Auberon Waugh was given last rites

By Luke Coppen AUBERON WAUGH, the brilliant satirist, wit and former Catholic Herald columnist, received the "last rites" shortly before died last week, aged 61.
The son of novelist and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh received the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick in hospital where he was being treated for a heart condition. He died later at his home in Combe Morey, Somerset.
The anointing marked a final return to the Faith for the writer who had abandoned Mass-going after his father's death in 1966.
Educated at Downside (where he claimed to hold the record for the most beatings in a single terra), "Bron" Waugh inherited his father's staunch traditionalism. He felt that the Second Vatican Council had created a "new religion" different to the one to which his father had pledged allegiance and stopped practising.
"Depressed as one may be by the Church's retreat from spirituality, dismayed by its inept doctrine on contraception and disgusted by the language and form of its new services, a certain philosophical theism is bound to survive if only to explain the otherwise inexplicable," he wrote in his autobiography.
His faith was still strong, however, when he joined The Catholic Herald at the tender age of 23. Signed up to write political commentary for eight guineas a week, he used his column to alternately provoke, offend and delight the paper's readers. He left the paper after just 18 months following an avalanche of what he termed "Hang Waugh" letters.
Friends and family were expected to attend a funeral Mass on Wednesday at St Mary the Virgin Anglican church, Bishops Lydeard, Taunton. The Mass was to be followed by a private burial service in the graveyard beside the writer's home in Combe Florey.
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