The Conversion of Chauncey Stillman

Chauncey Stillman's Chapel, Wethersfield

Below is a letter of Chauncey Stillman explaining to his sister the reasons for his conversion to the Catholic faith. Stillman was the founder of the Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard, which was first held by Christopher Dawson. He also founded the Wethersfield Institute “to promote a clear understanding of Catholic teaching and practice and to explore the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the Catholic faith.”

Dearest Elizabeth,
I’ve long put off writing you this letter wondering how to do it without distressing you. Now I rely most earnestly on your love and respect, and Lang’s, for sympathy when I tell you that I am taking a step of greatest significance to me: that is joining the Catholic Church. Only two considerations mar my happiness about it – that you may be troubled at first to learn it, and that I will henceforth be attending a different service from Lily and Theo. To you two, as to them eventually, I owe some account of the path that has led me to conversion.

Summarily – too simply put to mean much – of course my reason is that I am convinced that the whole truth is contained in the Catholic Faith. Chesterton remarked, “It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it, they feel the tug towards it.” As you know, I’ve felt this tug for years. To resist it longer would be a denial, a refusal to bear witness to the light as I see it.

Many years ago I started finding that every secular expression of the human spirit that struck me as valid, beautiful, wholesome, could be traced back, if one sought far enough, to the mainstream of Christianity, usually pre-Reformation. This proved true of architecture, painting, music; economics, social ethics, psychology, – even romantic poetry. It took me a long time (me lazy, scatter-brained, and no scholar) to face up to the inference that all these peripheral paths that I wandered across led from a central highway.

An obstacle has been the notion that the Catholic Faith required a servile, unreasoning submission to authority. Fortunately life has given me a number of Catholic friends, notably Louis Warren, Martha Hamlen, and the Emmett Rieras. Although I have never seriously discussed religion with any of them, their lives have shown me that the assumption that they were in any way unfree was a chimera. Gradually my distrust of spiritual authority per se dissolved, to be replaced by the desire for duty, enrollment, under such authority as “an obligation freely undertaken.”

Here my navy experiences helped by an analogy. Submission to authority, it became plain to me, is a condition of honorable service. For instance, in the navy there were men above me to whom I must submit, and men below me to whom I must transmit authority. My own effectiveness and peace of mind depended on subordination, on my acceptance of my place in an order. So, in creation, I as a man rank somewhere between animal and angel. The Church recognizes, reflects this hierarchic condition of man. She doesn’t expect each seaman or junior officer to route the task force or to write fleet doctrine, but she requires his full duty for the successful accomplishment of the entire mission. When a man sets out on a long combat voyage he does well to travel with professional officers, the most reliable charts, and tested instruments.

I feel in this step I make no repudiation of any positive tenet of the Episcopal Church. I am grateful for familiarity with “her august and passionate liturgy,” for having known such ministers as Bishop Rhinelander, Arthur Ketchum, and Tooie Kinsolving. In joining the Catholic Church I feel I am abandoning no birthright but reclaiming the full one that your and my ancestors enjoyed for some 1500 years, then relinquished some 450 years ago. I have found the rooted tree from which the branch was lopped. 

As an undergraduate I was surprised to hear Bishop Rhinelander remark that the Protestant Reformation was the greatest tragedy in history. I remembered the remark on reading Belloc to the effect that the tragedy was two-fold in that the north lost the full faith whereas the Catholic Church lost “the genius of the north.” I guess he means that she lost the peculiar contribution that lay within the Teutonic (including Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian) people. I mention this realizing ruefully how alien to us yankees the surface of Catholic practice and people can seem. But I have learned to distinguish between faith and its temporal vessels.

Solely on my own hook I sought instruction, choosing a priest mainly because his office was on 76th Street and Madison. No friend has been consulted. I have never been proselytized; in fact I have been lengthily and rather austerely quizzed on my sincerity.

I doubt if my external life will show much change. I daresay I will continue to be a stumbling, erratic person. But I know I will get back on course more quickly after each aberration, and with no more wanderings into “adventures of discontent.” I know that I will continue and increase in the love of the same people, particularly yourselves.

Always devotedly,

Chauncey

July 1951

to my sister, written longhand of course
(copy kept for my daughters)

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