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[Both David Jones, a Welsh poet, and Christopher Dawson, an English historian, were Catholic converts. In a letter to a friend Jones described a meeting he had with Dawson in wartime London, written on ‘the Glorious First of June, 1942’ (the day the RAF launched a 1000-bomber raid on Essen, Germany).]

He [Dawson] said he found that Catholics, in his experience, since he became a Catholic, were getting far more, not less, ‘institutional’ (in the bad sense) and mechanical, so to say. That the age of von Hugel, the ‘belief’ in the Holy Ghost, in the subtlety of where truth resides etc. seemed far away—and a belief in effecting things by organization and formulas etc., etc. (among Catholics) growing rather than lessening. In short, that ‘propaganda’ is universally dominant in the Church as outside it, and once you yield interiorly to the propagandist attitude you’re sunk. We talked about how that one of the ‘condemned propositions’ of Luther was ‘that the burning of heretics is offensive to the Spirit’—well that the burning of heretics is offensive to the Spirit is obviously true—condemnation or no condemnation. Yet rather than make this admission they go in for all kinds of beating about the bush to justify the papal absurdity—all of which is a pity and quite irrelevant to the truth of the Catholic Religion.

[Hilaire Belloc was a combative defender of Catholicism who was noted for his candour. He is reported to have made the following remark to William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944:]

The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine—but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

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