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[Douglas Hyde (1911–1996) was raised as a Methodist, but converted to communism at the age of 17. A man of tremendous energy and dedication, he rose to prominence in the British Communist Party, recruiting and training its leaders. In 1948, after ten years as chief editor of the Daily Worker, he took his comrades completely by surprise when he converted once again, this time to Catholicism. Decades later he took sharp exception to Pope John Paul II’s suppression of the (mainly) South American theologians of liberation, with their Marxist leanings and their “preferential option for the poor.” By the time of his death Hyde identified as a Christian agnostic. The following excerpt is taken from his 1950 book, I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist.]

Wherever I went I took pamphlets on Spain with me, selling them or leaving them in buses, trams and trains. And, like other communists, I would sometimes hurry into the porch of a Catholic church and make for the Catholic Truth Society’s literature rack, where pamphlets were being exhibited for sale. I would take out any which appeared to be anti-communist and put others on Spain in their place. I did not bother even to spare a glance for the churches themselves.

One Saturday, just as it was growing dark, I hurried into a church, pamphlets at the ready. Three little girls wearing convent school hats came out. To pass off what I was about, I asked them what they had been doing.

“We’ve been to Confession,” said one.

“What on earth have little girls like you got to confess?” I asked incredulously.

“Little girls sometimes forget to say their prayers,” replied the bright one of the three as they made for home.

I was appalled. Appalled to the point of fascination. I had not had a religious thought in my head for years. I had consciously made my life as blasphemous as I could.

Having put my pamphlets into the rack, I was turning to leave when I saw that lights were shining inside the church. Out of curiosity I peeped inside.

Through the gloom I could see a figure of Christ standing with garment opened at the chest on which was painted a vivid red heart—a Sacred Heart statue which meant less than nothing to me.

Other figures in gaudy colours, and equally lacking in taste, stood here and there. Red, blue and gold paint—lashings of gold—appeared to have been splashed about almost indiscriminately on the masonry, woodwork and stone walls. It jarred almost to a point of physical hurt. In the body of the church here and there people knelt and I watched lest they should make for the door and find the communist pamphlets in the rack, whilst I had my pockets stuffed with the Catholic ones I had removed.

One man rose and went into what I took to be a confessional box, as the woman who had just left it went to kneel in silent prayer.

It was all utterly alien to me. It represented superstition at is lowest depth. Yet suddenly for one brief moment the craziest and most outrageous of impulses took possession of me. I, too, wanted to go and confess. To say to the priest inside: “Look here, you who live in a world of your own, you are wasting your time. The children whose confessions you have heard have not come within a million miles of sinning. That man and woman still go to church. They live respectable lives. They believe in God. Here’s a real job for you. I’m up to my eyes in sin. I sin more in one day than they’ll sin in their whole lives. Confess me.”

The impulse was so mad, so preposterous, yet so strong and urgent that it all but swept me inside. Instead I stuffed a few more Red pamphlets into the rack, went out into the night—and blasphemed all the harder to get myself back to sanity again.

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