Why didn't C.S. Lewis become Catholic?

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]What is it about C.S. Lewis's relationship to the Catholic Church and in a way, [music] why didn't he become Catholic?

[00:00:06]Yeah, I mean it's like the one of the questions that always makes me wince a little bit when you have Q&A sessions after you've given a talk is you know, why did C.S. Lewis never become Catholic? And I the reason I wince is that you can give quick soundbite answers and they might be true up to they are true but only up to a point.

[00:00:23]It's really just quite scratching the surface, [music] which is why I wrote that book of about 70 70 or so thousand words. I mean to to actually look at Lewis's relationship with the Catholic Church. Uh it wasn't all negative but there were prejudices.

[00:00:34]In fact, it was he became more and more Catholic the older he got and by the time he died, he was a basically a very very orderly Catholic non-Catholic so to speak. In his letters to Malcolm, yeah, wrote chiefly on prayer, uh he makes it clear that he believes in purgatory. He also there was an option among uh Anglicans to go to auricular to go to like impersonal in-person out loud confession, which he went to. Yeah, so he he went to confession. He believed in purgatory, right? These are things that uh would be unusual [music] for your average um you know, evangelical Protestant of his day or of ours.