Conversion

The day after the election of Pope Pius XII last March, lumbering, untidy, gentle-hearted Heywood Broun wrote a respectful column in which he said:

"Quite recently I talked to a newspaper friend of mine who is now a priest. I said to him that I wanted to know if there was anything in Catholicism which stood in the way of any person who believed in political and economic progressivism. And my friend smiled and answered: 'Don't you realize that you're a little naive, Heywood? You like to call yourself a radical, but the doctrines of the Church to which I belong imply so many deep changes in human relationship that when they are accomplished--and they will be--your own notions will be nothing more than an outmoded pink liberalism.'

"Whenever the Church militant begins to march there is no force in the armaments of dictators which can stay its progress."

For Heywood Broun, these seemed strange words indeed. Although he had never attacked a Christian church as such, he had in the past laid about him in bludgeoning fashion among the churches, belaboring reactionaries like Bishop James Cannon Jr., Canon William Sheafe Chase, Anthony Comstock (in a biography he helped write). To many a U. S. churchman, Heywood Broun was a Red, certainly a freethinker, probably an atheist.

But last week Heywood Broun was about to accept his marching orders in the Church militant. Gossip-column rumors that he had been converted to Catholicism were, he admitted privately, true. Thus his conversion became the most spectacular since the late Colonel Horace A. Mann's in 1933 (Colonel Mann was credited with handing out anti-Catholic propaganda during the Smith-Hoover campaign).

Brought up in a substantial Episcopal family, Heywood Broun is one of the ablest Bible-quoters in U. S. journalism. At Harvard he was most influenced by a course in the Bible as English Literature. He is today happily married to a Catholic second wife--Constantina Maria Incoronata Fruscella Dooley ("Connie") Broun. But "Connie," firm as she is in dealing with her husband, did not bully him into turning Catholic. Broun's conversion came slowly, was sealed in the talk with the newspaper friend turned priest--Rev. Edward Patrick Dowling, S. J., 40, associate editor of the Queen's Work in St. Louis, distant kinsman of Actor Eddie Dowling. Jesuit Dowling, once a crack baseballer, called "Puggy" by St. Louis schoolmates, worked on the Globe-Democrat before he became a priest in 1931, is today a member of Broun's Newspaper Guild.

To become a Catholic, it is not enough to tell the nearest priest that you want to join the Church. You must hold an intellectual conviction that the Church is the True Church. You must then exhibit a "good will to believe" in God's revelation. Finally you must make the act of faith, wholly supernatural, in God. At present Heywood Broun is receiving instruction in Catholic belief from one of the ablest of U. S. priests, Monsignor Fulton John Sheen (who also instructed Convert Mann). Columnist Broun will be received into the Church late this month. Thereafter he may well become the U. S. equivalent of a famed British convert--the late Gilbert Keith Chesterton, stylist, wit, rough-&-tumble fighter for the Faith.

* His first, Ruth Hale, divorced him, died in 1934-

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