Difficulties

The Catholic faith and difficulty seem to go hand in hand. “It’s very diff­icult being a Catholic,” laments Sebastian Flyte of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; the Christian ideal, in Chesterton’s phrasing, “has been found difficult; and left untried.” In Difficulties, Arnold Lunn and Ronald Knox set forth to find these difficulties and try them for truth. In 1930, the agnostic Lunn suggested to Knox that they collaborate on a book that might serve as a proving-ground for the veracity of the Catholic Church’s claims: Lunn advancing the objections to those claims; Knox aiming to resolve them. Ranging from papal infallibility to the sacraments and beyond, their correspondence encapsulates a drama of faith and reason, enacted against the candid background of Knox’s undisturbed conviction that while difficulties do exist and always will, they do figure in divine providence and will not prevent anyone of good will from finding the faith. 

Only the difficulties will have altered; it will be the same Truth. (Ronald Knox)

On the evidence, Difficulties bears Knox out: three years after their correspondence began, Lunn entered the Catholic Church, a testament to the saving work that grace will accomplish in those with honesty of mind and openness of heart.

Paperback. 308 pages.