Melanie McDonagh, "Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century" (Yale UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Melanie McDonagh, "Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century" (Yale UP, 2025)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Melanie McDonagh
Date: December 6, 2025

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode explores Melanie McDonagh's new book, which examines the remarkable wave of Catholic conversions among British artists, writers, and intellectuals from the late 19th century through the 20th century. The discussion delves into what motivated figures like Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark (among others) to convert, how these conversions were perceived by society and the Church, and what their impacts were—both personally and culturally. The episode balances intimate biographical stories with broader historical and cultural analysis, highlighting continuity and change in converts’ motivations and experiences over time.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origin & Motivation for the Book

• Personal Motivation:
  • Melanie was struck by the prevalence of conversions among the “decadent” circle surrounding Oscar Wilde and noticed a historical pattern that seemed strangely underexplored in scholarship.

    “Almost all of them became Catholic...that struck me as being rather remarkable.” (02:58)

• Sincerity & Impact of Conversions:
  • Contradicts the trope that conversions were superficial, coerced, or psychological crutches. For most, it was “the most important event in their life.” (05:03)
  • Emphasizes the profound, often lifelong, impact these conversions had on individuals’ lives and works.

2. The Search for Authority and Continuity

• Cultural Yearning:
  • Converts sought “the fire and authority of the Church” (06:28), especially in unstable times (e.g., World Wars, economic upheaval).
  • Graham Greene’s desire for “something firm and hard and certain in these times.” (06:44)

3. Scale of Conversions

• Numbers & Trends:
  • Roughly 3,000 conversions/year at the start of the 20th century, rising notably during and after WWI and increasing steeply into the 1960s.
  • Over 600,000 people converted in the period under study, with only “one-sided” records (i.e., entries, no records of departures). (08:45)

4. Converts as Subversive: The 1890s

• Societal Suspicion:
  • Conversion seen as subversive and even threatening—“these aren't converts, these are perverts...the Church of Rome goes in for body snatching of this kind.” (11:15)
  • Common myths: Jesuit manipulation, ritual attraction, and lack of free will (“the priest got him”). (13:34)
  • Artistry and conversion intertwined; for some artists, it was “subversive” or boundary-pushing. (10:59)

5. Motivations: Ritual, Beauty, and the ‘Real Thing’

• Not About Aesthetics Alone:
  • Many did not convert for ritual or aesthetic beauty; in fact, some, like Graham Greene, found Catholic churches “completely hideous” but were after “the real thing,” i.e., authenticity and true authority. (14:03)

6. Oscar Wilde's Conversion

• A Deathbed Reconciliation:

  • Wilde’s path back to Catholicism after prison, his intent to convert, and the circumstances of his eventual reception into the Church on his deathbed.

    “Father Cuthbert came with him to Oscar Wilde's deathbed...Wilde was perfectly sensible of what was going on.” (18:12–21:44)

• Misconceptions:

  • Challenges to legitimacy (whether Wilde was cognizant enough, for example) were addressed by those present.

7. The Church’s Perspective on Intellectual & Artistic Converts

• “Natural End” for Sinners and Artists:
  • Seen as a proper evolution for those seeking forgiveness and as a logical move for artists, given Catholicism’s sacramental, symbolic richness.
  • “I've become a Catholic, as every artist must.” —Ernest Dawson (22:56)

8. Types of Converts

• Variation:
  • Both deeply religious and previously irreligious figures became converts—ranges from those, like Maurice Baring, for whom it was "all or nothing," to Muriel Spark, who came gradually via Anglo-Catholicism and Newman's writings. (24:59–27:59)

9. The Figure of John Henry Newman

• Newman’s Influence:
  • The quintessential intellectual convert; his trajectory and writings (e.g., the Apologia, Essay on Development of Doctrine) paved the way for Anglicans and the irreligious alike.
  • “...if any of the Church Fathers had returned to earth...they would have gravitated towards the unprepossessing Catholic Church in [St. Mary] Moorfields...” (29:01–32:54)

10. Social Contagion

• Conversion as ‘Contagious’:
  • Often conversions spread within families and social circles, sometimes via exemplars or intimate discussion, sometimes not (“the principle of contagion”).
  • Noted examples include the Beardsley family and social groups, though not uniformly present in every context. (35:33–37:55)

11. World War I and the Surge in Conversions

• Death & Urgency:
  • Proximity to death prompted many to seek forgiveness and the sacraments, sometimes accelerating the conversion process.
  • Catholic chaplains distinguished by their sacramental ministry in battle, impacting soldiers’ perceptions of Catholicism.

    “If you know that there's a very lively possibility that you die within weeks… it does concentrate the minds.” (38:21–42:54)

12. Between the Wars & into the Mid-Century

• Conversions Become Fashions:
  • By the 1920s, conversion was a marked intellectual or upper-class trend—no longer shocking but even somewhat expected in certain circles.
  • Post-war uncertainty (both after WWI and WWII/Cold War) drove people to seek the Church’s stability and authority. (43:16–45:50)

13. Vatican II and Its Impacts

• A Crisis for Converts:
  • The post–Vatican II reforms (liturgy, language, clerical expectations) caused great distress among some converts, who felt alienated by drastic changes they had not anticipated.

    “It was terrible for some of them...Even more said that he felt he’d been kicked in the guts by Vatican II.” (46:17)

  • Converts tended to lead opposition to reforms, less deferential to authority than “cradle Catholics.” Some, like Muriel Spark, were more adaptive and involved in the reform process, but with reservations. (52:07)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the draw of Catholic continuity:

  "If you looked at the Catholic Church, you could see a line of continuity that stretched back to the apostles." (07:22, Melanie McDonagh paraphrasing Newman)

• On the suspicion surrounding converts:

  “These aren't converts, these are perverts. So the Church of Rome goes in for body snatching of this kind.” (11:15, public reaction described by McDonagh)

• On artists’ attraction to Catholicism:

  "I've become a Catholic, as every artist must." (22:56, Ernest Dawson, relayed by McDonagh)

• On the ‘contagion’ of conversion:

  “Once one member of the family does [convert], it quite often happens that others follow suit.” (35:43, McDonagh)

• On war and conversion:

  “If you know that there's a very lively possibility that you die within weeks when you're sent to Flanders, that does concentrate the minds.” (38:21, McDonagh)

• On Vatican II:

  "It was terrible for some of them...Evelyn Waugh said he felt he’d been kicked in the guts by Vatican II." (46:17, McDonagh)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & Book Motivation: [02:52–06:28]
• Search for Authority & Continuity: [06:28–08:11]
• Scale and Statistics of Conversions: [08:45–10:21]
• Subversive Conversions in 1890s: [10:59–15:00]
• Oscar Wilde’s Conversion: [17:52–21:44]
• Church’s View on Artistic/Intellectual Converts: [21:44–24:18]
• Variety in Conversion Paths: [24:18–28:24]
• John Henry Newman’s Influence: [28:56–32:54]
• Contagion Principle in Social/Familial Conversion: [35:18–37:55]
• World War I’s Impact on Converts: [38:21–42:54]
• Interwar & Postwar Trends, Fashion of Conversion: [42:54–45:50]
• Vatican II and its Challenges: [45:50–52:16]
• Present-day Reflection: [52:41–53:41]

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

McDonagh brings a tone that is scholarly but engaging, mixing anecdote and analysis with a palpable sense of curiosity and empathy for her subjects. The conversation demystifies the mythic, sometimes suspicious, sometimes poetic aura around “the convert” and explains, in human and historical terms, why this phenomenon remains compelling. Ultimately, the episode suggests that religious conversion—particularly among intellectuals and artists—has been both countercultural and deeply personal, shaped by circumstance, persuasion, crisis, and conviction across the generations.

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Further Exploration

For listeners intrigued by the intersection of culture, faith, and personal transformation, Melanie McDonagh’s Converts provides both a group portrait of remarkable individuals and an analysis of the societal currents that shaped them. The episode is a compelling guide for understanding why, in the words of her subject Graham Greene, so many sought “something firm and hard and certain in these times”—and still do today.

Transcript

[Melanie McDonagh]

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[Marshall Poe]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very Pleased today because we get to talk about quite an interesting book published by Yale University Press just recently in 2025, titled Converts from Oscar Wilde to Muriel why so Many Became Catholic in the 20th century. I have the author with me today, Melanie McDonagh, to help us understand why so many people in this really, honestly, pretty short period of time, kind of suddenly became Catholic. What were their reasons? What did it mean to them in the moment? What were the impacts later on? How did wider society think about this? We have a lot to discuss. So, Melanie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Melanie McDonagh]

Well, thank you very much for having me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

[Melanie McDonagh]

I'm a journalist primarily. I do also have an academic background in that I did a PH at Cambridge in Medieval history, but I am primarily a journalist and I write for the Evening Standard and for the Spectator and for other papers. And my motivation in writing the book was exasperation. I was reading about the circle around Oscar wilde and the 1890s, the decadence, they were called, and it was remarkable that almost all of them became Catholic. Indeed, all but two of the circle around Oscar Wilde became Catholic. And that struck me as being rather remarkable. And then, of course, with later reading in subsequent periods, there was a remarkable number of converts, literary and artistic converts, in the early 20th century. And so once it occurs to you that something's happening, you seem to see it everywhere. And then when I looked into it further, it was apparent that it was regarded as something a little odd and a little problematic. That is to say that people would discuss the conversion of Oscar Wilde as being some sort of fraud on the part of his friend Robbie Ross. They'd see the conversion of Aubrey Beardsley as being coerced. They might see the conversion of Evelyn Waugh as being something that was. Was kind of a psychological prop, this problematic personality, or in the case of Graham Greene, something that was quite superficial and didn't really stick. And when I looked into it, it turned out that this wasn't the case, that overwhelmingly the conversions were undertaken sincerely. Some indeed weren't profound. And the dearth of interest in the conversion struck me as being rather remarkable, given that they had the most profound effect on the individuals concerned. So in some cases, for instance, Edith Nesbitt, who became a convert after her husband, Hubert Bland, converted, he was one of the founders of the Fabian Society and she was a famous children's author, it wasn't perhaps very evident in her religious attendance so perhaps it was in her spiritual life. But for the others I looked at, it was indeed an important event in their life. In fact, for some of them, it was the most important event in their life. And so it struck me that it would be a useful effort to look into why they converted and what the effects on their life and work was. So I went into the general phenomenon, that is to say, into the numbers and into the general trends and the reasons in the period why this might have happened. And then I also went into the cases of just over a dozen people and looked at them in particular and the reasons why they became Catholics. So, as you can imagine, these things varied over time, but not that much. I covered a period between the 1890s, the Decadence, and went right up to the Second Vatican Council. My last convert was Sigurd Sassoon and just a little earlier, Muriel Spark. And there was a remarkable continuity over that period and the reasons why people converted.

Part of it was that, as Eva Sitwell said, she doesn't loom very large in the book, but she does make a fleeting appearance. She wanted the fire and authority of the Church, or as Graham Greene put it in the 1920s, I do so want something firm and hard and certain in these times. So at a time when things were febrile and uncertain in the world at large, people did seek the authority and the stability of the Church. That is to say that it wasn't, at these two outward appearances, an institution that.

Swung with the times. Indeed, as Chesterton said, he didn't want a church that moved at the times, he wanted a church that would move the times. And so it was that element of.

Firmness, of identity that was sought and that sense of authority in terms of teaching, that is to say, looking at the history, as Newman first put it. Well, he didn't first put it, but as Newman influentially put it, if you looked at the Catholic Church, you could see a line of continuity that stretched back to the apostles. So he said, Newman, that if any of the doctors of the Church, any of the fathers of the Church, were resurrected in the late 19th century, they would find themselves gravitating towards Mary Moorfield's the Catholic Church in London, rather than to any of the Protestant institutions. And it was that sense of continuity that really resonated with the people who became Catholics. Though, of course, there are many reasons that animate different people.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, there's, of course, a range of reasons and we'll get into that, but really interesting to hear a bit about the time period that you cover and the sort of way in which you've looked at individual people, but also sort of the broader context too, and kind of going back and forth between those two scales. And obviously it makes sense to kind of focus individually on certain people more than others, because there are a lot more than 12 converts in this period. So before we get into some of the details, can you give us a sense of that scale? Like how many, roughly converts are we thinking about is 12? What level of drop in the bucket is 12?

[Melanie McDonagh]

The figures in the early period would have been about 3,000 a year.

That is to say, for the first decade of the century. And we do have actual figures from about 1911, which was just over 3,000. But the real period of growth was in the Great War. And during the Great War the figures advanced quite considerably for reasons that we can perhaps go into. And then there was a very steep rise in the 1920s, and the trajectory continued right up to the Second Vatican culture. So we're talking about on the cusp of the 1960s, and over that time, over 600,000 people became Catholics, that is to say, well over half a million. So although the earlier figures are a little uncertain, they're more firm for the later period. So we are talking about significant numbers of people, as I say, well over half a million. And what we don't have is an in and out. Horad. So although the figures are relatively firm for people received into the Church, because this was a formal procedure, there's no record of the lapses. So a lot of people may have left the church, but the Church doesn't record those who leave it, perhaps because there's no real way of knowing whether that's a farm and permanent decision or whether somebody might return to the fray on their deathbed? So I'm afraid it's only a one sided audit. But as a one sided audit, it did show a steep trajectory over the course of the 60 years that I looked at.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That is really interesting to understand the wider context this is all taking place in. So starting with the beginning of the period you cover, I'd love to pick up on the thread you mentioned earlier that this was sometimes through some of the periods seen as kind of concerning that people were converting to Catholicism. So if we look, for example, at the 1890s, to what extent was it seen as concerning at that point? I mean, in the book you even suggest it might have been seen as subversive. Is that a thing going on then? And maybe even is that a reason why, for example, artists who are already pushing the boundaries would be more inclined to do it. Or is that sort of conflating too many things?

[Melanie McDonagh]

Well, in some cases that's certainly right. So it was interesting to see the controversy relating to different converts when the very redoubtable composer Ethel Smythe wrote about her friend Morris Baring.

And his conversion. She herself was an Anglican and not particularly religious herself, but she wrote about Maurice Bering's conversion with great sympathy. And she got a colossal correspondence of people writing to say that these aren't converts, these are perverts. So the Church of Rome goes in for body snatching of this kind. When, when David Jones the artist converted his Methodist father, his Welsh father was absolutely horrified and talked about the grotesque excesses and the abominations practiced by Rome. But it didn't do the man great justice affect at all his affectionate relationship with the son. And Maurice Baring devoted his entire, entire sections of his first book Passing by, which he wrote on his conversion, to an account of the misinterpretation that was put on conversion by very many of his acquaintance. For instance, the standard trope was that the priest got him and then everybody would replicate, yes, yes, the priest got him, as though this explained everything. And in fact, as Maurice Bering said in his case and in the case of the converts that they were discussing, it wasn't actually the case. The first encounter that here the others had with priests was after their decision to become Catholic. And so very far from the priests going in for body snatching, it was the fact that the initiative came from the would be convert. And I do go into this at some length, there were any number of people who would turn up at Farm street or Rompton Archery, because in London these were the two places where many people sought to be received and instructed. And they were kind of despondent and rather disappointed that there was so little enthusiasm, showed the possibility that they might become Catholic. So that was quite funny. And Newman's own account of these things is very interesting. Evelyn More devoted to Nantara piece in the Daily Express to the whole business dealing with each of the misapprehensions in turn. And.

It was an essay that was called Converted to why It Happened to Me. And one of the misapprehensions that he discussed was the Jesuits got them. So.

The notion that converts would never do things of their own free will, but they were got up by the Jesuits who were thought to be conspicuously wily and duplicitous. And the other misapprehension that he dealt with was that.

They wanted the ritual. And in fact, he said, if you want ritual, you can get lovely ritual inside the Church of England. And Hugh Benson, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, E.W. benson, he made the point that in terms of liturgy and beauty of worship and the Catholicism could provide all these needs without having to take the very considerable step of becoming a Catholic. Indeed, almost for all of them, the ascetic argument wasn't really decisive. So Graham Greene would make the point that in fact, Catholic churches on the whole were completely hideous. So if you wanted an ascetic experience, the ordinary Catholic church, with its ghastly decorations and its very tawdry kind of statues and awful taste.

In religious art, wouldn't be for the sensitive. And in fact, it was quite the reverse that some people left Anglo Catholic religion and went to a church where they were actually worse served in terms of the beauty of the environment and the dignity of the services. But they went for something that was called, that they called the real thing. That was what John Craig called it. And John Gray was the alleged original of Dorian Gray. So people, he was widely reputed to be one of the models on which Oscar Wilde based the Dorian Gray of the story.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I'd love to stay on Oscar Wilde for a moment if we can, and because these processes of conversion I think, is really interesting here and obviously part of what people were paying attention to. So what, if anything, is significant or was seen as significant at the time? That Oscar Wilde does convert to Catholicism, but he does it on his deathbed.

[Melanie McDonagh]

The end of his life. After he'd been in prison, where his reading included the Gospels in Greek, he.

Began to think again about Catholicism. He sent a message, it would seem, to Brompton Oratory to ask to see a priest there, but he was told that.

He couldn't do so. It may have been that the fathers were influenced by what happened to him.

But Oscar Wilde was always influenced by Newman, and Newman he was very familiar with. So it may be that his earlier reading and his earlier inclinations came back to him after that devastating experience in prison. And when he was on the continent, he returned both to homosexuality and indeed to his attraction to Catholicism. At the first port of call in France, he used to attend the church regularly, but he also gravitated back eventually to us, to Alfred Douglas. And in the final months of his life, when he was in Rome, he did try to become a Catholic, and he asked Robbie Ross whether he might be received into the church. But Robbie Ross, I think rather prudently, thought that if he did become a Catholic, he'd have to go the whole hug and.

Perhaps reform his ways, his sexual ways, and he wasn't entirely confident that Wilde would do that. So Oscar amusingly described Robbie Rosk as being like the angel at the gates of Eton, with a flaming sword keeping him from entering. But he did make Ravi Ross promise that he would fetch a priest if he were in danger of death. And in the weeks before his death, he told a correspondent for a newspaper that he had every intention of becoming a Catholic before long, and he felt that the Church might have saved him from his worst excesses had he become a Catholic earlier. And when it came to it, Robbie Ross came to his deathbed when he was conscious but not really capable of speech, and he sent for Father Cuts to the Passionists for a priest, and he found an Irishman, in fact, from Dublin, which is where Oscar Wilde came from. And Father Cuthbert came with him to Oscar Wilde's deathbed. And Wilde was capable of communicating through signs rather than by language. And Cuthbert Donne asked him whether he wished to become a Catholic, and he assented by signs. And he went through the normal forms of receiving someone into the Church and combined that also with the last rites. And he came to him more than once before his death. And it was apparent that Wilde was perfectly sensible of what was going on. Indeed, he tried to smoke a cigarette but couldn't quite manage it. He was conscious and he was able to understand perfectly what was happening, but he simply wasn't capable of speech, or indeed, I think, of receiving the Eucharist because he couldn't have swallowed it. So the misapprehensions about his ability to become a Catholic, I think, centred on this question about whether he could properly assent and properly understand what was happening. But Father Kolsputch, and indeed Robbie Ross, it was confident that he was able to understand and he was able to signal his agreement and dissent. Hmm.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Moving beyond the perceptions of individual priests, what did the wider Church think about people like Oscar Wilde or other artists or intellectuals converting in the early 20th century?

[Melanie McDonagh]

It was seen as.

In a way, the natural end.

Of.

A variegated life. I mean, from the point of view of the artists in question, it was clear that forgiveness of sin was one of the things that they sought. And if you lived a life very much to the full, as the decadent artists had, then that element that your sins will be forgiven was very important. But there was also the sense that for an artist, it made sense to become a Catholic. And Ernest Dawson, who died without receiving the last rites, he said, I've become a Catholic, as every artist must. So there was that sense that the idea of sacrament and the idea of the expression of belief in signs and indeed in symbols was.

A part of the attraction of the faith for artists, as well as that notion of continuity and that sense of, indeed, artistic tradition in terms of the Church, and the Church as not just a patron of the arts, but.

A form of faith in which faith and natural expression, visually and poetically. So for a Catholic, and this came up very much in the case of David Jones a little later on, for a Catholic, that notion of sacramentality, that something is both what it seems to be and something else, and they're both at the same time. So for an artist, that sense that you have something that's real.

In what you see and also in something beyond itself is quite profound. And for poets also, this idea of symbol and sign is important, though in a rather different sense. So I don't get the impression that it was seen as something problematic. A repentant sinner is a repentant sinner, no matter whether he's an artist or a normal member of society. The idea is that once you embrace the faith, your sins are forgiven. And if you're a bad Catholic, you just go back to confession more often.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's very interesting to see the kind of institutional perspective there, but going back to the individual level, as the book kind of goes back and forth between them, when you're talking about these kind of seeking of the profound and things like that, it sounds almost like some of the converts are looking for things that are specific to Catholicism, but maybe also just kind of looking for things that are religious in general, if that makes sense. Like, to what extent are we seeing converts who. Who weren't really religious at all, and then they become both religious and Catholic at the same time versus people who were already religious, but then specifically kind of became Catholic? Do we see more of one kind or the other?

[Melanie McDonagh]

You see both. So in the case of Maurice Baring, it really was a case of if you are to seize on God at all, you will seize on him as a Catholic. It was all or nothing, though he was unusual in having encountered Russian Orthodoxy when he was a little younger. And for him.

Once you seized on the idea of the Church, you also seized on the idea of God and revelation and the idea of an institution that embodied.

Christ and succeeding generations, because that was a crucial thing. Whether the Church had the authority to continue a living tradition, not just the tradition that was left there at Pentecost, but the continuation of that authority to teach and for doctrine to evolve over time. So there are many instances of people in that position. Now, Muriel Spark was pretty.

Non Christian really, when she started the journey. And. And she began through Newman. Her parents were.

Jewish in background, her father was Jewish and her mother partly Jewish, apparently. And she was brought up in an environment that was respectful of God, but it was entirely undogmatic. And she came to faith through reading Newman, really. And she began as an Anglo Catholic and then gravitated within a year to the Catholic Church, I think primarily through Newman. And then you had cases like Hugh Benson, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury, was very well grounded in the Anglican tradition and indeed spanned the Anglican tradition during his entire career. And for him it was a matter that the Anglican Church was too all inclusive. That is to say that intuited opposites. He found that there was a latitude that was worse than chains. That is to say that.

The notion that it didn't really matter whether you believed in the real presence or not, that some churches that you went into would have a very strong sense of.

The real presence in the Eucharist and others simply wouldn't. And indeed the same Church could have different emphases at different points in the services that some went in for auricular confession and some didn't. That to him was intolerable that the Anglican Church could unite these opposites. And so he went from a position of very sincere and committed faith at the end, naturally, as an Anglo Catholic, to become a Roman Catholic on the basis that he sought the authority that would resolve these questions. So you have an immense variety of individuals with different motivations. And yes, indeed some of them.

Had been parted from their childhood Anglicanism or Protestantism, like Alfred Douglas or indeed even more, and were relatively godless by the time they became Catholics, or some were still Anglican and then entered into the Catholic Church as. As something that completed what they sought for. But there's simply no rule.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's really interesting to understand kind of the variation within the different stories. And if we think beyond any of the one. One of the people that are mentioned here, that's of course the helpfulness of the fact. You've not just given us a biography of one person and their conversion story. There's just so many different people in their interactions here too. One of the key figures that comes out is actually not a convert, but sort of someone who seems to be involved in a bunch of different people's conversions. John Henry Newman. Why was he someone that kind of came up a number of times.

[Melanie McDonagh]

He was the archetype of the convert. He was the person who.

Thought the Church of England could be reconciled with the Catholic tradition. He thought that the 39 articles were patient of a Catholic explanation or interpretation, that is to say, that they could be interpreted in a Catholic light and by the sheer process of intellectual engagement with Church history, and particularly with the history of the Fathers, came to the conclusion that the Anglican Church, as it had emerged from the reformation in the 16th century, was simply not the Church that the Apostles had left behind. That in terms of continuity of belief and continuity of faith.

The line of succession led from the Apostles to the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the abuses and idiocies of the Catholic Church as it was in his period and indeed subsequently. That is to say that Newman was very clear in his account, especially in the Apologia and in the essay called On Development of Doctrine, about how the development of doctrine comes about.

And how it happens under the aegis of the Catholic Church. And so, as I said earlier, he felt that if any of the Church Fathers had returned to earth improbably in London in the late 19th century, they would have gravitated towards the unprepossessing Catholic Church in Samaria, Moorfields or Neely Place, rather than to any of the grander Anglican edifices, on the basis that they would have recognized that Church as embodying the doctrines.

That they had articulated. So Newman thought himself into the Catholic tradition and then he thought himself out of it. And his process of reasoning was so clear and so lucid that it was very, very compelling. And a number of people followed him, not only into Anglo Catholicism, but a number of people followed him out of Anglo Catholicism and into the Catholic Church. Even though his own career within the Church was problematic, to say the least, he encountered hostility, encountered suspicion. He was perpetually being thwarted by his peers, including other Catholic converts, and he had to wrestle with the philistinism of the episcopacy at the time. But nonetheless, Newman, by virtue of his thought, which the Catholic Church has recently recognized by making him a saint, did pave the path for other Anglicans in particular, who sought to establish a kind of authority in terms of the development of doctrine from the time of Christ to the present day. And for countless, countless converts, Newman was an exemplar and also someone who gave the rationale that they themselves followed. Somebody called John Rothenstein, who became the director of the Tate Gallery, the son of William Rothenstein, who was a very famous painter. He encountered Newman at his very irreligious or kind of sopperly religious school. And he thought, why on earth didn't I come across him before? Because the path was so clear. Once he had Newman at his side and this was a chap who came to the faith from nowhere. And there are a number of people who did come to faith from nowhere. For instance, Polly Toynbee, the journalist's grandmother. She came to religion literally from nowhere. She was the product of.

A willfully atheistic family, very philanthropic. Her father was Gilbert Murray, the celebrated classicist, and he barred any mention of religion from the nursery. But.

This girl found Rosalind Montmorray found herself gravitating to the back of the Catholic Church for no good reason. So you have numbers of these cases who.

Are somehow attracted to faith without any external stimuli. And for many of them, like John Rothenstein, Newman became a guide and a friend by virtue of his writing. And indeed for Oscar Wilde, he often thought of going to pay homage to Newman while he was a student at Oxford. And Newman wasn't so very far away in the diocese of Birmingham. But he never quite got round to it. He called him that divine man.

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Given how influential he.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Was, what about sort of influences? I suppose a little bit kind of closer to an individual. Like how often did you find instances where someone converted after like their best friend did or after their sister did or sort of things like that? Within the social sphere?

[Melanie McDonagh]

Yes. It's what I call the principle of contagion. So once one member of the family does, it quite often happens that others.

Follow suit. I mean, not in the case of Hugh Benson, the Archbishop's son, because his brothers just laughed at him and thought he was completely preposterous for becoming a Catholic, and indeed keenly resented his becoming a Catholic, though they weren't particularly embarrassed by it, they just thought that it was nonsensical. So his brother Fred, for instance, who wrote the Map and Lucia books, he was appalled that his father's son had taken this step. But in the case of Aubrey Beardsley, for instance, his sister Mabel became a Catholic first, and she became a Catholic under the influence of Florence Gribble, who was a companion to a chap called Andrei Rafalovic, and he also became a Catholic. And then, once Mabel became a Catholic, Aubrey became a Catholic, though not necessarily directly under her influence, but it would have stimulated.

His thought in that direction. And then his mother became a Catholic later on, after his death, and his father became a Catholic after his death. And in the Rafaelvitch circle, his butler became a Catholic on the same day as he did. So the principle of contagion is very much at work. But as I said, in the case of Hugh Benson and many others, it wasn't invariably the case. So none of David Jones's relations, for instance, showed any sign of following suit. But it certainly was the case that once a friend becomes a Catholic or a relative, then the subject arises and. And if you're on sufficiently intimate terms, you will discuss the reason for the conversion. And that was certainly the case with Maurice Baring. I think it was Reginald Balfour who became a Catholic, and Morris Baring couldn't understand why he went the whole hog, why he couldn't actually stand on the threshold of the faith rather than entering into it. And then he found himself taking the same step, and for precisely the same reasons. So there were what we nowadays called influences. People like, for instance, Hilaire Billock, though he could influence people the other way as well, or Chesterton. But it was certainly people's immediate circle who might give rise to these discussions and cause people to think about these things, perhaps for the first time.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I mean, when you explain it like that, it makes a lot of sense to have intimate conversations with someone and be like, oh, well, hang on, what's your thinking here? Right. Kind of develops from that. But of course, there are wider events as well that would definitely have an influence. So if we're looking at the period of the sort of 1890s until Vatican II, kind of an obvious one that jumps out is World War I. How did that impact conversions in terms of both scale, but Also reasons, well.

[Melanie McDonagh]

If you know that there's a very lively possibility that you die within weeks when you're sent to Flanders, that it does concentrate the mines. And the Catholic Church did offer the forgiveness of sins, which was something that was profoundly important for many people who are facing likely death. And there was also.

That element that you may have been thinking about it and considering your religious options in a leisurely sort of way prior to 1914. But once you joined the army, you had to make your mind up very quickly indeed. And so there was one convert soldier.

Who was received within a fortnight. Normally, the process of instruction and reception takes place over months, but I think priests realized that this was a little unrealistic given the circumstances. And so some converts were received in very short order. And this particular chap was received after a fortnight and just came away with a whole bundle of Catholic Truth Society pamphlets and tried to look to question every other Catholic he came across for some sort of doctrinal discussions, which they were not necessarily equipped to give. There was a very famous.

Priest, the chaplain to the Dublin Regiment, and that was Father Willie Doyle. He was chaplain to more than one of the Irish regiments. And he.

Found that there were any number of people who would engage in friendly discussion.

As he went around visiting the troops. So he would actually get very close to the action, and he would be very close to the troops when they were engaged.

In combat. And in visiting the soldiers, he would have the opportunity of having a chat, for instance, to officers who might raise doctrinal issues in a friendly sort of spirit. And I think also that it was the example of the chaplains and their bravery that did impress a number of people, because it was important for a Catholic to receive the last rites before death. So a chaplain was. Would do his damnedest to get to a dying soldier before he died in order to give him the last rites and absolution of his sins. And this was an impressive example, not just of personal bravery, but of the rationale for it, which I think caused a very great number of people to become Catholics during the Great War. And.

The rationale of the Catholic chaplain was different from that of the Anglican. So you had some delightful and very brave and spirited Anglican chaplains, like Woodbine Willie, who would go around and cheer up the men and hand them out cigarettes. But it was a very different function from that of the Catholic priests. There was one, famously, at Gallipoli, who joined his men as they kind of struggled onto the beaches and onto the Turkish guns. And he was meant to have said, the priest places with his men precisely because they were about to die and precisely because he could offer them the last rites and forgiveness of their sins and the open gateway to heaven in a way that the Anglican chaplains, certainly of a Protestant persuasion, weren't able to. It came up quite clearly in the case of Father Ronald Knox, because he wasn't the Catholic at the start of the Great War, but some of his friends became Catholics. And one of them, who was an Anglican ordinand, found that when he was interviewed by the Chaplain General for a post as a chaplain, he was asked, well, what would you do for a dying man? And he said, well, here is sins and give him absolution, because this man was an Anglo Catholic. But from the Chaplain General's point of view, the correct answer was, I'd offer him a cigarette and say, I'll take any messages to his family. And the function of these things was quite different and perceived quite differently. And one was pastoral and almost social and very well intentioned and very well meant, but the other was very, very different. It was in order to make it possible for you to get into heaven if you're a sinner.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I can see how that would make quite an impact on observers. To all of this. Given though, then, that the war ends, do we see any of this sort of spill over or continue into the interwar period? The kind of reputation, I suppose, of Catholicism at this point, I mean, for example, was it still controversial the way it was earlier, or was it kind of a more normal thing now?

[Melanie McDonagh]

Well, in 20s it became a fashion. So somebody like Evelyn Waugh, who became a Catholic at that point, knew that he was going with a very decided trend. It wasn't for that reason he became a Catholic because he was such a stubborn individualist. But GK Chesterton said that before the 20s.

You would no more have thought about why you weren't a Catholic than why you weren't a Confucian. But after the 20s, people for the first time started to ask themselves, why are you not a Catholic? Rather than why are you one? And so the.

The trend.

Was very widely felt, especially among the upper and intellectual classes. There were two periods, in fact, when the trajectory was marked and that was in the 20s and in the 50s. And Graham Breen, as I mentioned earlier, put his finger on it when he said that I do want something firm and hard and certain in these times because the times were very febrile. Nobody knew how the political situation was going to work itself out. And indeed, we know it worked out very Badly. The economic situation was similarly uncertain. The political classes seemed to gravitate to extremes. People didn't know where they were at. They just emerged from the most tremendous trauma of the Great War and intergenerational hatred. I think it's probably not too strong a point. It was very marked that there wasn't the consensus between the generations that there had been. And in this time of tremendous uncertainty and instability, the Catholic Church did seem to offer that stability and authority and certainty that people sought. And I was a little puzzled about the same phenomenon of the 1950s. But talking to people who lived through it, they did point out that that generation was very conscious that it was living in the shadow of the bomb, that they'd lived through Hiroshima. And for them, the possibility that the Cold War might resolve itself into the destruction of humankind did of itself, concentrate minds to an extent, although it was rather a different phenomenon than in the 1920s, when it was also a matter of fashion. So I think it's probably fair to say that at times that were particularly unstable, the authority and continuity of the church did have a particular appeal that's.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Really interesting to kind of track that change over time. And especially as we get up to, for example, Vatican ii, that obviously has a huge impact on Catholics worldwide, whether or not they had converted. But what did that mean for the converts you had particularly looked at? Were they happy with Vatican ii, given that they had, you know, not been born necessarily into Catholicism, but made a choice? And then Vatican II changes a bunch of things. So what was that like for them?

[Melanie McDonagh]

It was terrible for some of them. I mean, somebody like David Jones, it was a blow that he had to endure. Even more said that he felt that he'd been kicked in the guts by Vatican ii. And by Vatican ii, I don't mean those very large changes in the way that the church that regarded questions like, for instance, the church's relationship with the world or the church's relationship with the Jews. It wasn't these very large and momentous developments that they particularly had in mind. It was like the original Reformation, the effect on worship and on the conduct of the clergy and on the way a church looked and felt. So you went from a situation where you had either a Low Mass where the congregation were relatively quiet, it was a church where they joined in spiritually rather than actively, and then a High Mass, which was rather a splendid thing, and you went from that to a situation where the priest would face the congregation, the pews would be reordered, the pulpit might be ripped out, because the preaching had a different sort of function when the thing became a Mass participatory event, rather than something that was quiet and reverent and devotional. And there was also, at the same time, a change in the understanding of what the clergy were about. Not fundamentally, I think, but in terms of many of the aspects that people were most familiar with. There was, for instance, a Mass exodus of ordained clergy to get married during this period, which was, as you can imagine, terribly discombobulating for all Catholics, let alone for those who'd taken the decision to become Catholics. There was a chap called Edda Watkin, and his daughter Madeleine, or Maudlin, said that he felt that he'd been sold the Church under a false prospectus. And. And there are in books about these converts some heartrending accounts of their sense of alienation and betrayal. It wasn't that any of them, I think, genuinely felt that the Church was something other than they thought it, but it became something. The Mass became something to be endured rather than celebrated. And for Evelyn, war, it became almost a torture. And to even think about what he called about the noisy Mass, so he felt that there should have been a degree of choice about this. He said that his friend Penelope Betjeman, who was married to John Betjeman, liked a noisy Mass, so let her have one, but let the rest of us have the quiet Mass. So he felt that it should be accommodating for all. And he tried to engage with Cardinal Heenan at the time and to try and persuade him to allow some latitude for the traditionalists, as you might call them. But the Church certainly wasn't keen on synodarity in those days. And there was that authoritarian aspect whereby what Rome said went. And indeed, much of what happened wasn't even envisaged by the Fathers of the Council, but it was interpreted at various levels below them, and it turned into something very different in terms of the necessity of them, even they had thought. So I think that there were a number of even bishops who were discombobulated by the changes. But what was interesting about the reaction to the changes in Britain was that the converts led the opposition. As I say, Evening Waugh was very robust about it, and he had some very poignant correspondence with people writing to say, can you not lead the opposition to all this? And Arnold Lum, I think he was a very famous convert at the time, a mountaineer and travel writer, and he set up the Latin Mass Society. And then there were these famous letters that were organized to the Vatican on the part of artists and people of culture from outside the church as well as within it. But again, you had the converts being represented within that. So they went. They had what I might call a useful sort of bulginess. So they came from a tradition, the Protestant randigan tradition, mostly, where you weren't unduly deferential to the clergy, where you didn't have to do just what Father said. And so when it came to something that struck them as being so completely outrageous, as changing radically the appearance of the church and the.

The nature of the liturgy, they had no hesitation about making clear their discontent was those Catholics who had been baptized into it as babies were, I think, more deferential and more inclined to do what they were told. Whereas that habit of deference wasn't inculcated into converts who would have become Catholics when they were grown up. So I think that they were actually rather inspiring as exemplars for the rest of them in that they said what they felt, and if they felt the thing was wrong, they said so. On the other hand, you had somebody like Mura Spark who didn't necessarily welcome the changes, but who engaged with them. So she was involved with the North American body that was in charge of translating some of the liturgy into English, and. And she was involved in that liturgical commission and enjoyed the work. So she very much approved of the larger changes in the church in terms of its relationship with the world, for instance. But she also did take a part.

In the workings of the commissions that were responsible for the liturgy, although I don't think that she would herself have had any objection to retaining the latter Mass.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Again, so interesting to see the range here of the different converts that you look at, and of course, through the time period as well. So thank you for giving us a sense of the different journeys that the book covers. Though obviously I cannot keep you here 12 hours to give us every detail in the book, but of course it is off your desk. It is out in the world if people want to learn more. So is there anything you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Melanie McDonagh]

No, but I've been thinking about.

Present day conversions, because there are now in England and Wales, I don't know about other parts of the United Kingdom or Ireland. There are now about 3,000 people a year becoming Catholics. That was a figure for last year. And so we're getting back to the point where we were at a little before 1911, when there were over 3,000 converts. And it struck me that in many cases, the reasons that they give for becoming Catholic are very similar to those that were given by the converts a century and more ago. And so I was rather heartened that you do have these rather brave and rather intelligent people taking a step that many in their circle and many in their family just find baffling and doing it for much the same reasons that the people in the book that I write about would have found familiar. So it's been interesting and, and rather heartening in that respect.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. Well, for anyone who wants to learn more, you could, of course, go read the book titled Converts from Oscar Wilde to Muriel why so Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, published by Yale University Press in 2025. Melanie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Melanie McDonagh]

Well, it was such a pleasure. Thank you for having.

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