If you are friends with me on FB and actually look me up and have not noted this, astute is probably not the best description you can have for yourself. I mean, if I spend 30 min. on FB, I'm
probably sharing at least five of either Chesty* or Lila Rose (or related) or both.
Unless I'm arguing on a FB group for Creation and against Evolution, for Flood and against Deep Time. For Angelic Movers and against Deep Space. For Freewill being real and against it being an illusion of law bound deterministic matter. That happens too.
Some who knew my MSN Group Antimodernism before it shut down in early 2009 will also know that I enumerated four authors who led me to the Catholic Faith in my youth, I can add from ages 9 to 25, to be precise ("don't be!"), these being in chronological order of my becoming their reader:
- C. S. Lewis
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
- Hilaire Belloc.
And the most obvious convert to the Catholic Church among these is Chesterton. CSL converted ... back to the Anglican Church he had stopped believing in after his mother died. JRRT actually did convert to the Catholic Church, but this is little known. He was too old to be received simply when his mother converted** so he had to go to Catechesis in order to convert. I think it was at age 12 he was received. Hilaire Belloc was a cradle Catholic, from an Anglo-French couple. The one person of the four who was first some kind of High Churchish Protestantism and then a Catholic, like my own case, was Gilbert.
So, if you have ever concluded he had sth to do with my conversion, you are right. He did not absolutely determine it, it was actually Tollers who gave me the clue when speaking of Anglicanism in the essay on English and Welsh, and it was in my case a matter of Church history: if the Church of England (that of CSL) or Church of Sweden (my own) were split off from the Catholic Church, I either had to defend splitting off, somehow, and it wasn't restorationism, like Joseph Smith would have defended it, or I had to sooner or later join the original Church.***
However, unlike Newman of whom I back then read only one book, the Apologia, Chesterton both accompanied my conversion and became a constant companion through my reading. So, here is on his conversion:
Why Chesterton Became Catholic: The Argument He Couldn't Escape
Catholic Frequency | 10 May 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1pp_TiUuN4
One part of my own argument was actually parallel to his, about agreeing with Catholicism, and this was the pro-life issue:
Thomas Aquinas Appears To A Pro-Choice Doctor... Then This Happens
Cameron Riecker | 9 May 202
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMISqjS4FxE
The video is slightly inaccurate in implying that Communist Yugoslavia was part of the Soviet Block. In economics, Tito was continuing while Stalin was discontinuing the NEP, the pro-Kulak policy, which as a Distributist I like. This also led to a rupture between Yugoslavia and the Warszaw Pact, I think even before it was actually formed. However, in lots of other areas, like abortion, like anti-Christian compulsory education, like secret police, it was Marxist, which as a Christian I totally abhor. Like Social Democracy has worked roughly speaking like a Fascism in economics° (also to my liking) but also has loads of Marxism, not unlike Yugoslavia. Both economies obviously functioned better than the Soviet Block, but that doesn't mean the societies were necessarily all that human. Man has other sides to his being than pure economics.
But the point is, I was already abortion banner before joining the Catholic Church. When I say abortion is murder, I'm not simply submitting to the authority of the Church, I already knew that before I accepted this authority. It was one of the reasons
for accepting it. Dito for my deep hatred of contraception. Chesterton shared these, but I already had these from mother before coming to him.
And as I was also a Young Earth Creationist on the day of my reception into the Church°° (or what I took to be such), you may imagine that my take on the Galileo trial was to a high degree caught by St. Robert Bellarmine defending Biblical inerrancy. I was OK with being allowed to be Deep Timer and Evolutionist if I wanted, I was OK with being allowed to be Heliocentric. I was even more OK with not being obliged to either. The book by Sister Broomé had recommended Heliocentrism as proven scientifically by parallax, but not presented this as obliging the conscience of the faith. At least, Heliocentrism wasn't proven in Galileo's day. Since 2001, I add: nor has it been proven since.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Sts. Philip and James, Apostles
11.V.2026
Natalis beatorum Philippi et Jacobi Apostolorum. Ex his Philippus, cum omnem fere Scythiam ad Christi fidem convertisset, tandem apud Hierapolim, Asiae civitatem, cruci affixus et lapidibus obrutus, glorioso fine quievit; Jacobus vero, qui et frater Domini legitur et primus Hierosolymorum Episcopus, e pinna Templi praecipitatus, confractis inde cruribus, ac fullonis fuste in cerebro percussus, interiit, ibique, non longe a Templo sepultus est.
* Not sure I should call him that, many who do are girls. ** When he was 8, I think. *** In my teens I simply didn't doubt that Caerularius split off from St. Leo IX rather than the inverse, in some of my adult years, I
did have such a doubt and became Romanian Orthodox between late 2006 and Pentecost of 2009, when a sermon by an Orthodox priest or bishop drove me back to Old Rome, that sermon endorsing contraception, at least implicitly. ° Specifically, the Swedish Fascist Engdahl, admirer of Mussolini and of Perón, said one of his men (Nysvenskar) was also a party member, a high ranking one, of Social Democrats, and helped form the Saltsjöbad policies. While the technical solution is different, both Fascism and Swedish Social Democracy have as obvious at least short to mid term goals that Employers and Employees should get along and the state help out so they didn't make a civil war or attempts of Revolution over wages. °° At this point, in 1988, there was not yet any CCC with its § 283. Sweden was not France and did not have
Pierres vivantes. Also, converts were not required to profess an obedience and acceptance of current positions of the magisterium, a profession "John Paul II" introduced in 1990, in a wording that doesn't make the adhesion conditional on its being a traditional position, unlike Trent Session IV (sententiam quam tenuit et adhuc tenet). I professed to accept what the Church "believeth, teacheth and proclaimeth to be revealed by God"
