When I told my literary agent friend that I wanted to write a book about converts to Catholicism during the sixty heady years before the Vatican Council, he was in no doubt about their motives. “It was the glamour!” he declared. He was thinking Brideshead Revisited, Brompton Oratory liturgy, altar boys and incense and possibly the Sistine chapel ceiling.
Well, actually, it wasn’t the glamour. At least, not in the case of the converts I am looking at. As a group, they include some of the most interesting figures of the century. There’s Oscar Wilde who converted on his deathbed; Lord Alfred Douglas; Aubrey Beardsley who was received just before he died; Hugh Benson and the frightful Frederick Rolfe; Radclyffe Hall; Evelyn Waugh; Eric Gill and David Jones; Graham Greene; GK Chesterton; Edith Sitwell; Muriel Spark and perhaps Siegfried Sassoon. But there are other figures in this story; the celebrated Proust translator, C. Scott Moncrieff, Ronald Knox, translator of the New Testament, Ernest Dowden, the poet, plus the engaging figure of Arnold Lunn, the mountaineer.
