The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde flirted with Catholicism for most of his life. He was tempted to convert while an undergraduate at Oxford, but he was threatened with disinheritance by a fervently Protestant relative if he did, so perversely and typically became a freemason instead. He was later minded to follow his young seducer and devoted friend Robbie Ross into the Roman Church, but Robbie suspected (rightly) that Oscar would never be able to take the faith seriously. After all, Wilde had declared that ‘I am not a Catholic; I’m simply a violent Papist!’ and on another occasion, that the Catholic Church was ‘for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Chiurch will do.’ When he went to Rome after his release from prison, where he had served two years with hard labour for gross indecency with various young male persons, he was so excited by an audience with the Pope that he thought his walking stick was going to burst into bud, or so he quipped. This did not stop him engaging in a some hanky-panky with a young ordinand behind the altar in an Italian church.
It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that a new study of Wilde, by the Italian writer Paolo Gulisano, has just received a laudatory review in the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. Wilde is described in the article as a man ‘who, behind a mask of amorality, asked himself what was just and what was mistaken, what was true and what was false.’ It lauded him as ‘one of the personalities of the 19th century who lucidly analysed the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects.’ Wilde was eventually received into the Church on his death-bed in a small hotel in Paris. More than a century later, he has become a sort of secular saint, an iconic figure in the struggle for sexual liberation. But given the views on homosexuality held by the current Pope, Benedict XVI, it is hard to believe that Oscar is quite on the road to canonisation yet.
