A good deal of Oscar Wilde's work may remain undiscovered. His plays are best known but his prose writings are often remarkable. There is, for instance, his De Profundis, an essay written to Lord Alfred Douglas while in Reading Gaol between 1895 and 1897.
The work is redolent of an exceptional fervour. He writes: "Is there anything that for sheer simplicity of pathos, wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect, can be said to equal or approach even the last act of Christ's passion? The little supper with his companions . . . his own utter loneliness, his submission, his acceptance of everything . . . the terrible death by which he gave the world its most eternal symbol."
Moving on to the liturgical enactment of this Christian mystery, Wilde sees it as a theatre of transcendence: "When one contemplates all this from the point of view of art alone, one cannot but be grateful that the supreme office of the church should be the playing of the tragedy without the shedding of blood . . . and it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass."
If this does not qualify as strict theology it is, nevertheless, an affirmation of Wilde's artistic appreciation of Christian culture.
Wilde's esteem and affection for Catholicism was both a fitful and an inconclusive thing. He found it impossible to achieve a spiritual equilibrium. The gift of full faith seemed to remain for him all too intriguingly elusive. His apprehension of the mystery could not but harbour its share of ambiguities; a not uncommon condition, as we know, for many a pilgrim soul.
Although his religious quest was persistent, it expressed itself more in dalliance than in resolve. Throughout his life Wilde frequently claimed that it was his conformist father's threat of dis-inheritance that alone prevented his conversion to Catholicism. Whether that was simply a shallow excuse or a real and, for him, too steep a price to pay, it is hard to know.
Wilde had been friendly with several Catholic priests while at Trinity College Dublin. His Protestant Establishment father welcomed his son's move to Oxford in the belief that the English university would surely rid him of his Catholic leanings.
There, however, Oscar became fascinated with the writing and reasoning of Oxford's lately distinguished Catholic John Henry Newman and with the Balliol converts, Manning (later Cardinal) and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some of his close acquaintances at Magdalene College, including his dear friend, David Hunter Blair, became converts to Catholicism.
Mischievously playing his quasi-closet Catholic role, he was to remark with typical extravagance: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do."
Wilde's episodic and elaborate relationship with the Catholic Church is perhaps pre figured by his own quirky baptismal history. He was baptised no fewer than three times: twice conditionally - as an infant into the Church of Ireland - and, at age five, baptised conditionally as a Catholic at the instigation of his mother and with the consent of his father.
Finally, on his deathbed in Paris, he signalled his desire for baptism, followed by absolution and annointing in the Catholic Church from the Irish priest Father Cuthbert Dunne.
Was there some strange poetic justice at work? After all, Wilde had earlier famously averred that "Catholicism is the only religion to die in"; how seriously this declaration was meant is hard to divine.
Father Tom Stack is parish priest at Milltown, Co Dublin.