotokos
X. Bless the Heretics!work under copyright
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