Nearly 60 years ago, the renowned prose stylist and infamous Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh passed away. On Easter Sunday (April 10) 1966, after attending a soon-to-be-banned Tridentine Mass, Waugh met his ignominious fate in the lavatory, reportedly having suffered a coronary thrombosis. He left behind a devoted wife, seven children, 14 novels, about two dozen short stories, seven volumes of travel writing (including one detailing his time as a war correspondent in Africa), three biographies (of artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, martyred Saint Edmund Campion, and English priest ad author Ronald Knox), countless letters, and a legacy of wit, wisdom, and (sometimes begrudging) faithfulness to the Catholic Church.

Although he was born nearly 121 years ago and died nearly 60 years ago, Waugh’s life is one filled with lessons for Catholics today. Indeed, one of the many reasons his works are considered enduring classics is not just the author’s biting wit, cast of colorful characters, and soaring, often elegiac writing style — though, of course, those are all reasons in themselves — but the wisdom he evinced in facing many of the same challenges, questions, and even crises that Catholics face today. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: DC Cardinal Surprisingly Praises Pope Francis on LGBT Issues)

Raised in the Church of England, the bright and bullying Waugh was an ardent agnostic by the age of fifteen. He quickly added hedonism to his spiritual resumé, alongside agnosticism, and his time at Oxford University was spent drinking heavily, dabbling in homosexuality, and leading a lifestyle that would have been considered outlandish even by the more whimsical standards of 1920s English university life. As one can imagine, hosting debauched costume parties that culminated in orgies in chartered hearses was not conducive to study, and Waugh was eventually forced to leave the University after achieving one poor grade too many.

The budding author took up a position as a schoolmaster at a dilapidated boarding school in Wales and, missing his friends and his hard-partying Oxford social life, attempted suicide. He left his clothes neatly folded on the beach and walked into the ocean, preparing to drown himself. Fortunately, God almighty had had the foresight to create jellyfish, a swarm of which turned Waugh back to the beach.

The comic novel Decline and Fall was based on Waugh’s experiences as a schoolteacher and won him both fame and fortune. He courted and was briefly married to Evelyn Gardner (they’re friends called the duo “He-velyn and She-velyn”), but that marriage ended acrimoniously when she proved unfaithful to her husband and unwilling to attempt to salvage the marriage. Faced with this devastating blow, Waugh chose not suicide, having failed in that endeavor once already, but a new home: the Catholic Church.

Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in 1930 was controversial. His father, a devout Anglican, referred to it as his son’s “perversion to Rome.” As most in his generation were embracing nihilism and atheism spiritually and turning to socialism and progressivism politically, the up-and-coming literary star Waugh bucked the trend, looking not to the nebulous “future,” but to eternity. Having experienced himself the disastrous results of the madness of the modern age, Waugh wrote of his conversion, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.”

For Waugh, Catholicism represented order, in stark contrast to the political, philosophical, and social chaos of his age. He saw the Catholic Church not as some ideology that happened to align with his own sentiments, but as an institution of spiritual and moral order to which he would have to subject himself. Jesuit Fr. Martin D’Arcy, who oversaw Waugh’s conversion and became his spiritual mentor, wrote, “I have never myself met a convert who so strongly based his assents on truth.”

This is the first lesson we can learn from Waugh: endurance in faith. Like St. Thomas Aquinas some 700 years prior, Waugh believed the Catholic Church to be the ultimate force of logic and reason operative in the world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Waugh admitted that the Church was, in fact, more reasonable than he, and thus submitted to her doctrines. When asked in an interview, 30 years after his conversion, if he had any doubts about God or the truth of Catholicism, a by-then aged and bloated Waugh bluntly responded, “No.”

Waugh’s faith was evident in his unquestioning submission to the Catholic Church. After the dissolution of his first marriage with Gardner, Waugh waited patiently for an annulment. The process reportedly took years longer than was the norm, and Waugh did much in that time to publicly demonstrate his devotion the Catholic Church, including writing his biography of Edmund Campion, for which he was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. When his annulment was finally granted, Waugh was asked why he didn’t badger and pester the Vatican courts — his paperwork had apparently been misplaced, accounting for the delay. The convert simply replied that he didn’t know how long an annulment should take and was willing to wait however long the Church required. (READ MORE: Dawkins and the Frankenstein’s Monster of Atheism)

This episode is reminiscent of St. Patrick’s baptism of the King of Cashel. According to legend, Patrick accidentally pierced the king’s foot with his bishop’s crozier. The Saint was unaware of having done so and the king bit his tongue. When Patrick realized that he had stabbed the king’s foot, he asked why the Irishman did not cry out in pain. The king simply replied that he thought it was part of the baptism ritual and was thus willing to suffer it.

Waugh’s chief difficulty with Catholicism was in conforming his will to the moral precepts of the Church — somewhat ironically, given that the stringent moral code of the Church is one of the chief attractions that sparked his conversion in the first place. For much of his life, Waugh was something of a bully. He delighted in baffling, teasing, and even tormenting others. Much of the time, this took the form of practical jokes that he alone found amusing. One biographer tells of the time that Waugh hosted a (white) guest named Moor. The author made repeated references to jazz and “negro culture,” which his wife later explained was simply a pun on the guest’s surname.

However, Waugh had a cruel streak, and he struggled to reconcile this with the charity demanded by the Church. In one infamous instance, Waugh’s bullying caused a young woman to leave a party in tears. His friend Nancy Mitford asked him how he could possibly be so callous and still call himself a Catholic. The bully par excellence responded with both wit and a strange sort of humility, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” It takes a great deal of faith to admit that you are, in fact, a wretch in need of aid.

But Waugh did exercise charity. While serving as a commando in World War II, alongside Randolph Churchill, Waugh rescued many persecuted Jews in war-torn Yugoslavia, offering financial assistance and making sure that many were able to escape the brutalities of both the Nazis and the communist revolutionaries led by Marshal Tito. Waugh also managed to write up reports for the British Foreign Office and Pope Pius XII on the persecution of Yugoslav Catholics under the communists.

“The Church,” Waugh once wrote, “is the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled themselves.” Over the course of his life, Waugh sought to return to that “normal state of man” and end both his earthly and spiritual “exile,” amid an age of rapidly shifting political standards and rapidly decaying moral codes.

The second lesson we may learn from Waugh is to never abandon the Church in her time of need. When Waugh converted in 1930, the Tridentine Mass was then the norm in the Church. He fell in love with the order, the majesty, and the symbolism of the Mass, finding there the link between the temporal order and the Kingdom of Heaven. In the 1960s, under Pope St. Paul VI and the “reforms” of the Second Vatican Council, the Tridentine Mass was reconsidered and revised, and Waugh began to fear that the solemn and sacred grandeur of the Mass which brough him to Rome might be diluted, damaged, or altogether discarded. He wrote, on behalf of the laity:

We hold the creeds, we attempt to observe the moral law, we go to Mass on days of obligation and glance rather often at the vernacular translations of the Latin…. We go to some inconvenience to educate our children in the Faith…. In every age we have formed the main body of “the faithful,” and we believe that it was for us, as much as for the saints and for the notorious sinners, that the Church was founded.

In a series of letters, Waugh expressed his concerns to his bishop, Cardinal John Carmel Heenan of Westminster. He was worried that the role of the priest would be diminished in an effort to make the laity feel more empowered and that, in an attempt to encourage the laity to participate more vocally in the Mass, their spiritual participation might be forgotten. He considered the introduction of the vernacular into the Mass to be an unnecessary diminution of the mystical nature of Christ’s sacrifice:

This was the Mass for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold. Saint Augustine, St. Thomas à Becket, St. Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us; were, in fact, present there with us…. Their presence would not have been more palpable had we been making the responses aloud in the modern fashion.

He wrote that the slow disappearance of the Tridentine Mass “leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but churchgoing is now a bitter trial.” Had Waugh been told that some forty years later, the late Pope Benedict XVI would once again promulgate the Mass of the ages with his motu proprio Summorum pontificum, the convert would have no doubt taken comfort. But since Pope Francis’s motu proprio Traditionis custodes has restricted celebration of the Tridentine Mass, perhaps we may take some comfort from Waugh’s example of humble grumbling and longsuffering.

The final lesson we might learn from Waugh is to focus our attentions and our energies on that which really matters. Despite his commercial and critical successes and his relatively opulent lifestyle, Waugh’s chief focus was on eternity. He recognized the truth which Christ spoke in the Gospel: “[S]tore up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be” (Matthew 6:20-21). He thus built his treasure not on bookshelves nor in his (rather expansive) wardrobe, but in his family, the souls entrusted to his care. (READ MORE: American Catholics Back Trump Over Biden)

In the final interview he granted before his death, Waugh was asked if he believed God put him on earth to be a writer. Waugh responded that he believed God had given him a particular talent or penchant for writing, but that writing was not his purpose. Instead, he explained, his literary talents were given to him as a means of supporting his true purpose: “My service is simply to bring up one family.”

Waugh’s family life wasn’t always easy — he and his wife lost one of their seven children in infancy, and Waugh often struggled to express affection for his children. But he worked hard, often writing thousands of words per day, to provide for his wife and children. He went to great expense to ensure his children were not just educated well but educated Catholic. And his children learned that their father didn’t necessarily fail to show them constant affection but rather fought hard to be charitable to mankind in general, and succeeded best with his wife and children.

Today, Waugh is best remembered as a talented author, a grouchy reactionary, a vicious wit, and a devout Catholic. Perhaps that is not a bad legacy to leave behind.