One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the ’educated’ are completely orthodox. The most immediately striking thing about the English Roman Catholics, I don’t mean the real Catholics, I mean the converts: Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn et hoc genus, is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they are Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting from it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man. But the really interesting thing about these people is the way in which they have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest details of life are involved. Even the liquids you drink, apparently, can be orthodox or heretical; hen
