Seeing What's There

Interesting people.  Excerpts:

...Maisie was English, Edwardian, proper, upper-crust, ferociously Catholic, witty, likable, and incredibly intelligent. Born into a family of writers and editors, Maisie’s mind was as keen and expansive as Frank’s, and she was steeped in centuries of tough-as-nails English Catholicism. His family was poor; hers had money. For years, the Wards had rubbed shoulders with the major figures in the English Church. This heady atmosphere, cloudy with incense and ringing with Latin and chant and the glorious echoes of generations of recusant English Catholics, was immensely attractive to Sheed. He gravitated immediately to Maisie and her live-wire Catholic world...

Frank and Maisie worked with many of the great names of 20th-century Catholic literature: Fulton Sheen, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, John Hugo, Arnold Lunn, Dorothy Day, Ronald Knox, Caryll Houselander, Clare Luce, and Evelyn Waugh. He moved easily among these writers with an amiable self-effacement that won many admirers...

Invariably, Sheed started his guided tour of the faith with a preliminary discussion about reality itself. For him, there was no point in tackling issues such as the papacy or infant baptism unless one had first laid the proper groundwork. He approached apologetics the way a builder approaches a project: Start with the foundation, build the first floor, and then raise the building from there. If the foundation was laid properly, a structure of any height could be built upon it.  As far as Sheed was concerned, no one was more insane than the man who ignored or denied the existence of God...