Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780801429965

Table of Contents

Reviews

An extremely valuable contribution, it makes clear-for the first time-how completely converts dominated the intellectual life of British and American Catholicism. . . . Brisk and lively, eminently readable. -Philip Gleason, University of Notre Dame

A scholarly and stimulating history of the impact made by gifted thinkers who became Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic between 1825 and 1962, and of the problems they faced in their new Church and in society. Generations of penal legislation in Britain and in many parts of the American colonies had left Catholics an uneducated, suspect group. Allitt (History/Emory Univ.) traces the fortunes of a rich variety of scholars and literary figures who went over to Rome, often in the face of social and professional ostracism. Beginning with the English Romantic architect Augustus Welby Pugin and renowned Oxford scholar John Henry Newman, who unexpectedly found the stance of the early Church in contemporary Rome, we follow the careers of Americans such as Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker, who came to the Catholic Church from Transcendentalism and saw Catholic belief as uniquely consonant with the American ideals of freedom and optimism. Allitt shows how the converts had to deal with pressures from inside the Church, such as the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility and Rome's increasing phobia toward new ideas in politics, science, and philosophy, which resulted in the excommunication of scientist St. George Milvard and Jesuit theologian George Tyrrel. A very different era ensued with authors Robert Hugh Benson, Hilaire Belloc, and G.K. Chesterton, who focused on Catholicism as a counterculture opposed to the Protestant-inspired industrial society and big Capitalism. Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene brought their anguished perspectives to Catholicism, while Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, and Fr. Avery Dulles initiated a more authentically American Catholic outlook before the watershed of Vatican II. Allitt makes good use of the extensive scholarship available on many of these figures, adding his own incisive observations and showing how their work tried but failed to restore the cultural visibility that the Church had enjoyed in former centuries. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Patrick Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University. He is the author of Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 and Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available