Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome - Hardcover

Allitt, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080142996X ISBN 13: 9780801429965

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

Being a Catholic in America or Britain hasn't always been easy. Since the days of "Bloody Mary," Catholics were viewed with suspicion and often actively discriminated against in Britain. Meanwhile, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment combined in many American cities to create violent mob scenes that targeted Catholic churches and other religious establishments. As recently as 1960, John F. Kennedy's Catholicism was an issue in the American presidential race. Church fortunes took a turn for the better in the years following World War II, and many of its leading intellectual lights have been converts. In Catholic Converts, Patrick Allitt, an associate professor of history at Emory University, takes a fascinating look at the men and women who came to Catholicism from other faiths and helped to shape it. Notable converts include Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Marshall McLuhan and Dorothy Day.

From the Back Cover

'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

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 080142996X
• ISBN 13: 9780801429965
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360