Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome

by Patrick N. Allitt

From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, an impressive group of English speaking intellectuals converted to Catholicism. Outspoken and gifted, they intended to show the fallacies of religious skeptics and place Catholicism, once again, at the center of western intellectual life. The lives of individual converts―such as John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day―have been well documented, but Patrick Allitt has written the first account of converts' collective impact on Catholic intellectual life. His book is also the first to characterize the distinctive style of Catholicism they helped to create and the first to investigate the extensive contacts among Catholic convert writers in the United States and Britain. Allitt explains how, despite the Church's dogmatic style and hierarchical structure, converts working in the areas of history, science, literature, and philosophy maintained that Catholicism was intellectually liberating. British and American converts followed each other's progress closely, visiting each other and sending work back and forth across the Atlantic. The outcome of their labors was not what the converts had hoped. Although they influenced the Catholic Church for three or four generations, they were unable to restore it to the central place in Western intellectual life that it had enjoyed before the Reformation.

Genres: Religion, History, Biography, Catholic

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Joe Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Engaging, Allitt has done his homework and it shows. Better than most at understanding the contexts that inspired these conversions, the converts are not nearly as athwart society as they think. But this is ultimately doomed by a limited thesis and a tendency to take Anglicans at their word, always a dangerous pastime. For all of his talent with context, he can’t comprehend why Catholicism, intellectual and prestigious in countries where it’s the biggest denomination, would suffer in English speaking nations.

Perhaps it’s less the dogmatic nature of the Church, and rather that a hostile Anglo culture denied both opportunity and even the notion of advancement for Catholics. It’s easy for the British and American literati to dismiss Catholic intellectualism when they inherently saw it as a paradox. What they, and the author, responded to in these converts wasn’t an enlightened perspective, but rather a shared culture. The main obstacle was packaging, not content.

[sch · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a treat to take a break from literary criticism and turn to history.