An Interesting Look at Artists and Catholicism in 20th-Century Britain

Melanie McDonagh’s ‘Converts’ highlights Roman Catholicism of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the reasons many leading artists converted.

This new book by author Melanie McDonagh answers the question why so many converted to the Catholic faith in the 20th century. Yale University Press

“Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic side of the church, and the fragrance of its teaching would have curbed my degeneracies. I intend to be received into it before long.” This was the sentiment of the famous early 19th-century Irish poet and author, Oscar Wilde, when discussing his moral shortcomings, of which there were many, with his friend, John Clifford Millage.

This is a quote referenced by Melanie McDonagh in her new book, “Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century,” and it indeed gives an overarching perspective of those artists and thinkers, regarding their moral failures and the reasons they were drawn specifically to Roman Catholicism.

Answering the Questions

As McDonagh indicates, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this period confronted the West (Britain, specifically in this book) with a plethora of metaphysical and existential questions. As new theories about life and the soul were presented, such as Marxism and Darwinism, there was subsequently an increase in agnosticism and materialism. Those referenced in this book, answered those questions accordingly, at least initially. That was until the emptiness of those answers became evident. Some artists, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, however, ventured into spiritualism, but for the subjects discussed by McDonagh, that path was without substance.