G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton — journalist, novelist, and critic, and the creator of the priest-detective Father Brown — had defended Christian belief in print for many years, in books such as Orthodoxy (1908), before he entered the Catholic Church. He was received on 30 July 1922 at Beaconsfield by Father John O’Connor, the priest who had been the model for Father Brown.

Chesterton left no first-person narrative of his reception that has passed into the public domain. But in The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), written a few years afterward, he set down his own account of what the process of conversion had been like — including this passage, which stands in his own words:

It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair.G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926)

In the same book he described the convert as passing through three stages of mind — beginning, he wrote, with a phase in which the inquirer imagines himself entirely detached.

the convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind. The first is when he imagines himself to be entirely detached, or even to be entirely indifferent, but in the old sense of the term, as when the Prayer Book talks of judges who will truly and indifferently administer justice.G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926)

Chesterton continued to write in defence of the faith, including his study of St. Thomas Aquinas (1933). He was born in London in 1874 and died at Beaconsfield in 1936.