Michael Ledger-Lomas: Pattern in the Carpet

Michael Ledger-Lomas

ACatholic policeman in wartime Sierra Leone finds himself in an almost mathematical bind. It would be a mortal sin for Henry Scobie not to go to Mass with his wife, Louise, but if he does not take Communion when they go, she will suspect that he has been having sex with a young widow. Although he tries the confessional beforehand, he cannot receive absolution because he refuses to obey Father Rank’s instruction to steer clear of Helen Rolt. If he takes Communion in his state of mortal sin, then he will damn himself, but he goes ahead anyway and receives ‘the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue’. Christ soon reproaches him, speaking from the wafer lodged in his gullet. Scobie then compounds his perdition, killing himself with sleeping pills. By committing the greatest and most irredeemable of sins, he hopes to trade his damnation for Louise and Helen’s peace, an act almost holy in its perversity.

The recondite agonies that Graham Greene inflicted on Scobie – let alone Jesus – in The Heart of the Matter (1948) repelled George Orwell. He accused Greene of being a spiritual snob, who had turned Hell into ‘a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only’. Even sharper criticism came from his fellow Catholics. Evelyn Waugh called Scobie’s spiritual deal a ‘mad blasphemy, for the God who accepted that sacrifice could be neither just nor lovable’. Waugh suspected that Greene had taken the idea of Scobie’s warped sanctification from the poet Charles Péguy, whose saying supplied the book’s epigraph: ‘No one is as knowledgeable in the matter of Christianity as the sinner, that is, except the saint.’ Péguy had made this ‘preposterous deduction’ as a morally erratic convert who needed to put a brave face on the fact that he could not take Communion.

Waugh was right that Greene did not speak for practising Catholics: he was skipping Communion because he refused to end his affair with Catherine Walston. Yet Waugh was also a convert who had been taken to task by ecclesiastical grandees for the pitiless frivolity of his early novels. In accepting Catholic authority, writers unleashed their imaginations. As Greene said, quoting Saki, ‘When once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations, its possibilities become practically limitless.’ But they also pledged to obey authorities who could be as philistine as they were dogmatic. Such tensions are central to Melanie McDonagh’s Converts, a chatty survey of literary and artistic converts to Catholicism in England from John Henry Newman to the Second Vatican Council. Catholic journalists like McDonagh have always doted over these prize catches, but it is a good moment to investigate the way converts change the religion they embrace. Before Palm Sunday this year, the New York Times found American bishops ‘buzzing’ over a ‘surge’ in new arrivals. Although converts make up only 8 per cent of America’s Catholics, their aggressive confidence and traditionalism stand out. J.D. Vance is typical in his chutzpah: although the vice president of the United States converted only seven years ago, he lectures Pope Leo on theology and has just published his spiritual autobiography.

McDonagh returns us to a time when novels rather than tweet threads or Instagrammed altars were the medium for discussing conversion to Catholicism. Then as now, articulate converts made a noise out of proportion to their number. By the time Westminster Cathedral was consecrated in 1910, Irish immigration rather than conversion explained the rise in the Catholic population of England and Wales to around 1.7 million. Half a million or so conversions between 1910 and 1960 sounds impressive, but the yearly rate never exceeded sixteen thousand – always greatly fewer than the cradle Catholics lost to ‘wastage’. Conversion was then, as it still is, generally a romantic rather than an intellectual phenomenon in which people – Greene among them – adopted the faith of the Catholics they married. There were many humble conversions from conviction but historians know little about them. Among the tens of thousands netted by missionary drives in northern England were some of my maternal ancestors, who silently entered a Church that most of their descendants have just as quietly abandoned.

Converts interpreted Rome to England all the same. The priests most gifted in receiving arty types were often converts themselves and couched Roman doctrines in sophisticated ways quite different from the rude assertions of the Penny Catechism. McDonagh touches on these enigmatic figures but is more interested in what their converts made of their new faith. Her deliberately capricious collective biography includes some lesser yet representative lights (the tub-thumping novelist Robert Hugh Benson) and excuses some glaring omissions (Gerard Manley Hopkins). Some of her choices do not come off. Siegfried Sassoon, whose writing had petered out before his conversion, adds little to the theme, while a chapter on Elizabeth Anscombe does not get beyond superficialities. The ‘too little read’ Maurice Baring will remain so. If McDonagh had broadened her gaze from the tormented lodestars of the Catholic literary revival and included more of the (sometimes justifiably) obscure women writers than she does, the convert’s lot would look more domestic and less agonistic. Still, she establishes her converts as a guild linked by friendships and preoccupations – the pattern in the carpet, Greene said, that ‘one has to stand back in order to make out’.

The purely aesthetic fascination of Catholicism was oddly slight. Converts often claimed that they had little prior acquaintance with Catholic worship, which seemed less dignified than the Prayer Book services of their youth. The Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England allowed the curious to try on Roman outfits or even to pose as monks without submitting to the pope – the inmates of an Anglican monastery on the New Kent Road swapped cassocks for suits to commute to jobs in the city. While witnessing Mass often proved decisive in a conversion, the ritual was often most effective when most slipshod. In 1880, the clergyman George Tyrrell was teetering on the brink of conversion when he followed an exquisite Palm Sunday service at St Alban’s, Holborn, with Mass in the crypt at St Etheldreda’s, where three priests droned ‘in darkness and mid the smell of a dirty Irish crowd’. Here finally was ‘reality! Here was the old business, being carried on by the old firm, in the old ways.’ There was a self-mortifying thrill for upper-crust Anglicans in rubbing shoulders with Irish navvies or soldiers, who personified Rome’s demotic offer of grace. Benson, who followed Tyrrell in being an Anglican clergyman turned Catholic priest, trilled that the peasantry of Killarney was the ‘real Royal Family of Heaven’.

Running on high but stifled emotion (like all five of his siblings, he was a homosexual) Benson maintained that the massive reality of Catholic sacraments did not depend on your feelings about it. It was an ‘ice peak’: resolve to scale it and your inner conflicts fell away. Ronald Knox, another closeted Anglo-Catholic homosexual, remembered his Anglican agonies seeming unreal when he went to Rome: he was, as he put it in his memoir A Spiritual Aeneid (1918), like the dozy man who had ‘mistaken a pile of bed-clothes for a polar bear’. Knox, who supported himself as a priest by writing detective stories, liked a clincher. Yet although he presented his conversion as the healing of a self’s divisions, most of his story was still to come. Decades later, Waugh’s biography of him grimly detailed his subsequent collisions with the bishops who squandered his gifts in dead-end jobs. McDonagh is more at ease in rendering the human comedy of conversion than its intellectual history, but for that reason her book offers a granular account of the frustrations involved in reconciling an elective Catholicism with the actual Church.

The artistic re-envisioning of Catholicism really began in France. Its Decadents offered a more attractive model for writers and artists than John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, that solemn tale of backing out of one spiritual cul-de-sac after another. The Decadents likened the Mass to Wagner’s operas as a means of refining and intensifying bodily sensations. Sexuality and piety joined in sin and its exciting absolution in the confessional. Decadents who embraced Catholicism accordingly avoided the boring feuds about papal authority or the interpretation of Aquinas that passed for the Church’s intellectual life. The classic conversion narrative was Huysmans’s novel En Route (1895), then as widely read as À Rebours is today. Just as the dandyish Des Esseintes exquisitely withdrew from the bourgeois world, so Durtal in En Route undertakes the same kind of stay in a Trappist monastery that effected Huysmans’s conversion. A tearful erotomane who thrills to the mortifications of saints but turns his nose up at the refectory’s oily vegetables, Durtal mixes rapt commentaries on liturgy with anti-clerical jokes and sulphurous memories of the prostitutes he once enjoyed. No wonder that Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission, which broods on conversion as the antidote to secular inanition, made its narrator a Huysmans scholar whose special study is En Route.

Decadence lost some of its savour across the Channel. McDonagh is impressed with the upwardly mobile John Gray, who escaped the Woolwich Arsenal to become a civil servant and poet before he converted and took ordination at the Scots College in Rome, but he was a clenched figure. Gray modelled Silverpoints (1893) on Paul Verlaine, who after turning to the Church in prison wrote as both satyr and monk, alternating tender addresses to Jesus with gusty celebrations of anal intercourse. Gray suppressed the book after becoming a Jesuit and settled down to a close but sexless companionship with André Raffalovich, a wealthy Russian Jew who wanted to be the Maecenas of the Decadents and soon followed Gray into the Church. The only public expression of their love was the exquisite church they built together in Edinburgh’s Morningside, where ‘Father Silverpoints’ prayed every year for Verlaine’s soul.

Better artists slow-pedalled their conversions, for fear of the connection that Oscar Wilde identified ‘between Faith and bad art’. Raffalovich introduced the tubercular imp Aubrey Beardsley to a priest, but he only agreed to be received into the Church once he was ailing fast. From his deathbed in Menton, he instructed his publisher to burn his phallic illustrations to Lysistrata (an order fortunately ignored). Beardsley’s collaborator Wilde spent much of his life doodling at a kind of Decadent theology. He presented Christ as a divine dandy whose greatest work was himself. He held that ‘what is termed Sin is an essential element of Progress,’ and found in the rigour of the confessional a model for his poetic autobiography, De Profundis. If only Wilde would rewrite all of the Bible, Max Beerbohm joked of Salome, there would be an end to scepticism. Yet he did not return to the Church until it was almost too late – although the priest responsible for his deathbed reception noted that he was conscious enough to ask for a cigarette afterwards. McDonagh points out that his lover Alfred Douglas had a longer run in the Church: from 1911 until his death in 1945, he was an ardent Catholic as well as an Ulster Unionist, an antisemite and an enthusiast for Mussolini.

The only English writer to match Huysmans had been kicked out of the Scots College. Frederick Rolfe, who was from a family of Dissenting piano-makers and had developed a fascination with the Borgia popes, had been too strange for his classmates to handle. Although he became a minor contributor to the Yellow Book, he never gave up on the priesthood – hence the deliberately misleading ‘Fr Rolfe’ of his title pages. His novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904) narrates with solemn dream logic the impasse in the conclave that forces the cardinals to choose as pope George Rose, an expelled seminarian turned scribbler. As Pope Hadrian, he strives for the conversion of England and summons Europe’s crowned heads to avert a world war, before a socialist stabs him to death as he strolls around Rome. Greene, who loved Rolfe’s writing, noted that he had turned his furious disappointment with Catholic bureaucrats into a spiritual epic for the era of ‘Norfolk jackets and deerstalker caps’. Rolfe drifted to Venice, where he fraternised with gondoliers and male prostitutes before dying destitute in 1913, but not before he had produced another masterpiece, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It obsessively yet exquisitely recounts Nicholas Crabbe’s martyrdom, which is also his own: Crabbe is yet another failed priest whose ‘ruthless immitigable faith’ both sustains him in and perpetuates his isolation and eventual death. ‘Immitigable’ – this and many other weird neologisms capture the perverse autodidacticism of Rolfe and his martyrs. Hadrian’s enemies in Rome had sniped at his ‘hendecasyllabical allocutions’.

McDonagh passes over Rolfe for Benson, a one-time friend who learned from Hadrian the Seventh how to translate his queerness into jewelled visions of martyrdom. Although Benson became the loudest Catholic voice of Edwardian England, his voluminous output shows how converts who had it all their own way often ended up ranting (the dogma in his novels was the ‘gritty powder in the jam’ sighed his novelist brother Edward). As the son of an archbishop of Canterbury, he was a prize catch who was permitted to complete his ordination in Rome in quick time – just as well, as he hated ‘foreign countries’ and Italian food – and to set himself up for a literary life in a country pad so grand he bequeathed it to the archbishops of Westminster. Father Benson understood conversion as an orgasmic capitulation to authority. His omnivorous appetite to believe – not just in the papacy but in horoscopes and necromancy – gave him a Decadent’s feel for the corporeal pull of the Mass. He gloried in it as a primitive rite, in which the Catholic is ‘not ashamed to take his place … with the naked Fijean, and to dance with all his might before the Lord’.

Lord of the World (1907) shows that his lurid credulity could produce some gripping writing. In this Edwardian apocalypse, later 20th-century Britain has become a secularised republic that offers euthanasia on demand, and the bits of Europe not absorbed by Russia have fallen for the godless fascinations of an American demagogue, Julian Felsenburgh. The only obstacle to Felsenburgh is an English pope – a conceit pinched from Rolfe. After British and German airships carpet bomb the Vatican, Percy Franklin flees to Palestine to await death at the hands of the Yankee Antichrist, just outside Megiddo. For all the charm of its Wellsian future casting, the book’s Catholicism is boringly true, the ‘Humanitarianism’ of its opponents predictably hollow and vicious. Benson’s popular Reformation novels were also too keen to pick sides. They cannot match the Fifth Queen trilogy of his contemporary Ford Madox Ford, whose fading Catholicism impelled him to explore the dark passages between faith and power in the reign of Henry VIII.

Neither Rolfe nor Benson’s brands of sensationalism lasted long into the 20th century. Only Ronald Firbank, who converted as an undergraduate under Benson’s influence, kept up the Decadent mood into the 1920s. His novels shared Rolfe’s fascination with the camp Latinity of the Vatican but were overtly naughty: the eponymous hero of Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) baptises a lapdog and dies, naked but for his mitre, while pursuing a choirboy. Unwilling to joke about sin, the next generation of converts were just as incurious about ideas: they avoided the controversies aroused by the handful of Catholic intellectuals, such as Tyrrell, who had called for a properly critical theology and attacked ‘Papolatry’. Although Pius X introduced an oath against ‘Modernism’ in 1910, which remained binding on most priests and clerical teachers until 1967, newcomers were not bothered by the crackdown, preferring martyrs to thinkers (Thomas More and John Fisher were canonised in 1935). Father Basil Maturin, the only priest to attend the excommunicated Tyrrell’s funeral in 1909, confessed that ‘an overpressure of authority does not really trouble me much.’

The indulgence of overpressure explains the cult of Gilbert Chesterton. Decades before his stagey and belated conversion in 1922, Chesterton’s apologetics had recommended Catholic teaching as a liberation from the oppressive scientism and faded liberalism of his age, which let the numinous weirdness of reality back in. Chesterton’s mousetrap syntax, which constantly pings with inversions – dogmatism is freedom, the trivial is the momentous, the impossible the plausible – is almost unreadable today. But what he called orthodoxy promised a new basis for England’s flagging democracy: sin and redemption were the ultimate common denominators. Together with his convert brother Cecil and their friend Hilaire Belloc, he announced principles to withstand the ruthless globalisation of European empires. ‘Distributism’ would have given workers the land and the supportive institutions (especially guilds) they needed to challenge the plutocratic ‘servile state’ that had debauched democracy.

Belloc, who often sounded like a popish Weber, attacked the English Reformation for isolating the soul. Yet the Europhile and medievalising effort to find a path between capitalism and atheistic Bolshevism led to much the same bad places as Catholic corporatism did on the Continent. ‘Chesterbelloc’ stood among other things for antisemitism. Cecil accused Hebrew financiers of starting the Boer War and of corrupting the Liberal government. Belloc described Jews as a congenitally secretive and alien minority, an enemy of Christian civilisation fit only for elimination or segregation (he generously preferred segregation). Mussolini was a sound alternative to ‘Parliamentary filth’ and General Franco was the ‘man who saved us all’. If few converts went as far as the South African poet Roy Campbell, who fought for Franco before translating St John of the Cross, Belloc’s thought tainted many of the efforts to find in Catholicism not merely a literary sensibility but a governing creed. For the Augustinian philosopher of history Christopher Dawson, fascism and liberal democracy were just two varieties of the fallen state.

Although the sinister Merry England of the Distributists never came to pass, they did inspire artists who despaired of flourishing under capitalism. The sculptor Eric Gill, who had looked to create a ‘new religion’ before he transferred his hopes to Catholicism, teamed up with Vincent McNabb, a friar and apostle of Belloc who insisted that the embrace of apostolic poverty involved the rejection of industrialism. They founded a commune at Ditchling whose members churned butter when they weren’t making art. Gill and McNabb did their bit to give theoretical heft to their Cistercian rebellion against modernity by translating Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, which proposed that the artist trace the principles intrinsic to God’s creation. Gill followed Maritain, whose wife was a Russian convert from Judaism, in another way too: he denounced the Catholic flirtation with Franco and Mussolini.

Gill’s Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral and the hieratic Christs of his war memorials did challenge English Catholicism’s gewgaw aesthetics, even if he quietly kept his experiments in living afloat with commercial decorative commissions. But his writings turned from demanding a social revolution in art to explaining why it probably could not happen: market forces were too strong for peasant artists who prayed as they worked. The best one could hope for was that the workers might get to own their machines and produce a new kind of functionalist beauty (‘Towns are all right,’ admitted Gill, who admired the Forth Bridge as much as early Roman churches). His Catholicism was as strange as his social theory was wobbly. Gill retained his Protestant missionary family’s contempt for priests, especially when they criticised his libido. While taking instruction in the faith, he had been carving a marble replica of his penis and he carried on in that vein thereafter. Fiona MacCarthy long ago exposed the secret evils of Gill’s antinomianism – he sexually abused his daughters and his dog – but even casual acquaintances noticed his icky conflation of worship and copulation. His drawings were more Rabelaisian than Thomist. Nuptials of Christ, which illustrated being ‘fucked by Christ’, flustered even the broad-minded McNabb, but Gill was able to get a compliant priest to give an imprimatur to his books of erotic etchings.

After Gill’s death in 1940, Greene gently dismissed him as a grubby eccentric. Yet he too became a ‘Protestant in the bosom of the Church’, who came to see his subject as the unstable compound of sexual desire and belief, the ‘dangerous edge of things’ where conversions unravelled. The contrast with Waugh is indicative because back in the 1920s and 1930s these Oxonian contemporaries had both been bitterly unhappy young men who found in the Church a sheet anchor against personal despair and the fatuity of modern life. They had toyed with suicide. Waugh tried to drown himself at sea (a jellyfish sent him back to the beach) and Greene played Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver. Both found the word and idea of ‘conversion’ suspect: they had merely accepted the cogency of Catholicism’s explanation for the modern predicament, which clarified more than it consoled. After being received at Farm Street Church, Waugh had strolled off with Tom Driberg to hear a nightclub singer. Despite or rather because of his ostentatious lack of feeling, he had picked a side in the war ‘between Christianity and chaos’. Waugh’s application of that war to politics was more reactionary than Greene’s: he admired Mussolini as a strongman against Bolshevism and personally debriefed him on Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. But after both visited Mexico to witness the Church’s struggles against republican anti-clericalism, Waugh joked that the ‘Augustinian’ Greene had written more darkly about what he found there. The Lawless Roads (1939) began with an epigraph from Newman, suggesting that the only way to make sense of Mexico or any human society was by supposing that it had grown up after a ‘terrible aboriginal calamity’ – the Fall.

The two soon diverged, however. Waugh never weakened in his puritan understanding of Catholicism as a system of onerous but feasible duties deduced from Christ’s death and resurrection. Helena (1950) turns Emperor Constantine’s mother into a stout Englishwoman (it backs the tradition she was an Essex girl); her quest for the ‘true cross’ linked the contested reality of Christ’s divinity to a ‘solid chunk of wood’. Brideshead Revisited (1945), though, had shown how hard it was to ‘accept the supernatural as the real’ within the profane conventions of the modern novel. Its country house sections confirmed a view of Waugh as a snobbish Blimp, but the novel is really a supernatural thriller, which turns on whether the lapsed convert Lord Marchmain can be reconciled to the Church. It climaxes with a filmic cliffhanger in which the dying Marchmain slowly crosses himself in an act of assent to the priest who has granted him conditional absolution and extreme unction. The book’s insistent suggestion that God’s designs on people run underneath and counter to the world is clearest in the account of Marchmain’s son Sebastian, whose drunken determination to fail nonetheless brings him near to sainthood (was Péguy right after all?). Yet the divine plot is so strong it often makes its agents seem flimsy: when Marchmain’s daughter Julia throws over the fey narrator for God, she ends an affair that never seemed real.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) showed that Waugh could rouse himself to think innovatively about the way the supernatural might bend the novel to breaking point. The voices that accuse its tweedy convert hero of imaginary crimes turn the cabin of his ocean liner into a demonic confessional and their menace lingers even after we learn Pinfold caused them by the improper mixing of medications. Pinfold could have been a patron saint for a Catholic postmodernism. Waugh recognised as much when he welcomed Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), as an essentially Catholic book. Spark, a self-described ‘Gentile Jewess’ who had converted to Canterbury then Rome in quick succession, pursued in this and subsequent novels a sort of Roman Calvinism in which her characters become uneasily aware of their hard and sometimes brutal manipulation by a narrator who is as indifferent to the small facts of time and space as is God himself.

Greene also cheered Spark and, McDonagh reveals, backed her with cheques and wine in the hungry year of her debut. He had once shared Waugh’s faith that only writers with supernatural belief could revive the novel from the secularised characters of Forster and Woolf, who ‘wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper thin’. Bad Catholics in his early novels – the Augustinian hoodlum Pinkie in Brighton Rock or the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory – are living witnesses to heaven and hell, especially when they appear set on damnation. With The End of the Affair (1951), however, Greene’s fiction turns from proclaiming such realities to exploring their instability. Sarah Miles vows to God that she will renounce her lover Maurice Bendrix if he is spared death from a German rocket. Although Greene evokes the pathos of her bargain, he is more interested in its cognitive charge. Faith and love resemble each other in being less a recognition of reality than an ontological jolt that transforms the way we construe it. Sarah’s arbitrary acceptance of Catholicism comes to matter because of her mounting resolve to suffer by its dictates. In her determination to resist Bendrix – who chases her into a church and fondles her in the pews – she catches her death on a rainy Clapham Common and dies. Bendrix, a novelist by trade and the book’s narrator, tries to dismiss her divine plot as mere projection. Sarah had renounced him to stage a rich finale for an affair that was petering out anyway. Saints like Sarah ‘create themselves’, generating the realities by which they perish. Bendrix – and the reader – have to concede that Sarah was no martyr to fantasy: the touch of her saintly lips miraculously healed the disfigured face of Richard Smythe, a free-thinking lecturer. Yet he still reserves the right to hate God, whose ‘great schemes … ruin our happiness as a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest’.

The incandescent sexiness of the novel strengthens the power of the God who swoops to forbid it. Bendrix, cheated of his lover, tells God he hates him ‘as though You existed’. As Greene’s passions faded, so did his vivid awareness of damnation. Critics of The Heart of the Matter often miss that its author shares their wariness of Scobie’s logic: his pitying seduction of Helen Rolt seems too mechanical to warrant God’s anger and his wife had sensed what was going on all the same. Greene gave open expression to his scepticism in A Burnt-Out Case (1960), which greatly pained Waugh. Querry is the most Greeneish of characters, a church architect and a lothario. Equally tired of shagging and Mass, he flees to a leper colony in the Congo. His ‘aridity’ is not as bad as the criticism of it by the local Catholics. The most emetic of the bunch is Joseph Rycker, a palm oil merchant and failed Jesuit who pressures his young wife, Marie, to have sex by arguing that it is sacramental. Rycker tries to force Querry into the role of a desert saint, then – no less ludicrously – shoots him dead on suspicion of seducing Marie.

Greene had once argued that novels suffered when the atrophy of the ‘religious sense’ reduced the ‘sense of the importance of the human act’. This decay eventually became his subject. Eduardo Plarr, hero of The Honorary Consul (1973), is a doctor in an Argentinian border town who gets mixed up in the kidnapping of Charles Fortnum, a minor British official. Plarr has been sleeping with Fortnum’s wife, Clara, and despises his drunken love for her. After all, Fortnum found her in the brothel that Plarr (a regular customer) regards as a microcosm of life: a place for the unsentimental servicing of physical needs. Plarr completes Querry’s break with the penitential romanticism of Sarah Miles and Henry Scobie. There is no difference between love and his mother’s greed for dulce de leche. The important thing is to see that ‘caring is the only dangerous thing.’ Plarr realises too late that he has shrunk himself in living like this: at least the pathetic Fortnum knows how to love. He finally runs out to face the soldiers who have the kidnappers surrounded, along with León Rivas, the apostate priest who leads them. After they are both shot, he calls out ‘Ego te Absolvo’ to Rivas – the words with which a priest dismisses a sinner from the confessional – in sardonic recognition of a time when both men had felt the stakes of living were higher.

Greene was interested in the reorientation of Catholicism from individual sinfulness to social questions, but the changes agreed at the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 did little to shift his accidie. He found that the translation of the Mass into the vernacular made it harder to follow when travelling. The introduction of trendy bidding prayers ‘for the astronauts and what have you’ grated. McDonagh ends her book with the open dismay of her surviving converts at the decisions of the Council. Going to the modernised Mass, the mystic painter David Jones said, was like dining off tinned salmon. The Council radically altered the penitential conception of religion that first captured and then distanced Greene. Catholics and their clergy were now one people of God, embarked on an earthly pilgrimage symbolised by the tent-like churches built in the period. The Eucharist now looked like a shared meal rather than a sacrifice conducted by priests standing in for Christ, confession a sacrament of reconciliation rather than an individual’s encounter with a judicial God. Benson’s ice peak had melted almost overnight.

Waugh, who liked to watch as priests got on with propitiating God, was horrified at Mass becoming a ‘social “group activity”’, a rally cooked up by progressive German bishops in which people celebrated one another rather than God. Now that it has become fashionable to dismiss the guitar-driven Masses with which I grew up as a boomerish aberration, his complaints sound oddly contemporary. But they also resonate with this moment in a deeper way. The gnawing loneliness that had pushed Waugh and converts from Newman to Spark into the Church meant they were never joiners. ‘It’s queer, dears, how I’m lonely!’ Firbank’s Cardinal Pirelli sighs to the mute audience of his oil paintings. ‘The evenings are suicide.’ Today, if we can believe the bishops who spoke to the New York Times, ‘isolation’ again explains why young Americans enter the Church.

McDonagh, who has trad leanings, prefers to believe that the revived use of the Latin Mass might explain today’s modest uptick in conversions. I am partial to such Masses too, but the numbers run against her, as they do against those who prefer to see Pope Francis or Leo’s statesmanship as the draw. Weekly Mass attendance in England and Wales has slumped from two million before the Council to around half a million today, an inexorable fall which barely responds to changes in popes and which renders the lonely few that come in of small account. Conversions today happen in societies that are losing their appetite for literature as well as faith in God. The Lentmaxxers of social media seem like just another manifestation of the industrialised narcissism of contemporary life. Perhaps some of them will one day probe rather than just post about their religion and give us writings as rich as those discussed in Converts. Let us hope that for every J.D. Vance, we have a Fr Rolfe in store.

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