Reflections of a stormy petrel

I take your corrections about Irish history, the more so as I have written my article on Fascism exactly to challenge the same kind of politically motivated rewriting of recent history of my own country which you decry. My basic point was, I know who and what Fascists are - incredibly, I have even had Fascist friends. So I regard Mr.Goldberg's thesis as an imposition. About the Black and Tans, I generalized from the life history of William Joyce, the man who became Lord Haw-Haw, who certainly was an Irishman, fought in WWI, and became a Black and Tan. All his later politics were dictated by his embitterment in the years that followed the war. My point was not that Lewis would ever have become a Black and Tan - I agree that his upper-middle class background would not have agreed with becoming a cheap pseudo-soldier - but that he came from a group which essentially had their own country taken away from them about 1922. Lewis described himself as an "Irishman" (not an "ulsterman", a definition he associated with sectarianism) to the end of his life, and while his swift entrance into Oxford gave him opportunities that less fortunate loyalists may not have had, we cannot imagine that the transformation of three-quarters of his fatherland into a foreign country did not affect him; the more so as he met Coghill there, with his stories of IRA brutality. He said himself that he had "been taught from the cradle never to trust a Catholic", and that meeting with such men as Tolkien and Dr.Havard had been a real revelation. And may I say, I have met a few Anglicans and a few Protestants in my life. When I come across someone who gives as much value to the first part of the Scriptural injunction to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" as to the second, "for it is God Who works within you", and indeed makes it one of his most frequent quotations; who does not like hymns; who believes in Purgatory; who is conscientious about the details of the sacrament of marriage to the point of lawyerliness; who regards the Eucharist as the holiest thing you will ever encounter, transcending human reason; who has the highest possible regard for the priesthood, and not only for the Anglican but for the Catholic priesthood (read his correspondence with Don Giovanni Calabria); and who seems to pattern himself after GK Chesterton - well, I think I have some reason to ask, Why are you not Catholic?