Evelyn Waugh Catholic Quotes & Sayings

The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh. — Maureen Howard

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being. — Evelyn Waugh

Do you know last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I'd decided to have it brought up a Catholic? I hadn't thought about religion before; I haven't since; but just at that time, when I was was waiting for the birth, I thought, 'That's the one thing I can give her. It doesn't seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.' It was odd, wanting to give something one had lost oneself — Evelyn Waugh

Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but you're holding too much back. I've had a long talk with a Catholic-a very pious, well-educated one, and I've learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a Cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there mayn't be a good reason for all this, but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself. — Evelyn Waugh

I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith. — Evelyn Waugh

The best I can tell you in that way is that I'm much more at ease with fellow-Catholics than I am with heathens or Protestants. One has so many basic assumptions in common that there's so much that doesn't need saying, and when you're talking to even the most amusing and intelligent heathen you suddenly find that something you've said has no meaning at all to them. — Evelyn Waugh

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land. — Evelyn Waugh

I've usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest. — Evelyn Waugh