Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, Melanie McDonagh, Yale University Press, £25

In Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Christ and the Soldier’, an honest Tommy passes by a stone roadside cross somewhere on the Western Front. When he starts chatting to the crucified figure, he hears a whispered reply: ‘Wounds like these would shift a bloke to Blighty just a treat!’ The soldier and the statue begin talking, until the former asks what the use of the latter’s teaching is in the middle of war. In response, the soldier hears only the booming of distant guns as the statue falls silent again. But the meaning of Sassoon’s poem is loud enough: war makes a mockery of the Christian message.

Many British soldiers in the First World War would have shared Sassoon’s scepticism. But a significant minority found their faith revived by the fighting, or even found themselves drawn towards Catholicism. Perhaps they were attracted to the simple piety of local populations, or the courage of Catholic clerics braving gunfire to give the last rites, or the fact that the Church offered prayers for the dead. Either way, according to the Catholic weekly, the Tablet, some 40,000 conversions took place during the war.

These wartime converts were part of a much larger trend. As Melanie McDonagh explains in the introduction to her new book, between 1910 and 1960 well over half a million people in England and Wales were received into the Church. More impressive than the numbers was the calibre: poets, clerics, painters, philosophers, and a remarkable number of authors, including G.K. Chesterton, Edith Sitwell, Radclyffe Hall, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark. Converts devotes chapters to most of these figures, mixed with a fascinating survey of Catholicism in Britain between the late Victorian era and the early 1960s.

Although 20th-century British culture is often described as a slow drift into secularism, Converts offers a different account. The book begins with the decadents of the late 19th century, who were drawn towards the Church as another form of rebellion: Oscar Wilde converting on his deathbed, and Aubrey Beardsley doing the same shortly before his own death. Interestingly, Lord Alfred Douglas loathed the idea of his former lover converting ‘under the baleful influence of the Catholic Church’, although he himself was received into the same institution 11 years later.

By the interwar period, Catholicism became one of the ideologies competing for young people seeking lost certainty. As George Orwell wrote about the late 1930s: ‘It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had “joined” [the communist party] as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Catholicism was fashionable, to hear that so-and-so had been “received”.’ At the same time, many converts turned to Rome for idiosyncratic reasons of their own. For Muriel Spark it was the writings of John Henry Newman, for Elizabeth Anscombe the work of G.K. Chesterton, whereas for Graham Greene it was a clever correspondent named Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who only married him on the condition that he join the Church.

McDonagh questions the idea that Catholic priests were scheming to capture naïve Anglican souls – a popular Protestant slur. However, several priests became well known for instructing converts from the creative classes, like Father Martin D’Arcy, the Jesuit responsible for Evelyn Waugh’s conversion, who later befriended Dorothy Sayers, W.H. Auden and Edwin Lutyens. The Irish priest Father John O’Connor guided G.K Chesterton into the Catholic Church and inspired his mystery-solving cleric Father Brown. Some of these were converts, too: Father Ronald Knox, who wrote his own detective stories and translated the Bible into English, was the son of an Anglican vicar, while Father Hugh Benson, another cleric and author, was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Converts emphasises the variety of motives that drew its subjects into the Church. It also rejects the argument that these artists and writers were only attracted to Catholicism for aesthetic reasons – another contemporary criticism. Often the reverse was true: C.K. Scott Moncrieff, the translator of Proust, had grown up attending Winchester Cathedral. Like many Anglican converts, he was horrified by the ‘hideous drab little R.C. chapel at Portland’ he now found himself attending. Nor was it socially advantageous to become a Catholic: although a few aristocratic families belonged to the old faith, in most cases becoming a Catholic meant going to church with the servants.

Nonetheless, that sense of exile had its own appeal. G.K. Chesterton was attracted to the Church precisely because it stood at odds to much contemporary opinion: ‘it was precisely the unyielding character of the faith that he found appealing’, McDonagh explains. For Edwardians, the ritualistic and supernatural qualities of the Church were a rejection of high-minded Victorian agnosticism. During the 1920s and 1930s, they became a revolt against the self-satisfied liberalism that ended in the First World War. Then, in the postwar period, they were a protest against the moral compromises of the Second World War.

Other, less pious, reasons also help to explain the attraction. First, the simple fact that Catholicism appeared foreign gave its ritual and theology some of the trendy exoticism that would draw people to Buddhism in the 1960s. Second, artists and writers often benefit from an original perspective on society: for those who had grown in comfortable middle-class households, becoming Catholics made them into outsiders. Third, for all McDonagh resists the idea that the appeal was aesthetic, it’s suggestive that the rates of conversion collapsed after the Second Vatican Council.

Academics disagree about the role of Vatican II in the Church’s decline. According to the traditional view, the secularism of the 1960s would have damaged the number of worshippers regardless. However, recent research has pointed out that Catholic observance dropped much more quickly than Protestant in the wake of the council – suggesting the reforms made worse the problems they were attempting to solve. By breaking the illusion of the Church as a source of permanent authority, it became easier for believers to treat religious obligations as optional.

Either way, the converts in McDonagh’s book were appalled by Vatican II. They grieved the loss of the traditional liturgy, in particular the Latin Mass. Graham Greene used the term ‘a broken heart’, while for the poet and painter David Jones ‘it was the most traumatic event of his later life’. The majority had left behind the Church of England because of its simplified ceremonies and uncertain creeds, only to find their new spiritual home embracing the same compromises.

Siegfried Sassoon was among the last of McDonagh’s converts. For much of his life, he called himself anti-clerical: ‘the Churches seemed to offer no solution to the demented doings on the Western Front’. However, in 1957 a nun wrote to him with the words: ‘I think you are looking for God.’ This marked the start of an intense correspondence that culminated with his reception into the Church at Downside Abbey on 14 August. ‘My need for authority was what finally settled it,’ he told Ronald Knox in a letter a few months earlier. As McDonagh’s wistful conclusion suggests, in less than a decade the Church would abandon that authority, and the number of converts never recovered.