A wilde faith

"The Catholic church is for saints and sinners [alone].  For respectable people, the Anglican church will do."

      Oscar Wilde, as quoted by Richard A. Kaye in "The path to Rome:  investigating the deathbed conversion of Oscar Wilde," Times literary supplement no. 6386 (August 22, 2025), 8 (7-8).  Richard Ellmann adds "alone", citing an undated letter of Reginald Turner to T. H. Bell "in Bell's unpublished MS. on Wilde (Clark)" (Oscar Wilde (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1988, 583 and 621).  I have followed this trail no further.  In a number of ways, but this one in particular, Kaye implies that he has settled the matter of the deathbed conversion about which Wilde "admirers have often expressed unease" (7):  "Whatever prompted Wilde's lifelong attraction to Catholicism, the intensity of that attraction should now be beyond question" (8).