The Catholic distinction.(Book Review)

The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, by Ian Ker; Gracewing (distributed in Australia by Freedom House), 2003, about $50.

IT SEEMS TIMELY to be discussing Catholic revivals. Just as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ appears to be giving a new currency to the Catholic attitude, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a Catholic renaissance with the Catholic position brought to bear on literature, art, politics, leisure and work.

In the field of English literature, in particular, the Catholic Church benefited from the talents of a number of eloquent propagandists. These were significant and highly regarded writers with enduring reputations: witness, for example, the attention given to the recent centenaries of the births of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. More often than not it seems they were also high-profile converts, able persuasively to articulate the reasons for their conversion, adding to the force of their religiously loaded message.

As Ian Ker has set about to demonstrate, it seems to have been unnecessarily pessimistic for John Henry Newman--principal figure in the Oxford Movement and arguably the person most responsible for the stream of English cultural and intellectual figures to arrive at the Catholic Church--to have announced in 1873 that English literature was essentially Protestant literature and that there was nothing Catholics could hope to do about the situation.

In attempting to show up Newman's despair as misplaced, Ker offers a useful beginner's overview of the depth and breadth of the Catholic literary revival in England between 1845, the year of Newman's conversion, and 1961, the year of publication of Evelyn Waugh's last major work. Yet the writers mentioned in this brief survey, notable literary figures such as Ford Madox Ford, Maurice Baring, Edith Sitwell and Muriel Spark, are largely writers who happened to be Catholic rather than Catholic writers. In Ker's view there are six important writers from this period--Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene and Waugh--who stand out as having written as a result of a "formative Catholic influence" and these are Ker's principal focus. In individual chapters devoted to each writer, Ker attempts to justify his selection of them as important, if not major, figures in modern English literature and considers how Catholicism shaped and influenced their writing.

When Charles Ryder in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited comments to the Catholic Sebastian Flyte that Catholics "seem just like other people", Flyte responds, "That's exactly what they are not--particularly in this country where they're so few." Since the Reformation, Catholics ...