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Joyce Kilmer's Conversion How He Became a Catholic Joyce Kilmer. INTEREST in that very attractive figure, Joyce Kilmer, poet, critic, essayist, who was killed in action in France in 1918, and in his equally brave and distinguished wife, Aline Kilmer, is reawakened by the announcement from America of the death of Fr. James Cronin, who received them into the Church. Fr. Cronin was born in New York fifty-five years ago. He was graduated from Boston College, and worked for two years as a chemist before entering religious life. He pursued higher studies at the Catholic University of America. He was stationed for many years at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York, where he was widely known in charity work, having served as the head of the St. Vincent de Paul Society for a long time. He was also widely known as a missionary. He was the first director of programme for the Paulist Fathers' renowned wireless station. Kilmer, to whom these—his own—lines, from "The Rouge Bouquet," may be applied, Comrade true, born anew, peace to you! Your soul shall be where the heroes are, And your memory shine like the morning star, took his B.A. degree at the Columbia University when twenty. He was married a year later to Miss Aline Murray, step-daughter of Henry Mills Alden, a well-known American writer, who was editor of "Harper's Magazine." Instructor in Latin at a high school for a year, Kilmer, with his wife and the son born to them, who is now a poet himself, went to New York full of high hopes and with remarkable talents. There he rapidly made a name as a journalist of the more literary type, and was on the way to wider recognition when the war came—and brought him "a rendezvous with death." His Spirituality. Mr. R. C. Holliday, one of his colleagues on the New York "Times," tells in a memoir which prefaces Kilmer's collected verse of the latter's conversion: It was late in 1913 that Kilmer astonished the little world that then contained his family, his friends and acquaintances, by entering, with his wife, the Catholic Church. . . . It had repeatedly been declared by friends very close to him that, in his minute knowledge of pious customs and practices, of which a lifelong Catholic might easily be ignorant, he was a constant surprise to them, but that, with respect to religion as particularised in himself, he kept silent, would never discuss the steps that led to his conversion, and it was only by chance that they discovered that he was a daily communicant. I like to feel I have always been a Catholic, was a sentiment frequently expressed by him. "I think it was very clear," says Mr. Holliday, "that he did not become, but had always been, a Catholic, though he had not realised it earlier. He tried all things, and held fast to that which he found good. He was inwardly driven to seek until his spirit found its home. . . . His spirit was a winged seed, which, in the rich soil which had mothered so much art, found fructification." Letters to Fr. Daly. Joyce…