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)
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."
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