Letter

              15th November, 1937.
Rev. L. O'Hea, S.J., M.A., 
Catholic Social Guild, 
OXFORD.
Dear Father O'Hea,
I am very much obliged to you for your letter of the 9th November, and thank you very much for writing to me at the suggestion of Mr. R.C. Ellison, sending me some brochures descriptive of your work. I hope you will not mind, however, if I mention to you with due respect that, as a Catholic interested in public affairs in this country and elsewhere, I am already aware of the work of the Catholic Social Guild and try as far as is possible to follow its work. With many of its statements I profoundly disagree. You will have had an idea of my views and my knowledge from the letters which I sent you some months ago on the Spanish Civil War. This correspondence was initiated by you, when you wrote to me expressing regret at my non-attendance at the Annual Dinner of the Westminster Catholic Federation, but I have never even yet had the courtesy of an acknowledgment of my letters.
I am one of those Catholics who in the obiter dictum of Daniel O'Connell is prepared to accept my religion from Rome but not my politics. I have my own political convictions and my conscience is perfectly free in fitting in my political convictions, which are extremely Left, with the Catholic religion as taught to me, and with the words of our Saviour. Many Catholic clerics, judging from their pulpit pronouncements, do not desire intelligent Catholics to be men, but would prefer worms, ready to do the bidding of any reactionary partisan pronouncement made by an individual garbed in clerical clothing. As the grandson of an Irish Catholic Priest, I decline to allow myself and a personality which God has given to me to be put into that subservient position. I am hoping in the near future to be engaged — God and time being willing — on the writing of a book on the Catholic Church and Democracy, narrating my experience of life as I have seen it, and the anti-democratic tendencious character of many of the observations made by Catholic clerics of high standing. So much so has
/ the position