<strong>10TH DECEMBER 1982</strong>
<em>Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge joined the Church ten days ago. Christopher Howse meets them in their Sussex home.</em><br><br>Kitty Muggeridge's aunt, Beatrice Webb, was not pleased when Malcolm started, upon his return from Russia in 1932, to write of the horrors and starvation there. He ought to "go off and join the Roman Catholic Church and confess and be absolved," she said, huffily.<br><br>Fifty years later that is what they have both done; and they are very happy about it. Kitty was sitting on the sofa away from the fire, propped with cushions and dispensing endless cups of tea from a pot cocooned in a thick cosy which snapped up with a metal clasp, like Miss Murdstone's purse. She was looking very beautiful, with her intent features framed by her steel grey hair. She wore buckled blue suede shoes, grey woollen stockings, a thick red skirt and jersey, with a black neckerchief.
"It was a marvellous service," says Muggeridge, "I'm very taken with that bishop, I get the impression he is a good man. And of course Bidone is a marvellous man."<br><br>It was to Fr Paul Bidone that Muggeridge wrote in August to arrange his reception into the Church. What impressed Muggeridge about him?<br><br>"First of all he looks after these Mongol children, and does it extremely well. I've seen quite a lot of his establishments. I think he's a very holy man. Being received into the Church at this time was more due to him than anybody. It's because of what he is and because he said to me things which made it seem almost inevitable that it was the appropriate and natural and right thing to do."<br><br>Muggeridge attacked the log fire in the grate forcefully with a pair of tongs. He sat upright on one side of the fire on a little plush-covered chair. It had two worn patches on the pile where he propped himself up with his hands.<br><br>In his diaries, at the age of 21, Muggeridge blames himself for having glimpses of the infinite, and not having the guts to follow it up. Does he still blame himself for being such a long time on the road?<br><br>"Well I probably ought to. The fact is it seems pointless to blame. You have to accept things that happened in this way for good or ill. But most people think that I received a late visitation — it's not at all true. I've been haunted all my life by this. And I've never in my whole life felt happier or more serene about it than at this moment."<br><br>In Muggeridge's life there seems to have been a sort of wave movement towards and away from God. In 1932, before going to Russia, he got rid of his wedding certificate.<br><br>"That was a different thing — the last dying flicker of believing in a kingdom of heaven on earth, in which I was brought up. I was brought up to believe that if my father, whom I adored and do, and his friends took over power then everybody would be happy ever after.
“So wanting to go to Moscow was due to the fact that in the circumstances of the first big depression that the game was up, and I still think it is up: The alternative then, it seemed to me, was the Soviet regime. Having found that that was not so and never could be so — that man was incapable by virtue of his nature of creating a kingdom of heaven on earth, of course one looked more than ever for a kingdom of heaven in heaven. And for the Incarnation which is the link between the two."<br><br>Kitty observes, "When I was a kid I used to believe very strongly in God. I thought my mother was an angel. But it wasn't belief in any kind of orthodoxy. When we lived in Switzerland, it was a Catholic Canton and when we went up in the mountains, every now and then there would be a shrine with a crucifix and flowers. Once a year there'd be a procession to a little chapel, carrying figures of the Virgin Mary. I suppose that probably had an effect on me."
Muggeridge has always seen pain as part of the world's pattern, instead of an argument against God's goodness.<br><br>"I have never felt that objection, or that people should be made unhappy or that people should suffer. If I could generalise — a key thought which came to me early on is embodied in the sentence which I've so often used — that life is a drama, not a process.<br><br>"Christianity is an exemplification of that. For instance, in the drama of the Incarnation, there had to be a Judas. Our Lord in a way conveyed that — which had often puzzled me when I was first familiar with the Gospels — that he knew Judas was going to betray him, but still he washed his feet with the others, and gave him the first Sacrament with the others.”
In 1978, Muggeridge said: "When one reaches my age, one must choose between suicide and sainthood. I have chosen sainthood." Now he thinks sainthood rather a ridiculous thing to have said. Kitty suggests faith would have been the right word, then Muggeridge continues:<br><br>"God has ultimately given us faith. There is nothing else in human life worth speaking of. As a near octogenarian, there isn't any value except faith," he says.
"Love," interposes Kitty.<br><br>In the early thirties, the Muggeridges asked Alec Vidler to baptise their children, but he refused, thinking that they hardly knew what they meant. Muggeridge himself had only been baptised to qualify him to enter Selwyn College, Cambridge. Kitty was baptised because her mother thought there might just be a Hell and wanted her children to keep out of it.<br><br>"Underneath she was very spiritual, but her arguments for things were idiotic. The funny thing is that she should tell us this. So I always knew why I'd been baptised, and that made me believe it. I wasn't frightened of hell as a child. I always said to God 'Do have my mother in heaven, because she's an angel'."<br><br>Muggeridge asked for some fresh tea; he drinks it in quantities equal to his hero Dr Johnson.<br>In 1936 Muggeridge and Kitty agreed in conversation that the survival of truth in the Church was an astounding thing. That was one thing which persuaded them to enter the Church on the last day of the liturgical year more than four decades later. "It can't ever depart from its foundation which is Chris <br><br>Muggeridge had been troubled when he moved to Christianity by the trendy vicars in the Church of England. "One of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church very strongly was my utter dissatisfaction with the state of the Anglican church. And I think if the Catholic Church ever unites with it, be uniting with a corpse."<br><br>Dusk has descended over the Muggeridge's Sussex cottage, with its low-pitched tile roof and white ends. The branches stand out black against the sky. Birds gather in the empty fields. Kitty and Malcolm Muggeridge plan the observance of their new religion with the enthusiasm of neophytes.<br><em><br>Photo: Malcolm Muggeridge (Getty Images).</em><br><br><em><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-black-color">Malcolm Muggeridge</mark> (24 March 1903 - 24 Nov. 1990) was a British journalist and social critic. An outspoken and controversial iconoclast, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Malcolm-Muggeridge"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">notes</mark></a> the </em>Britannica<em> website, he targeted liberalism and other aspects of contemporary life with his stinging wit and elegant prose. He was early an avowed atheist but moved gradually to embrace Roman Catholicism. He wrote some 30 books, including satiric novels and religious accounts, and from the 1950s was a popular interviewer, panelist, and documentarian on British television.</em>
<em>Kathleen Muggeridge (née Dobbs; 8 December 1903 – 11 June 1994) was a British writer and translator. Like her husband, she became an admirer of the Calcutta-based nun Mother Teresa, about whom she wrote a book, Bright Legacy (1983), a work published the year after the couple had become Catholics. In that period, she translated two books by Jean Pierre de Caussade, the 18th-century French Jesuit priest.</em>
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