ABSTRACT
During his last trip to Rome in April 1900, Oscar Wilde wrote: “My position is curious: I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent papist.” A few months later, he was received into the Church on his deathbed, years after having first flirted with Roman Catholicism while a student at Oxford. This essay attempts to show that the Church that fascinates Wilde is not so much a community of believers or a hierarchical structure as it is the locus of a highly subjective experience; private judgement (religious or aesthetic) is at the heart of his “religion,” and he tends to see the Roman Church through a fundamentally Protestant lens. Of course, the main element of attraction in Catholicism for Wilde is precisely that it is not Protestant and thus represents an un-English, exotic world of Latin, incense clouds, and beautiful vestments. Yet, at the same time, Wilde focuses on aspects of the Catholic faith that are most polemical in the late-Victorian context—the very same aspects that are highlighted and denounced in the anti-Catholic pamphlets of the time. The chapter focuses on three of these controversial Catholic motifs that Wilde dwells upon and develops in several of his works, namely, the cult of the Virgin Mary, Eucharistic devotion, and, finally, Rome and the figure of the Pope, in order to show that Wilde’s Catholic temptation, just like Dorian Gray’s, is perhaps first and foremost a revolt against the society that shaped him, a Protestant’s provocation geared at his own world.
