Word: witcutt
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Seven-Year Grind. Anglican Witcutt became a Roman Catholic, and resolved to study for the priesthood. He persuaded Catholic authorities to waive their rule requiring converts to spend two years in the church before entering the seminary, and within a month of his reception into the church, plunged into a seven-year seminary grind at Oscott...
...writes Father Witcutt, "a seven years' intensive training in how to think . . . We studied every branch of philosophy and theology. Logic was our master and the syllogism our instrument." He was entranced by the church's scholastic system of theology, "glittering and shapely as a machine." Scholastic theology's two fundamentals, says Witcutt, are the Abstract Idea (the essence of every object is comprehensible only to the mind, which is immaterial, spiritual and immortal) and the Beatific Vision ("the plunge of the soul into the Divine...
...William Purcell Witcutt's mouth clicked shut like a snap lock when British reporters tried to interview him six years ago on his reasons for quitting the Roman Catholic Church and rejoining the Church of England. This week the lock opened smoothly with U.S. publication of Anglican Witcutt's Return to Reality (Macmillan; $1.65)-a well-written attack upon Roman Catholic doctrine...
...Witcutt, son of a Staffordshire merchant tailor, was studying law at Birmingham University when the attraction of G.K. Chesterton's anti-industrial theory of "Distributism" led him to Rome. Distributists took one look at the misery of the workingman and concluded that large-scale industry should be abolished in favor of a social-industrial structure more like that of the Middle Ages...
Since the leading Distributists seemed to be Catholics, Witcutt began to study the Roman Catholic system of thought. "It at once attracted me," he writes. "Here was an intellectual scheme moulded and shaped, it seemed, to include every detail. One had only to make an act of faith and one was settled, intellectually, for life. No more questions need be asked...