Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century
As McDonagh’s vivid, engaging narrative implies, a traditional faith does not automatically give rise to a rigid and authoritarian culture. It can, but at its best 20th-century Catholicism gave birth to social and political experiments as daring as the Catholic Worker movement and the Spanish Mondragon cooperative, popular art as successful as Lord of the Rings and the Sagrada Família, and a subculture healthy enough that by 1960 annual conversions in England and Wales reached 14,483 ... Much of the converts’ stories is pretty familiar – especially to converts like me – and I wondered whether McDonagh’s book would feel like a mere rerun. In fact she is the ideal author for the subject, being simultaneously a serious Catholic, a history PhD, and a seasoned Fleet Street journalist who takes as her 11th commandment that the reader should never be allowed to get bored. The book is just pious enough to take its subjects’ inner lives seriously, but not so much so as to slip into a churchy hush ... Occasionally there could be a firmer editorial hand: the word 'remarkable' appears three times in the space of seven lines on page two, and the chapter on Siegfried Sassoon devolves into a series of letters, reproduced without comment, whose appeal is not obvious. But the book, in its cheerfully unsentimental way, does demonstrate not only why the floodgates opened for a few decades, but also why the stream has never quite dried up.
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McDonagh’s elegant and comprehensive study offers an illuminating account of a phenomenon often overlooked in British cultural history. She estimates that in the five decades between 1910 and 1960, well over half a million people in England and Wales converted to Catholicism — a figure both surprising and revealing, given the pressures of secularism and the lingering suspicion of 'popery' in British public life ... Yet for all its breadth and insight, Converts has one curious gap. McDonagh mentions Brideshead Revisited only in passing, as though reluctant to linger over the most significant English conversion novel of the 20th century ... Given her intelligent discussion of this conversion, it seems odd that she does not explore how Waugh reworked elements of his own spiritual journey into the character of Charles Ryder, or dwell on the unforgettable deathbed scene in which Lord Marchmain makes the sign of the cross, an incident Waugh insisted was drawn from real experience ... Still, this is a rich and rewarding study: elegant in style, humane in its judgments, and alive to the multiplicity of paths that led modern Britons to Rome. McDonagh restores to view a cast of characters— sunny, tormented, cerebral, eccentric — whose diverse routes into the Church illuminate a profoundly complex spiritual landscape.
Religious conversions do not, for the most part, make for good anecdotes ... The 12 conversions explored by Melanie McDonagh in this absorbing study are less Halloween and more slo-mo than this, the result of a gradual accretion of faith which cannot, as Cardinal Newman said of his own defection to Rome, be ‘propounded between the soup and the fish’ ... McDonagh focuses less on the conversions themselves, given their largely non-verbal nature, than on their influence on the life and work of the converts.
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