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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 whole host of poets, artists and public intellectuals less known to us today, whose “going over to Rome” provoked envy and dismay.
In this thoughtful though brisk book, Melanie McDonagh, a columnist for The Tablet, gives us 16 case histories of Britons who went “Poping” during the scariest decades of the 20th century. At a time when reason and decency appeared to have been chased out by political extremism and global warfare, it was only natural to long for something solid. Writing in 1925, Greene confided to his fiancee “one does want fearfully hard for something firm and hard and certain, however uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the general flux”.
Contrary to lurid Protestant fantasies, Catholic priests were not on the hunt for celebrity scalps to “lure” into their incense-fugged, whiskey-sodden clutches. Again and again, McDonagh’s converts report being taken aback by the way in which their approaches to Brompton Oratory or Chelsea’s Farm Street Church were met with a cool equanimity and slightly humiliating lack of interest. The job of the instructing priest was to tell you what was what, furnish you with the Penny Catechism and send you on your way. According to Maurice Baring, a man of letters who converted in 1909, the clergy were what ticket offices were to train stations: they gave the traveller information and told them where to go. Whether the traveller boarded the train was none of their business.
But this take-it-or-leave-it approach was ultimately appealing, especially to those who had “come over” from Anglicanism. To worship in the Church of England was to be presented with an infinite number of riddles. Not sure where you stood on the Real Presence, the Immaculate Conception, or even the Resurrection? Anglicans were happy to discuss the complexities ad infinitum. RH Benson, son of a former archbishop of Canterbury, spoke for many when he explained how frustrating he found this latitude when set against Catholic certainty: “there is a liberty which is a more intolerable slavery than the heaviest of chains”.
The aesthetic pleasures of Roman Catholicism also turned out to be largely illusory. Unless attending one of the smart London churches, converts had to get used to worshipping in ugly modern buildings alongside largely working-class congregations. Charles Scott Moncrieff, the 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. Nonetheless, Moncrieff, still an Anglican at this point, realised in a flash that he must be a Catholic. If you wanted magnificent buildings, glorious hymns, beautiful vernacular liturgy and the sort of clergyman whom you could invite to your club then you would be better off staying with the Established Church.
Then there was the inevitable censure. When Spark’s 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. Also commonplace were charges of moral turpitude (it didn’t help that 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 gay or spying for a foreign power.
Despite these penalties, few converts seem to have regretted their decision although, as McDonagh points out, it is hard to know for certain. Becoming a Catholic is a recorded event; deciding not to be one is simply a matter of no longer turning up to church. There is, too, a notable lack of women in this book, notwithstanding chapters on Gwen John, Spark and the Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Perhaps, although McDonagh does not say so, this was because women converting did not pose as much of a threat to the established order. The structure of her book, comprising a series of discrete case histories, means that these wider considerations fall between the cracks. What Converts lacks in analysis, though, it makes up for in vivid biographical storytelling.
