It is strange that two highly intellectual men should be affected so differently, you being attracted to join the Catholic Church, McCabe impelled to leave it.

It is not strange. Intellectual attainments have really little to do with it, in the ultimate analysis. Brains alone cannot bring a man to Christian truth, and brains alone will not keep him in it. Christ did not say, “Come to Me, all ye intellectual people, and I will refresh you.” If knowledge of religious truth and faith in it depended upon brains, heaven would be filled with the intellectual, and hell with the dull-witted. Goodness and brains do not always go together. You can have intellectual and cultured scoundrels. Christ appealed to men of good will. He demanded humility of all the human children who wished to be children of God. “God resists the proud and gives His grace to the humble.” Where is human wisdom before God’s infinite knowledge? Where is old age before His eternity? Or human strength before His omnipotence? God rightly demands that we acknowledge our true position. McCabe forgot it. He forfeited God’s grace, left the Church, and in doing so left the Christ who established it Meantime, McCabe left the Church after twelve years in a monastery; I joined the Church, and have been twenty years in a monastery. I became a Catholic with nothing to gain from this world’s point of view, entered Religious Life, and took the same three vows which McCabe renounced. The odds are against insincerity when a step is costly to human nature. But not when a man leaves the Church for an obviously lower standard of living.

Radio Replies Volume 1 by Rev. Dr. Leslie Rumble MSC and Rev. Charles Mortimer Carty