In some ways they are very close to Catholicism, closer than anyone except the Orthodox, but in other ways they are more hostile to the Catholic faith than anyone else. (Save, perhaps, dissenting Catholics.)

They love the Lord, accept the Scriptures at face value and try to live in accord with the moral law. They may even admire the Pope and practice some of the Catholic spiritual disciplines.

You see this and you think they will be open to learning more about the Catholic Church, but when you bring up anything distinctively Catholic, they often react in a peculiar way. Bring up purgatory or prayers for the dead, for example, and the nicest people will start snarling like junkyard dogs. This reaction would bear some analysis, but here I want to suggest one way to break through the evangelical's reaction and win at least a hearing for Catholicism.

Use C.S. Lewis. Or rather, use those places in his writings where he broke with Protestantism and sided with the Catholic faith, in fact with two of the Catholic beliefs evangelicals react to most strongly. When an evangelical friend rejects the Catholic Church because she believes in purgatory and prayers of the dead, just say, “But C.S. Lewis believed in them.”

Evangelicals love Lewis. And for good reason, of course. He was a great apologist, a great teacher of theology and literature both, a great writer of children's stories and science fiction, and a very helpful guide to the spiritual life as well. They love him enough that finding out he believed in these Catholic doctrines may stop them from snarling just long enough so they can hear what can be said for them.

You hope the evangelical will think like this: Lewis believed in purgatory and prayers for the dead. If he believed in them, firm Protestant that he was, there must be something to them. If there is something to them, there might be something to Catholicism. All you hope for is a hearing. You want them to take their hands off their ears and listen to the case to be made for Catholic belief.

Lewis expressed his belief in prayers for the dead in one of his last books, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (chapter 20). He said it quite bluntly: “Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me.” Indeed, he went on to reject “the traditional Protestant view.”

He not only affirmed this in theory but also practiced it himself. In Letters to an American Lady, he asked her to pray for him when he died. In a letter he wrote to an Italian monk, published in The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis, he asked the monk to pray for his wife Joy, who had just died of cancer. In another letter, he wrote that although he had thought the monk had died, “never in the least did I cease from my prayers for you; for not even the river of death ought to abolish the sweet intercourse of love and meditations.”

Lewis expressed his belief in purgatory in the same chapter of Letters to Malcolm, and just as bluntly. “I believe in purgatory,” he wrote. He argued that “our souls demand purgatory” (the emphasis is his) and clearly thought that in this case our souls demanded what God wanted them to demand.

Our souls demand purgatory because we do not want to be let into heaven in such rotten shape, he wrote. We want to be cleaned up, even if it hurts. “Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’?” We would naturally reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleaned first.”

Even if God warns us that it may hurt, we will still say Yes.

Now, using Lewis will not always work. Some evangelicals who love him will just shrug off his views — no one is perfect, after all. I have even met some extreme evangelicals who thought Lewis a sinister figure because he had these Catholic beliefs. Fortunately, the writers they put in his place wrote such spectacularly boring books that I suspect many people went back to reading Lewis in desperation.

As I said, in invoking C.S. Lewis you are only hoping to win a hearing. You are hoping to stop your evangelical friends from reacting as they usually do when such things as purgatory and prayers for the dead are mentioned. But if, because they love C.S. Lewis, they do stop to listen, they may stay still long enough to begin to understand the Catholic faith. And understanding, sometimes, turns into love.

David Mills is the author of Knowing the

Real Jesus (Servant/Charis) and a senior editor of

Touchstone (www.touchstonemag.com).