Father Thurston also called attention to the fact that Summers did not figure in any English register as either an Anglican or a Catholic priest, but was instead a literary figure with distinctly Decadent tastes. In 1938 both Mons. Ronald Knox and Douglas Woodruff objected to having their own essays published in a collection on Great Catholics edited by Fr. Claude Williamson, after they learned that the book would also include an essay by Summers on John Dryden. Shortly after Summers's death in 1948, the Catholic Herald published a statement by the Diocese of Southwark to the effect that Summers had, many years earlier, been a student for the priesthood but that, as far as was known, he had not been ordained. The Catholic Bishop of Southwark, Peter Amigo, excommunicated Mrs. Greville-Nugent for allowing Summers to celebrate mass in the private oratory at Kingsley Dene, her home in Dulwich.
Summers bequeathed his estate and papers to his long-time personal secretary and companion Hector Stuart-Forbes. This legacy was valued at £10,000 (the equivalent of about £300,000 in 2024), but Stuart-Forbes was already seriously ill and died in 1950, aged 45, and was buried in the same unmarked plot as Summers. An autobiography of Summers was published posthumously in 1980 as The Galanty Show, but it left much unrevealed about the author's life and dealt only with the literary side of his career. In the 2000s, many of Summers's personal papers were re-discovered in Canada, where they had been kept by members of Stuart-Forbes's family. A collection of Summers's papers is now at the Georgetown University library.