Michael Coren
The Interim

Joe Pearce and I have a shared background. We’re almost the same age and we grew up in Essex in the United Kingdom just a few miles from one another. Similar working-class backgrounds, similar schooling, similar interest in soccer. But there the links exploded. My father was Jewish and had lost family members in the Holocaust. Joe embraced extremist far-right politics, edited a magazine of the fascist National Front and led its youth movement. It may well have been that we attended the same demonstrations, on opposite sides of the police lines that separated fascist from anti-fascist.

Yet, now we are friends and colleagues, he in the United States and me in Canada. The reason? Our journeys were completed in the Roman Catholic church. Both of us became Catholics and have devoted our lives to journalism and broadcasting and the writing of books. Worlds apart to citizens in the same perfect world. And Joseph Pearce is now one of the most exciting voices in Christian literature.

Born in 1961, his involvement with fascist politics was severe. He was the youngest member of the main British fascist party’s governing body and was imprisoned twice for inciting racial hatred. He has written at length about this period: “During the first of my prison sentences, Auberon Waugh, a well-known writer and son of the great Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, referred to me as a ‘wretched youth.’ How right he was! I was wretched and wrecked upon the rock of my own hardness of heart.

Years later, when asked by the priest who was instructing me in the Catholic faith to write an essay on my conversion, I began it with the opening lines of John Newton’s famous hymn extolling the ‘amazing grace … that saved a wretch like me.’”

He continued: “Even today, when forced to look candidly into the blackness of my past, I am astonished at the truly amazing grace that somehow managed to take root in the desert of my soul. How was I freed from the prison of my sinful convictions? How was I brought from the locked door of my prison cell to the open arms of Mother Church?”

He had written as a fascist and now, with a voice of purity, he uses his gifts for Christ. In the past 15 years, the books and articles have appeared in astounding numbers. Biographies and biographical studies of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien, Roy Campbell and Oscar Wilde. Books on C.S. Lewis and Catholicism, a wonderful account of literary converts, works on Solzhenitsyn, a highly impressive novel and frequent journalism.

Since 2001, he has been co-editor of the Saint Austin Review, a Catholic journal. In 2004, he moved to the Florida campus of Ava Maria University in Naples. And he is a champion of light and life.

“With regard to left and right, I think we should remember that these are themselves Enlightenment concepts,” he wrote. “We should try to get out of the habit of employing such terms. We should ditch right and left and return to the more sensible discussion of right and wrong! If we do this, we will open up the terms of engagement. We will not see Greens as on the left and therefore as being fundamentally on the wrong side. We will see them as being right on issues such as localism and decentralization and wrong in their adherence to the culture of death and the sexual hedonism which is a large part of its cause.

“We can then engage them in constructive dialogue by showing them that the enshrining of selfishness, which is what they do in their hedonistic ‘do your own thing’ approach to sexual issues, is at loggerheads with the spirit of self-limitation necessary to conserve resources and the environment. Self-indulgence is the killer of the environment as much as it is the killer of babies. Problems are not solved by mechanisms, but by virtue. The wrongs of the right are not solved by the rights of the left; but the wrongs on both sides are solved by believing and doing what is right!”

So from a history of racism and violence and hatred for Catholicism, Joseph Pearce becomes a champion of truth and Christian love in the direct tradition of the great, roaring masters of the past. A deeply humble man, he would doubtless be embarrassed to be named in the company of Chesterton, Belloc, Lewis and Knox, but he is most certainly their comrade.

His life, as well as his writing, show how everything is possible with God. Which is a message we in the pro-life movement need to repeat as we are libelled and slandered by the culture of self and death. Joe Pearce heard it as a young man in a prison cell. Now he is with us and for us. A lesson for our times. A lesson for life.