Bernard Kelly was a regular contributor to Blackfriars and other Catholic periodicals over a lengthy period extending from the 1930s to the 1950s. Rayner Heppenstall, in his book on Léon Bloy, called him “a man of the purest genius”. In more recent times, however, he seems to have been strangely forgotten. If we speak of him now, it is because we believe that his insights, drawn from scholastic philosophy and especially from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, are of value not only for present-day Catholics, but for all Christians, and indeed for spiritual seekers of all faiths. Kelly once said: “There are some of us who can’t rightly pray without a pen in our hands.” Kelly was clearly no ordinary writer for him writing was prayer. He epitomized the view that prayer could only be accomplished on the basis of truth, and his writing was a means of determining and fixing the truth in his own mind and in the minds of others. A few years ago Barbara Wall published a moving account of Kelly’s life; here we shall concentrate chiefly on his writings and thought.
Kelly’s inspiration was the writings of the Medieval philosophers and, in particular, the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. For him, the Summa was a vehicle of truth and a paradigm of spirituality. Many are aware of St. Thomas’s declaration towards the end of his life that, in comparison with the Divine Reality Itself, his writings were as a heap of straw. A differing and more important evaluation is less well known; Christ Himself appeared to Aquinas in a vision and said to him: Bene scripsisti de Me, Thoma (“Thou hast written well concerning Me, Thomas”).