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[Christopher Hollis (1902-1977) had a rather interesting life. The son of an Anglican bishop, he went to Eton and then Oxford where he became friends with Evelyn Waugh and his set, converted to Catholicism, taught at Stonyhurst and then Notre Dame, served as a Conservative MP for ten years after the war, and authored more than two dozen books. The following anecdote is from his autobiography, The Seven Ages: Their Exits and Their Entrances, 1974.]

When I was planning to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, Monsignor Barnes was instructing me. Explaining to me the teachings of the Church, he said that if a man committed fornication he committed a sin. That I did not doubt. But then he added if in his fornication he used a contraceptive device then he committed a second sin. Since in the mood in which I then was I had no intention of fornicating at all, I dismissed it as an academic point of no importance whether, doing so, I would commit two sins or one. But afterwards the precise enumeration of sins did seem to me a strange legalism and as divorced from reality as the theorizings of undergraduate permissiveness. Surely one does right or one does wrong. If one does wrong, if one’s actions are turned away from right, who is to say and what purpose is there in saying exactly how many wrong actions one does?

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