TO JOSEPH PETER DE FONSEKA, OTHERWISE J.P. DE FONS, OTHERWISE J.P.
DEAR MR. DE FONSEKA AND MY DEAR SIR,
You have recently delighted the readers of our Ceylon Catholic weekly with so many epistles to so many addresses. May it please you now to receive this epistle to your own address.
Not that it can ever hope to match yours for charm and ease of style, for choice of phrase and the mot juste, for humour and hilarity. But may it take on some value from the fact that it is after all an epistle, and to you, and so lucus a non lucendo, as you yourself I think quoted in another and memorable context—in your famous Preface to the Prefaces in “G. K. C. as M.C.”
In these recent months you have bulked large in the Catholic landscape of this country. Of course there are those who have eyes for your physical bulk and have made it the subject of naughty witticisms and cruel jests. Thus a fellow scribe once wrote that “there’s acre upon acre of J. P. de Fonseka”. Now that was cruel. But then in this matter you have, in the true Chestertonian manner, set the good or bad example yourself, for all to follow.
But what the future Catholic historian of this country will have to reckon with will be the acre upon acre of your Catholic opera omnia, We are so close to it that we have perhaps failed to realise the prodigious and staggering proportions of your Catholic literary output. Your weekly contributions to the columns of the Catholic Messenger, your frequent contributions to other Catholic journals in this country and abroad, should indeed cover a tremendous acreage.
In a radio talk on Catholic Literature I once paused to refer to the literary giant that you are, disciple of the Chester-Belloc school, and was consequently cut off on the stroke of the clock before I could complete my survey of Catholic literature. But I figured out that that mattered little so long as you were placed in your niche.
The great living apostle and writer that is Father Martindale has paid you the compliment of calling you Ceylon’s Douglas Woodruff. English and American, Australian and Indian papers have taken up your articles for the benefit of their vast reading public. Your articles have even been done into French; and I suppose, now that the Catholic Digest is rendered into other languages besides English, into many other languages as well.
Your acquaintance with the great English men and women of letters was not that of the importunate pressman being granted a few moments’ interview. Your relationship with them was that of a true and intimate and esteemed friend, as I have reason to know. And this friendship was with writers of the calibre of E. V. Lucas and Sir John Squire, Chesterton and Belloc, Sheed and the Meynells and Walter de la Mare, Sir Philip Gibbs, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and a host of others. And that, dear Mr. de Fonseka, is no mean achievement.
You might have made a bid for fame, in the home of the English language, as a writer, a writer of secular prose and verse. You might do so yet. But that, I also know, is not your ambition. A clerical friend once complained about your literary output in England that he wished it had more Christ-colour. Well, even if the complaint were true, you have more than made amends in these later years by the utter Christocentricity of your writing. Your work has been shot through and through with Christ, and with Paul you can say that you have preached naught but Christ.
Only a few months ago you wrote an epistle to the almost octogenarian Belloc, entitling it “Epistle to a Living Doctor of the Church”. Well, you arc OUR living Doctor of the Church in these parts, though you lack the Psalmist’s three score and ten and the new Bellocian beard. You have come to be accepted as the spokesman of the Catholic Church in Ceylon, and rightly so, for if anyone is the living embodiment of the Catholic spirit, you are.
You have achieved the Church’s ideal of the perfect Catholic gentleman, able to give an account of the faith that is in him; of the lay Catholic living the complete Catholic life, with an intellectus quaerens fidem and a fides quaerens intellectum – a living, intelligent, intellectual fighting Catholic with a colossal conviction of the truth of his faith, a rare and deep understanding of its immensity and grandeur and intimacy—this faith which as Mr. Belloc once said, is as intimate as a great love. The Catholic Faith, in an utterly real and true sense, is the centre and inspiration of your life.
You have taken up cudgels against secular pundits and potty pressmen who, whether through ignorance or bad faith or both, have dared attack the Catholic truth. With a thorough understanding of the res catholica (the Catholic thing), a complete mastery of the Catholic thesis, you countered error and expounded truth, also as Mr. Belloc has done—here, there, and anywhere, even in the most unexpected places.
I still remember an open and friendly letter you wrote to Mr. A. P. Herbert in the columns of the Ceylon Daily News on the occasion of Mr. Herbert’s visit to Ceylon. Referring to Mr. Herbert’s efforts in the direction of a reform of the English Marriage Law you said, in a simple but devastating sentence: “God Almighty made the laws of marriage; you, my dear Mr. A. P. Herbert, have revised them”.
It was a non-Catholic writer who, in a flight of verse, referred to you as the “fons et origo of all that we know”. And so indeed you are. You have always expounded your philosophy with a lot of joy and laughter. But quid vetat ridentem verum dicere? And if there have been those who have taken the laughter and forgotten the philosophy, the fault is all theirs.
In these recent months you have received due recognition and thanks from the Church that you have served. That is as it should’ be. But I am sure that if, as it was asked of Aquinas, it were asked of you: “Thou hast written well of me, Joseph, what wilt thou have?”, pat will come the answer, Aquinas-like: “Nil nisi Te Dominc … .naught but Thee, Lord, naught but Thee”.
For only He can be your reward, exceeding great. The rest will pass—like the Pope’s own temporal royalty—sic transit gloria mundi. The One remains, the many change and pass. You have been so valiant a champion of that one and only real Unity.
You will remember those beautiful lines, written on Mr. Chesterton’s death, “Knight of the Holy Ghost he goes his way”. Go your way, brave Knight of the Holy Ghost. And may I, concluding this epistle, make mine the words of the Gradual of the Mass of a Doctor of the Church and apply them to you: “The mouth of the just utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks of justice. The law of his God is in his heart, and his footsteps shall never waver”. May your footsteps never waver, dear Mr. de Fonseka, till they have reached the threshold of the City of God.
For the rest, I am and remain,
Dear MR. DE FONSEKA
and my Dear Sir,
Your friend and beneficiary.
Justin Perera
(Blue and White, 1948)