G K Chesterton was a literary genius, but he was no saint

If there weren’t already any number of GK Chesterton societies about, I’d probably set one up, just to share my views on his detective stories, his mastery of paradox, his literary criticism, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and his observation that “it takes three to make a quarrel; the full extremity of human fury has not been exhausted until some friend has tried tactfully to intervene”. Or maybe his introduction to one essay: “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong…”

Chesterton was a writer of genius, a genial and very funny man. One man who met him told me it was often hard to make out what he was saying because he was laughing all the time. He was the kind of polemicist you don’t get now: the public debates at the beginning of the last century between him and Bernard Shaw or HG Wells were famous as expressions of their world views – the abolition of private property on their side, the extension of it to as many people as possible on his.

Genius he was. But not a saint. Please, not a saint. Nevertheless, the Bishop of Northampton is reportedly considering whether to promote formally the case for Chesterton to be canonised. He is said to have got through one of the first hurdles on the way to sainthood (hard to imagine, given his bulk) by providing a miracle. Childless couples prayed to him for help – effectively, asking him to put a word in for them with God – and they duly had babies. If true, it would be poignant, given that Chesterton’s wife Frances was apparently repelled by sex to the point where it was difficult for them to consummate the marriage – think Ian Mcewan’s novel, On Chesil Beach, and then some – so they ended up childless.

But for the Catholic Church to declare someone a saint says something about the Church as well as about

the individual concerned. And if the Bishop of Northampton has any sense, he’ll park the matter of GK right there. Because Chesterton, for all his merits, was anti-semitic. This is an ongoing charge, although there are those who disagree: Canon John Udris, the cleric who was appointed in 2013 to look into the possibility of opening Chesterton’s cause, as it’s technically known, says he personally thinks he didn’t have a racist bone in his body.

It doesn’t wash, I’m afraid. You don’t have to read very much of Chesterton to see it. He was friendly with many Jews, but he felt that Jews were fundamentally not English, that Judaism mattered more to them than the countries where they lived – and that led him to embrace Zionism. This view, which Chesterton articulated before the Holocaust, was most fully expressed in his hair-raising suggestion that Jews in public life should wear Oriental dress, by way of reminder that they were not really English. It’s not acceptable, not now, not then, for a man, no matter how great in other ways, to be declared a saint who says as much. It is a flaw which all his other merits cannot put right. Canonising him would be, to put it mildly, impolitic.

At the same time, it would be stupid for us to reject GK and all his works because he was wrong about Judaism. We’re not very good nowadays at separating our disapproval of someone’s opinions from everything else about them, but Chesterton is too large and interesting a figure to be rejected on account of this big, bad error.

For myself, he’ll always be the patron saint of journalists – he was forever writing for the papers, usually in the pub. READ more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion