Melanie McDonagh, Converts, From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, Yale University Press 2025
In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Christ and the Soldier’, an honest Tommy passes by a stone roadside cross somewhere on the Western Front. When he starts chatting to the crucified figure, he hears a whispered reply: ‘Wounds like these would shift a bloke to Blighty just a treat!’ The soldier and the statue begin talking, until the soldier asks what the use of the statue’s teaching is in the middle of war. In response, the soldier hears only the booming of distant guns as the statue falls silent again. But the meaning of Sassoon’s poem is loud enough: war makes a mockery of the Christian message. Many British soldiers in the First World War would have shared Sassoon’s scepticism, but some found their faith revived by the fighting, or even found themselves drawn towards Roman Catholicism. They might have been attracted to the simple piety of local populations, or the courage of Catholic clerics braving gunfire to give the last rites, or the fact that the Church offered prayers for the dead. According to statistics given in this book, some 40,000 conversions took place during that war.
These wartime converts were part of a much larger trend. The shifts and effects of war is to some extent a pillar of this book. G.K. Chesterton was attracted to Catholicism precisely because it stood at odds to much contemporary jingoistic opinion. For Edwardians, the ritualistic and supernatural qualities of the Roman Church were a rejection of high-minded Victorian agnosticism. During the 1920s and 1930s, they became a revolt against the self-satisfied liberalism that ended in the First World War. Then, in the postwar period, they were a protest against the moral compromises of the Second World War.
In the five decades between 1910 and 1960, more than half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics. Among them were a clutch of literary stars: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene. But there was a host of poets, artists and public intellectuals whose “going over to Rome” provoked envy and dismay. Among Melanie McDonagh’s portraits are three women, the painter Gwen John, novelist Muriel Spark and the Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. All these men and women were in some way the object of censure. When Spark’s novelistic invention Miss Jean Brodie tartly declared that “only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics”, she was voicing a general prejudice. There were, too, charges of moral turpitude pinned on Wilde, Bosie Douglas, Aubrey Beardsley and many other 1890s decadents had converted. To become a Catholic was to invite suspicion that you were mad, secretly homosexual or spying for a foreign power.
McDonagh gives us sixteen case histories of Britons who “poped” during the twentieth century. Faced with political extremism and global warfare, people looked for something solid. Not that the solution necessarily came easily. Some converts in this book were taken aback by the way in which their approaches to the Brompton Oratory or Farm Street Church were met with a cool insouciance. The job of the instructing priest was to tell you what was what, present you with the Penny Catechism and send you on your way. According to Maurice Baring, who converted in 1909, the clergy were what ticket offices were to railway stations: they gave the traveller information and told him where to go. Whether you boarded the train was up to you.
Yet somehow this lackadaisical approach was appealing, especially to those who were disaffected with Anglicanism. To them, to worship in the Church of England was to be presented with a number of riddles. Where did you stand on the Real Presence, the Immaculate Conception, or even the Resurrection?
Anglicans were happy to discuss possibilities endlessly. RH Benson, son of a former archbishop of Canterbury, contrasted Anglican polemic against Catholic certainty: “there is a liberty which is a more intolerable slavery than the heaviest of chains”. And most conversions were not motivated by an aesthetic quest: where they were they usually resulted in disappointment, for the putative aesthetic pleasures of Roman Catholicism turned out to be largely illusory. Unless attending one of the smart London churches, converts had to get used to worshipping in drab modern buildings alongside predominantly working-class congregations. Charles Scott Moncrieff, the great translator of Proust, described how on Easter Sunday 1915, he had gone “to a hideous drab little RC chapel” on the edge of an industrial estate which had an inaudible priest and no music. Moncrieff, realised in a flash that he must be a Catholic!
Oscar Wilde only just makes it into McDonagh’s time frame. His deathbed conversion in 1900 had had many foreshadowings throughout his troubled life. It was influenced by John Henry Newman. Indeed, Newman’s influence appears in a great many of the converts sketched in this book. Benson, said his conversion was due to “Newman, chiefly”, and Muriel Spark described hers as being “by way of Newman”. Newman, arguably the greatest English convert of them all, provided both a spiritual and intellectual framework, the potency of which claims a full chapter. But there were other motivators too. Chesterton was inspired by the Irish priest, Father John O’Connor, who became the model for the cleric-detective Father Brown. Elizabeth Anscombe was inspired by Chesterton, for Graham Greene it was the brilliant correspondent Vivienne Darrell-Browning, who married Greene only on condition that he became a Catholic. Chesterton, Greene and Evelyn Waugh are in any context entertaining subjects. McDonagh illuminates their stories with anecdotes and source material, including a letter from Waugh to his goddaughter Edith Sitwell on her reception into the Church. In it, Waugh, never an easy man, writes: “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.” He also encourages Sitwell to “recognise the sparks of good everywhere” and mentions a “rousing sermon… against the dangers of immodest bathing dresses”, assuring her that they were “innocent of that offence at least”.
Siegfried Sassoon was among the last of McDonagh’s converts. For much of his life, he called himself anti-clerical: ‘the Churches seemed to offer no solution to the demented doings on the Western Front’. However, in 1957 a nun wrote to him with the words: ‘I think you are looking for God.’ This marked the start of an intense correspondence that culminated with his reception into the Church at Downside Abbey on 14 August. ‘My need for authority was what finally settled it,’ he told Ronald Knox (another son of an Anglican bishop, translator of the Bible and celebrated preacher, a passage from whose Spiritual Aeneid prefaces this book) in a letter a few months earlier.
Here the Second Vatican Council enters the story and gets it in the neck, and here we are reminded that this lively and entertaining book has no pretensions to scholarship. McDonagh wistfully concludes that in less than a decade after 1960 the Church would abandon that authority, and that the number of converts would never recover. She posits that her converts still living were appalled by Vatican II. They grievedthe loss of the traditional liturgy, in particular the Latin Mass. Graham Greene used the term “a broken heart”, while for the poet and painter David Jones “it was the most traumatic event of his later life”. But if others had lived longer, would they have so responded, and even if appalled and broken-hearted, would they have jumped ship? I doubt it. Faith and life in the Barque of Peter continues still to convert as she floats and navigates through history, on the principle of authority expressed gem-like by our new Doctor of the Church –
“In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
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