It is not a book anyone would publish now. It’s an artifact from a bygone age. People don’t talk this way anymore: “Theologically, I’m afraid you have nothing to offer,” the Catholic wrote the Unitarian with whom she’d started exchanging letters on the differences between the two beliefs. Months later, after reading an official Unitarian booklet explaining the religion, she described Unitarianism as “like Diet-Rite cola: no calories, very little taste, and a throw-away bottle.”

In another letter, she objects to the Unitarian’s attempt, obviously sincere, to understand Catholic teaching, but almost always making it simplistic: “Not everyone can take a profound Christian doctrine (a doctrine that the theologians may have toiled over for several centuries) and so quickly reduce it to the level of ‘I see the cat. Do you see the cat? It is sitting on the mat.’”

Neither Was a Diplomat

The Catholic was a once-popular writer named Lucile Hasley, who had published three collections of essays with Sheed & Ward, the first in 1949 with the lovely title Reproachfully Yours. Once a Presbyterian, she had entered the Church in her 20s, describing her conversion as “tripping blindly over a threshold and being thrown flat on one’s stomach into the House of Light.” Her husband taught English at Notre Dame and they lived in South Bend.

The Unitarian was a religiously curious housewife (her word) and social activist named Betty Mills (no relation to me), who had written Hasley a fan letter about Reproachfully Yours, while noting, “I can’t swallow the religious porridge you serve up.” She, much younger than Hasley, wanted to know what Catholics believed and had even enrolled in an inquirer’s class at the local parish in Bismarck, North Dakota, just to find out what Catholics thought.

They fell into a correspondence that Frank Sheed, the major Catholic publisher of the day, wanted to publish. The book appeared in 1964 as Mind If I Differ?, dedicated “To each other.” As I write, you can’t find a used copy online, but you can read it on Internet Archive. (It includes Sheed’s introduction, “Ecumenism at the Grass Roots,” and a letter from him about the death of children.)

Hasley herself writes about halfway through: “The conviction grows that I was never cut out to be a diplomat. Neither can I pretend, of course, that this is a model dialogue for others to follow. Too brutal. But despite the abyss between us ... both in theology and age ... I rather think we go together like ham and eggs, that our friendship can survive the gaff.”

She says she loves the person she sees in her letters, someone who had come to her in good will and was already making an effort to understand Catholicism by going to the class. “You’re no longer an armchair critic of the Church; you had the curiosity, good will, and openmindedness to sit in this church basement and listen.” 

But that has its limits. “No doubt about it, you are much more detached and ecumenical than I. Why not? I think I have something to offer,” she tells Mills, meaning that she didn’t. “Otherwise, I’d just be swapping favorite bits of religious verse with you. Or cartoons.”

Mills always pushes back, holding her views with a conviction Hasley cannot move. She writes near the end of their exchange, “The only reason I’m not wilting with discouragement (‘Why do you put this keen intellectualism in cold storage when you tackle a Catholic doctrine?’) is that sometimes you turn me stiff with rage. (Academic, not personal.) Your idea of how I should tackle a Catholic doctrine is (1) accept it; (2) repeat only the pretty parts.”

Their exchange offers a model, if not a universal one, of a way of engaging people with different beliefs that gets to the differences more quickly and more clearly, and can describe the relation of the two more precisely, than the usual way people talk across lines today. We have good reason to look for commonalities and common ground, not least how quickly we can latch onto reasons for division, but that tends to minimize or erase differences and invent commonalities from similarities.

Theirs was also, of course, a “kids, don’t try this at home” exercise. Fewer people can do what Hasley and Mills did than think they can.

What the Unitarians Lost

Hasley responds to Mills’s kind words with her own, and in return Mills sends her a lighthearted essay she wrote called “On Being a Unitarian.” The Catholic didn’t find it funny. “All I can see is what you’ve lost ... Christ, the Mother of God, the sacraments, the saints, etc.,” she says, adding later in the letter, “you’ve surely, dear heart, thrown out the baby with the bath water. And what a famous baby that is, by now.”

Hasley sets out to explain to Mills what Catholics actually believe. Among her main arguments is the inadequacy of human reason, which was the Unitarians’ sole basis for belief. Building on that inescapable matter of fact, she explains the need for a Church that has thought through things over time and has definite beliefs about definite realities for that reason to work on.

Unitarians, she writes, “are on their individual own. (See above listing of different types and conditions of human reason.) This must be LOTS OF FUN at times ... no boundaries, no restrictions, no isms, no rules ... but it strikes me as pretty slim pickings when you need a guiding hand. If we can’t even see ourselves as we really are (and we can’t), think how human reason ... with no guide posts ... could shoot off in all sorts of erratic decisions.” (The ellipses are hers.)

Referring to Servetus, a proto-Unitarian the Protestants burned in 1553 for denying the Trinity, she writes, “I’m sorry about that burning, but who is to say that this one man — lighting a heretical bonfire — was more reliable, by virtue of human reason, than the pooled decisions of a huge body of theologians?”

Hasley constantly insists that the Catholic faith depends on realities while Unitarians depends on something unsubstantial. Like a Unitarian assertion Mills quotes that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead on Easter, but “was risen before Easter,” and that “the centuries have not been able to bury him,” because despite being completely dead, “he was nonetheless able to command the hearts of men to carry on his mission and his ideas.” (The quote goes on and gets worse.) Hasley responds, “If the catechism makes your back teeth rattle, as you bite down hard on the dogma, I get the feeling I’m sinking my teeth into cotton candy ... you know, that stuff that evaporates in your mouth?”

She doesn’t give a millimeter on doctrine, but throughout the book, she tries to find reasons Mills thinks and feels as she does, even when they point to the failures and sins of Christians. “Somehow, I get the impression that the Unitarians are refugees: people who have been damaged ... or hurt ... or repelled ... by exposure to an un-Christian Christianity.” Mills tells her that’s true.

Hasley also tries to be as generous as possible to her friend’s tradition. “For all I know,” she writes later in their correspondence, “the Unitarians may be part of God’s long-range pattern: that your Servetus, along with the Reformation, was needed to establish the freedom of worship we have today in our pluralistic society.”

Like a Fish and a Puzzle

One reason to read the book besides Hasley’s arguments is the images and examples she uses, trying to describe the Catholic faith and life to someone who didn’t understand it.

Like this one: “Once upon a time, in San Francisco, the waiter deftly removed the spinal column from my fish in a dazzling sleight-of-hand performance that I’ve never forgotten. Well, those beautifully bare and unbroken vertebrae remind me of the catechism: the backbone of the Church, but without an ounce of nourishment on it. You gotta read to put flesh on the bones.”

“It all MAKES SENSE,” she says later in the book, “exasperated” with Mills’ continued misunderstanding of Catholic teaching. “It all goes together ... but (like a jig-saw puzzle) you (a) have to have all the pieces and (b) you have to fit these pieces together properly. Then, the Christian picture emerges. You can make anything look ridiculous if you goof it up. Really, I don’t think you tolerant Unitarians are a bit fair to Christianity.”

Speaking With Conviction

Hasley never succeeded even in making her Unitarian friend question her Unitarianism. I didn’t expect her to, because it’s a religion for people disinclined to believe in dogmas, at least supernatural ones, and have several coherent and reasonable ways to justify doing so. Mills insists on the fundamental commitment of “the duty to doubt.”

Still, giving her a better understanding of Catholicism must have done some good, at least in making her writing about it more accurate and helping her fellow Unitarians see it a little more clearly, maybe creating in some of her readers the crack that lets the light in. And the exchange did bear fruit in a very helpful and unexpectedly inspiring book, which shows us a way of speaking with conviction to others with conviction.