Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge, born to non-religious parents in a London suburb in 1903, was one of the great journalists and raconteurs of the last century. His father was an early member of the Fabian Society, a group who purpose was to create a socialist society through gradualist means. The logo of the Fabian Society, a tortoise, represented the group's predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism. Their coat of arms, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” symbolized their methodology for achieving their goal. This group included men such as H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Havelock Ellis. As a boy he would sit inconspicuously near discussions of Fabian Society members and dream of how brotherly, contented and loving society would be when their ideas became reality.

He carried these dreams with him through college, into his career as a teacher, and later as a journalist for The Manchester Guardian. By the early 1930’s, the Great Depression had gripped England, and Muggeridge had heard glorious tales about the success of socialism in Russia, such as, perhaps, reporter Lincoln Steffens’ famous comment “I have seen the future, and it works.” He applied for the coveted position of reporting from the “workers’ paradise,” won the assignment, and arrived in Moscow in 1932.

Within a short time, disillusionment set in. “At The Guardian,” he said, “the policy was to end up editorials on a hopeful note such as ‘It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all shades of opinion will draw together and wiser councils may yet prevail.’” But in Moscow he discovered that “Moderate men of all shades of opinion were disappearing into Lubyanka Prison never to be seen again.” He was disgusted with the fatuity and gullibility of western intellectuals who would report what they were told and wanted to believe, instead of what they saw. Muggeridge witnessed starvation in Ukraine: “…people kneeling in the snow, begging for a crust of bread.” He was aghast when Walter Duranty, a reporter of the New York Times, who also knew of the famine, wrote “There is no famine or actual starvation”--- and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Upon returning from Russia, he realized that Western nations were gradually adopting the materialism and Godlessness of the USSR and that they, if they did not change course, were likewise, over time, destined to become tyrannical slave states. He became what one might call a “fallen-away socialist.” Although he was an agnostic, Muggeridge couldn’t believe that life was just “a worldwide soap opera, going on from century to century.” He thought there has to be a purpose. He began to see life as a pilgrimage toward a Heavenly City.

In 1983, the former socialist and agnostic, at 79 years old, became a Catholic. The holiness of Mother Teresa, whom he had met in in India in the 1960’s, had influenced his conversion, but he wrote: “It was the Catholic Church’s firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic.”

In a talk given in 1985, called “The True Crisis of Our Time,” he says “The root cause of our trouble is that we’ve lost our sense of a moral order in the universe, without which no order whatsoever—economic, social, political--- is attainable. For Christians, this moral order is derived from the Incarnation… in Christ, whoever cares to can find freedom, the glorious freedom of the children of God, the only lasting freedom there is.”*

In his 1988 spiritual autobiography, Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim, he wrote: “I have always felt myself a stranger here on earth, aware that our home is elsewhere. Now, nearing the end of my pilgrimage, I have found a resting place in the Catholic Church from where I can see the Heavenly Gates built into Jerusalem’s Wall more clearly than from anywhere else…” Malcolm died on November 14, 1990. We pray he passed through those gates.

*The talk, The True Crisis of our Time, is available on the St. Michael Broadcasting website under “Resources.”

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