A few hours after he attended Easter Sunday Mass on April 10, 1966, the great English novelist Evelyn Waugh died at his home in Somerset, England. A requiem Mass was celebrated 11 days later in Westminster Cathedral. Waugh, 62, had been baptized in the Church of England but had been received into the Roman Catholic Church 36 years before.
Obituaries and later biographies noted that Waugh was not much of an enthusiast for what was going on in the Catholic Church at the time of his death. While his antipathy is often ascribed to his contempt for the Second Vatican Council and the reforms it wrought, the discontent actually began more than a decade earlier with the liturgical changes implemented by Pope Pius XII in the 1950s.
The hints of further changes to come—Mass was still in Latin at the time of his death—only increased the notoriously grumpy Waugh’s rancor. “Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification,” he wrote to the archbishop of Westminster a year before his death. “I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.”
Waugh’s move to the Roman Church in 1930 in what was a solidly Protestant nation was one of many such events in an extraordinary period beginning around 1833, in which British Catholicism’s intellectual profile was dominated by a group of scholars, writers and popular figures who had done the same. In a nation that in 10 years will recognize half a millennium since its dramatic public break from the Catholic Church, a striking majority of British Catholicism’s most prominent figures in the 19th and 20th centuries had “swum the Tiber,” as the saying went. Like Waugh, many did so with some misgivings and later regrets, but there was no shortage of swimmers.
The most famous were surely Cardinal John Henry Newman and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, who were formerly priests in the Anglican Communion and prominent leaders of the Oxford Movement, a 19th-century campaign to reassert the Catholic heritage of British Christianity. But they were joined by a host of others over the 130 years, including Waugh, Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., the Rev. Robert Hugh Benson, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, the Rev. Ronald Knox, G. K. Chesterton, Edith Sitwell and many more.
This epoch was so extraordinary in the life of the church that the historian Patrick Allitt began his 1997 book Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome with a startling assertion: “Nearly all the major Catholic intellectuals writing in English between 1840 and 1960 were converts to Catholicism.” Such figures, Mr. Allitt argued, enjoyed educational advantages still largely denied to cradle Catholics in both societies, but also benefited from an intellectual adventurousness that was not common among their cradle-Catholic peers.
These converts were marked by their creative output, but also in many cases by a commitment to Catholicism as an intellectual and religious bulwark against modernity. As our own cultural moment in the United States has included some prominent conversions to Catholicism—most notably Vice President-elect JD Vance—and conjecture about the influence of tradition-minded Catholic voices in government and politics in general, what might we learn from that period in British Catholic history?
A caveat: According to all major Christian churches, it is theologically impossible to “convert” from one Christian church to another denomination; one’s baptism into any church, if done by the Trinitarian formula found in Matthew 28:19, establishes that person as a Christian. For that reason, America tries to use the more technically correct language of “received into the church” when a Christian baptized in another denomination becomes Catholic, but convert remains the dominant casual usage in Catholic culture.
On This Side of the Pond
As in Great Britain, the Catholic Church has experienced similar periods of prominent conversions on this side of the pond over the years, and many of the most famous Catholics in U.S. history were not born as such, including Isaac Hecker, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Orestes Brownson, Avery Dulles, S.J., Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Clare Boothe Luce, Caroline Gordon and Walker Percy. As with their counterparts on the other side, these figures made up the tiniest percentage of Roman Catholics in the United States, but all played an outsized role in the church’s religious and creative expression.
American religious expression is often more fluid than in countries like Great Britain—Orestes Brownson, for example, switched Christian denominations six times—and it is also true that a huge number of “cradle Catholics” in the past century in the United States have gone in the other direction, embracing different Protestant denominations. The Pew Research Center has estimated that half of U.S. adults raised Catholic have left that church at some point, and if “former Catholics” who had embraced Protestant churches or become “nones” were considered a religious denomination, they would make up the second-largest such group in the United States—behind only those still Catholics.
A number of prominent cultural figures and politicians have become Catholic recently in our own American political and cultural milieu, including the aforementioned Mr. Vance, the political commentator Candace Owens and Hollywood stars like Shia LaBeouf and Russell Brand. Rumors in the fall of 2024 suggested they might be joined by the media personality Jordan Peterson. Their journey to Catholicism has been paralleled by the increasing influence of prominent Catholic religious conservatives in U.S. government, including Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society, who is widely believed to have handpicked all three of Donald J. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees in his first term.
Inside the Beltway, Catholic converts have also held an influence belied by their relatively small numbers for a number of years; among the American political figures who became Catholic in the 1990s and 2000s were the Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, the columnists Larry Kudlow and Robert Novak, the publisher Alfred Regnery, former Senator Sam Brownback, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the political commentator Laura Ingraham.
The influence of these and other prominent Catholic figures—and their association with Catholic groups with politically conservative ties like the Napa Institute, Opus Dei and Legatus—has given the public political face of Catholicism in the United States a distinctly Republican hue at the moment, despite a long history of American Catholic political identification with the Democratic Party and the recent tenure of Joseph R. Biden, a Democrat, as the nation’s second Catholic president.
“No one’s walking into the administration ready to mount a crusade or anything,” Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, told Politico last month in an article that noted the large number of Catholics in Mr. Trump’s orbit, but “there’s a very specific sort of Catholic paradigm that you may begin to see.”
Swimming the Tiber
With the exception of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson (a revert to Catholicism) and former Prime Minister Tony Blair (who converted to Catholicism in 2009), Catholics have played a comparatively far more subdued role in British politics than on this side of the Atlantic. That is partly because of the reality that Catholics were barred or severely restricted from many political roles for centuries after the establishment of the Church of England; not until 1829 could Catholics serve in Parliament, for example. Only recently has there been, in the words of the British scholar Peter Hennessy, “the Catholic stealth minority’s rise to influence.”
Not so in the worlds of religion, literature or the arts. What was it about Roman Catholicism that attracted—and inspired—so many English figures in these disciplines? After all, as Pauline Adams noted in English Catholic Converts and the Oxford Movement in Mid 19th Century Britain: The Cost of Conversion, English converts faced a certain prejudice from their cradle-Catholic brethren.
“Converts who had steeled themselves to meet the hostility of the Protestant world were often unprepared to encounter an equally violent prejudice among Catholics,” Ms. Adams wrote. A common perception was that a convert “may be a gain to the Church, and he may be a thorn in her side.” The zeal of a new convert—and the suspicion of any Johnny-come-lately—could make a new convert’s life difficult, then and now. G. K. Chesterton had a cutting remark with regard to this phenomenon: “There is many a convert who has reached a stage at which no word from any Protestant or pagan could any longer hold him back. Only the word of a Catholic can keep him from Catholicism.”
It should go without saying that every conversion was supported by the conviction that what the Catholic Church teaches is true: St. Newman’s writings on how he came to Catholicism remain important and influential today for that very reason. But were there other factors that made so many prominent intellectuals convert?
No doubt there were many for whom aesthetic reasons contributed to their decision; for others, the Catholic Church’s seemingly unbending rules and practices may have had an appeal in a world increasingly unmoored from its old mores and traditions. The Catholic Church “was accustomed to making imperative demands on the lives of its members,” Ms. Adams wrote, something that surely provided a certain discipline for an artistic temperament.
While the bishops—and novelists and poets—might be the most well known among Britain’s Catholic converts in the 19th and 20th centuries, they were joined by prominent figures in other disciplines, including Augustus Pugin, an architect inspired by the Oxford Movement and Gothic architecture, who is responsible both for Big Ben and for much of Westminster Cathedral in London.
Among the novelists, Muriel Spark might be the most curious, having come to Catholicism so long after Newman and Manning that one can hardly cite them as an influence. Rather, it was the anomie of modern life—and the dogged support of fellow converts Graham Greene and Waugh—that brought Spark, a recovering drug addict, to the church in 1954. “If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly,” she later said. “If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.”
Her mentors Greene and Waugh both seemed to feel that Catholicism provided (among many other things) a rampart against their own proclivities. “I had to find a religion,” wrote Greene (who often described himself as a “Catholic agnostic”), “to measure my evil against.” Waugh took it even further, writing the following to his goddaughter Edith Sitwell on the latter’s embrace of Catholicism: “I always think to myself, ‘I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.’ One of the joys of Catholic life is to recognize the little sparks of good everywhere, as well as the fire of the saints.”
Years before, Waugh had written that “[a]s in the Dark Ages the cloister offers the sanest and most civilized way of life.” It is a sentiment reflected in the British-born American Thomas Merton’s The SevenStorey Mountain (which Waught edited for Merton), where the new monk wrote of his reception to the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani after a life that included periods of great dissipation that he had entered “the four walls of my newfound freedom.”
Several of the most prominent Jesuits in Great Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries were also converts to Catholicism, including the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the controversial theologian George Tyrrell. A Dublin-born Anglican born in 1860, Tyrrell became a Catholic in 1879 and joined the Society of Jesus a year later. He would become one of the most prominent figures in the Modernist controversies in the church at the turn of the century, and was later expelled from the Jesuits and excommunicated by Pope Pius X in 1908.
Two other prominent British converts who would later join the Jesuits became close confidantes of Waugh and Greene: C. C. Martindale, S.J., and Francis Canavan, S.J. The latter wrote a biography of Father Martindale (dedicated to Evelyn and Laura Waugh), in which he noted that Father Martindale had become perhaps the most famous apologist, preacher and spiritual writer in Great Britain—and a figure in countless stories of conversion. A resident of the famous Jesuit “House of Writers” at Farm Street in London, Father Martindale was also a major figure in the liturgical reforms that anticipated Vatican II.
Lessons for Today
What might we learn in our current moment from these histories?
The zeal and joy of every person who enters the Catholic Church should obviously be first and foremost a source of inspiration to those who grew up in the faith—as well as a rebuke. Whatever else converts to Catholicism are, they are rarely lukewarm, and seldom are they in search of the bourgeois Christianity that is characteristic of much of American religious expression, Catholic and not. Britain’s Catholic converts became the public face of the church in another century; American Catholics might well see the same happen here.
One cautionary tale from the history of Great Britain’s Catholic converts is this: Along with the many blessings these men and women brought to the church, they also brought their own baggage with them. Like the cradle Catholics they joined, they could be deeply flawed in ways that complicate the adulatory treatment they sometimes received. G. K. Chesterton is a hero to many Catholics for his clear, clever and spirited defenses of the faith (America ran his columns more than 60 times), but in recent years, scholars have struggled to reconcile his erudition and commitment to the faith with his embrace of an ugly antisemitism and racist attitudes. Evelyn Waugh also held patronizing—verging on white supremacist—attitudes toward other ethnicities.
We see the same today sometimes in the United States: The far-right provocateur Candace Owens became a Catholic in April 2024, calling it “a decision to come home,” but her embrace of the church was not accompanied by any obvious repudiation of her antisemitic, homophobic and Christian nationalist social media posts. Ms. Owens was fired from her position at The Daily Wire for promoting hate speech and banned from YouTube in September 2024.
In an essay for The Lamp in 2020, Vice President-elect JD Vance cited René Girard and St. Augustine, among others, as influences on his decision to become Catholic. In 2024 he told The New York Post that Catholic social teaching “certainly influences how I think about issues.” However, during the 2024 presidential campaign, his rhetoric on immigration veered radically from the church’s teaching, and when political winds shifted, he joined President Trump and the Republican Party and abandoned his public opposition to legal abortion. “Vance’s choice to join the Catholic Church,” wrote the theologian Massimo Faggioli in La Croix International in July 2024, “did not interfere [with] but rather accompanied his conversion to Trumpism.”
Another important lesson to remember about the influence of Catholics in politics is the law of unintended consequences. As Paul Elie noted in The New Yorker in July 2024, U.S. President Ronald Reagan packed his first administration in the early 1980s with politically conservative Catholics, many chosen for their anti-communist bona fides. But the policies and decisions adopted by appointees like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, C.I.A. Director William Casey and National Security Adviser William P. Clark (all of them cradle Catholics) produced disastrous effects in Latin America, including U.S. military support for murderous dictatorships and corrupt oligarchs. Many Catholic progressives still bitterly remember Mr. Haig’s vicious claim that the four “churchwomen of El Salvador” raped and murdered by Salvadoran paramilitaries in 1981 were political operatives who had attempted to run a military roadblock.
The same can be said of the other side of the political aisle: When President Joseph R. Biden filled his administration with Catholic appointees in 2021, America joined with many other Catholics in cheering a “Catholic moment” in American politics. But Mr. Biden’s administration was at odds with Catholic social teaching on many issues, including abortion and immigration.
Finally, other sets of numbers tell an important tale. In both the United States and Great Britain, it is clear that high-profile conversions—no matter how strong the boost they might give to flagging hearts—are rarely the lifeblood of the church. If they were, in both nations we would see a Catholic Church booming with new adherents rather than struggling to maintain numbers or facing the same decline as many other Christian denominations. Any Mass-going visitor to Great Britain will surely notice that from London to Liverpool and beyond, Catholic parishes are often sustained and given new life not by those who have swum the Tiber, but by those who have swum the Channel. Polish and Irish and Lithuanian families are among those in the pews most Sundays, not former Anglicans.
The same is true on this side of the pond. While Catholic pundits and journalists might muse about the dark influence of Catholic politicians and political operatives on the American political right or left, the pews are not packed with people debating integralism or questioning if the vice president has read “Rerum Novarum.” Rather, our pews remain apolitical in many places, to some degree because they represent a view of Catholicism often attributed to James Joyce: “Here comes everyone.”
Suburban U.S. parishes frequented by comfortable white families are often also the spiritual home of recent Vietnamese and Mexican and Filipino migrants. Rectories and sacristies in urban and suburban America alike are vastly more likely to host a foreign-born, cradle-Catholic priest than a former Anglican who left Canterbury over a dispute about women’s ordination. The music minister who wants to restore Gregorian chant? He’s a convert, but the congregation knows the words and the tune to “Pescador de Hombres” and “Be Not Afraid,” so guess what gets sung?
Headlines sell the story, but they don’t always tell the tale. Despite his well-deserved reputation as a misanthrope on many issues, it is perhaps Evelyn Waugh, after all, whose grumpy opinions offer the most insight on the common identity of all Catholic Christians.
Waugh didn’t care for Pope Paul VI a bit—he was in fact openly contemptuous of the pontiff—but he still insisted to his dying day that “‘Peter has spoken’ remains the guarantee of orthodoxy.” He also arrogated to his aristocratic self the position of “the man in the pew.” Writing in 1962, Waugh had this to say:
I believe that I am typical of that middle rank of the Church, far from her leaders, much farther from her saints; distinct, too, from the doubting, defiant, despairing souls who perform so conspicuously in contemporary fiction and drama. We take little part, except where our personal sympathies are aroused, in the public life of the Church, in her countless pious and benevolent institutions.
Nevertheless, Waugh wrote:
We hold the creeds, we attempt to observe the moral law, we go to Mass on days of obligation and glance rather often at the vernacular translations of the Latin, we contribute to the support of the clergy. We seldom have any direct contact with the hierarchy. We go to some inconvenience to educate our children in our faith. We hope to die fortified by the last rites. In every age we have formed the main body of ‘the faithful’ and we believe that it was for us, as much as for the saints and for the notorious sinners, that the Church was founded.
Fitting, perhaps, that Britain’s most high-profile convert of the 20th century—who himself certainly did “perform so conspicuously in contemporary fiction and drama”—would end up sounding like the most cradle Catholic of us all.
