Oscar Wilde’s long flirtation with the Catholic Church was consummated with his deathbed conversion in Paris in 1900. The event continues to cause controversy. Some biographers dismiss it as performative, or as a priestly trick. How, the thinking goes, could this Anglo-Irish paragon of artistic and sexual freedom possibly have gone over to reactionary Rome?
As G. K. Chesterton put it, Wilde ultimately “desired all beautiful things — even God.” Wilde, who once enjoyed a private audience with Pope Pius IX, moved among artists and poets who were alternately repulsed and attracted by what he described as “the artistic side of the church, and the fragrance of its teaching.” The poet Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s former lover, would later convert to Catholicism. The poet John Gray, another of his notable onetime companions, became a Catholic priest.
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