WILLIAM TEELING
TWO or three years after the last war there appeared in Oxford a gay and enterprising Undergraduate ol Magdalen, smartly dressed, quick to move mind or limbs, and much connected with the rich and great; a visitor in short to country houses.
He was an nudcigraduate SO enterprising that he invited and brought to Oxford even the then Prime Minister who, if one dates to mention it, bore the name of Baldwin. This volatile but shrewd undergraduate had come from the Oratory School. His mother was heiress to estates in Co. Galway and he might well, like so many other Oratorians, have gone into the Guards But his ambition was for other adventures. There was something unconventional in his thirsts. Leaving his fashionable friends in England and Ireland he set out to explore the New World, and its ideas He. had soon made it into material for writing; he plunged into journalism and before long the front page of the Times itself bore long articles signed by William Teeling.
HIS place in the 11 world of journaltarn was secuie. He had become an authority on emigration. Wherever the masses of the people moved. and ideas were being remoulded among them, there William Teeing would ars pear eager for the strong and some times acrid flavours of life. Across the American prairie. up and down the Rocky mountains, to Honolulu and the South Sea Islands, into the towns, the townships, on to the sheepruns, the dairy farms, into the orchards and bush of New Zealand and Australia. William Teeing would hurl himself, and always he would appear lean, eager. curious, friendly. dapper, urbane and avid for details and for views He seemed not only eager but tireless; he had a knack of adventure all his own It was the exploration of people in the mass. as they drifted and settled down in the Englishspeaking world It was to watch. therefore, how Catholicism worked out it, those continents and islands of democracy where men living close to the soil, and browned with the sun had free and easy manners and proclaimed not only freedom but equality.
But not all the New World is Englishspeaking Young Teeling had not been long in Canada before he discovered how much of it was French; Quebec was not only more Catholic than Ireland, but she seemed to send from her large families pioneers over all the Dominion of Canada and into tna United States.
What did this mean? These Catholics were not brought up with the privileges of William Teeling, they were the masses and the pool who provided him with the flavours of adventut e. And they had their own ways of looking at things. How quickly the Irish changed . when they went out of Ireland, how curiously the French-Canadian element fitted into the temper of the American continent! He listened to them .and he agreed. He would have the Catholicism of the New World made safe for democracy, in the hope that in return democracy would not be too dangerous for the Church.
THEN he would come back to I Europe Europe, after all, had more flavour than anywhere in the New World. Big things were happening The powers in Central Europe were spreading a new philosophy How was this going to affect the Masses of the People, how affect the Church? The freedom of the Colonies was abandoned A Cathoiic and a journalist, M. Teeling appeared in Rome. in Vienna, in Berlin, elegant, couraious, Polished, prosperous and confident. He approached Embassies and Bishops Hc explored the Nazi recesses; he penetrated the Vatican itself, threw on its recesses the searchlights of his journalism, and wrote The Pope in Politics. The book, of course, was fresh and enterprising—nothing from Mr. reeling could be otherwise—in fact it was so eagerly tinged with the ideas of the New World, so critical of certair immemorial traditions that many old-fashioned Catholics were rather taken aback and the author had some difficult moments with certain of his co-religionists But after all nothing is sure about sensations. except that they subside rrHE wanderlust was now lessening. Mr. Teeling had now a suite in the Albany and appeared sleek and wellgroomed in London. He gave good lunches at St. James Club, or the Bachelors. He visited distinguished ladies. Hs returned to country houses. In short he walked up his old Conservative connections, he began to think of Parliament.
The War saw him first busy as a writer ou the Nazi problem, saying: Know your enemy. He then entered the Air Force and became a Flight
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