Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, two prominent 20th-century British converts to Catholicism. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Canva.

It is still a little hard to believe.

Over a period of 70 years, in the final decades of the British empire, a group of highly talented artists and writers decided to become, of all things, Roman Catholic. These were, in the words of Melanie McDonagh in her new book Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, people of “blazing individuality,” the sort of folks you would love to have a drink with but maybe wouldn’t expect to find in church. But that’s where they wound up, and boy is it fun to spend some time with them.

Converts

by Melanie McDonagh

Yale University Press
354p $38

McDonagh gives us a rollicking account of these men and women as they make their way across the Tiber. Some of these individuals are well known (Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark), others less so (the writer Maurice Baring, the artist David Jones). McDonagh’s overarching question is simple: Why did they choose to do this? Fortunately for us, there is plenty of raw material in the form of letters and essays describing their spiritual journeys. 

(Editors’ note: In casual usage, the term “convert” is still used for baptized individuals who leave one Christian church to become Catholic. The more theologically precise terminology, since the Second Vatican Council, is that they have been “received into the full communion of the Catholic Church.”)

McDonagh holds a doctorate in history and writes for The Catholic Herald. She knows both how to do research and how to grab a reader’s attention. Each chapter of Converts is full of colorful quotes and sharp analysis. She tells each story with style, while holding onto the threads that tie these accounts together. It is these strands that may be of most interest to today’s reader. At a time when the church is experiencing a wave of conversions in Europe and the United States, what can we learn from this fertile period of Christian life? A few of McDonagh’s observations stand out.

Timing matters. To put it another way, conversions produce conversions. The people McDonagh profiles may have been individuals of unique talents, but they were not immune to the world they lived in. Or, as McDonagh puts it: They “all made individual choices of conscience,” but they were “going with the flow of a strong current.” In the unusual cases of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Douglas followed his former lover into the church 11 years after he died. Lord Alfred’s mother and sister became Catholic too, as did Lionel Johnson, the poet who introduced Douglas to Wilde.

Ideas matter. For many British converts, the logic of leaving had already been worked out by the most famous Tiber-crosser of the time: John Henry Newman. Cardinal Newman died in 1890, just as McDonagh’s account begins, and as she points out, he had “done the intellectual spadework” for future converts. Muriel Spark was a particular fan. She edited a collection of Newman’s letters with the British writer Derek Stanford, who sought to explain the connection between the novelist and the theologian: “Newman’s aloneness in his life (both as Anglican and a Catholic) made her, I believe, feel some kind of identity with him.”

Boundaries matter. The priest and novelist R. H. Benson, the son of the archbishop of Canterbury and therefore a most prominent convert, captured the sentiments of many who “went over to Rome” when he wrote: “There is a liberty which is a more intolerable slavery than the heaviest of chains.” For him, the Anglican Communion permitted too much freedom, allowing for—for example—diverse views on the nature of the Eucharist. For Evelyn Waugh, the church offered structure and discipline that allowed him to flourish. As one friend commented, “Evelyn saw himself as a man who had joined a regiment with tradition and rules he never questioned.”

Liturgy matters. Maurice Baring once described the low Mass “like looking into a telescope backwards, into the catacombs.” It may have been an idealized rendering of a liturgical experience, but there is no denying that the Tridentine rite held a special attraction for writers like Baring. It may have been their artistic temperament. In 1964, as Catholics were being encouraged to participate more actively in the liturgy, Waugh longed for the quiet of the old Mass. “By all means let the rowdy have their ‘dialogues,’” he wrote in a letter to The Catholic Herald, “but let those who value silence not be completely forgotten.”

Beauty matters—sometimes. These men and women knew beauty when they saw it. Many of them grew up with the Anglican liturgy, which is known for its attention to aesthetics. But beauty was not, primarily, what drew them to the Catholic Church. On the contrary, “Catholic churches tended in fact to be repositories of hideous taste in religious trappings,” McDonagh notes. It was instead something more mysterious and harder to pin down. The translator Charles Scott Moncrief, writing about the Easter Mass at which he experienced his call to conversion, attributed it to nothing so much as “that ragged old man in his frayed chasuble.”

Mercy matters. Many of these artists led unorthodox lives. As such, they sometimes lived on the margins of the church, and were thus acutely aware of the need for its mercy. Such was the case for Graham Greene, who converted to Catholicism in his 20s and struggled to reconcile himself to the church for much of the rest of his adult life. But he kept going to confession, and a priest was with him when he died.

In her final chapter, McDonagh offers a strong critique of the liturgical changes implemented by the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. “The numinous vanished from people’s religious lives,” she writes, “or as one woman who lived through the changes put it, ‘the sense of the sacred went.’” Here she is amplifying criticisms leveled by her subjects, many of whom died in a church they no longer recognized. 

She makes a compelling case. But a group of writers who thought their way into the church because they saw it as the most authentic manifestation of the Christian faith would have had a hard time with any changes. The Church of England changed, not the Church of Rome—until, of course, it did.

I wonder what McDonagh—or Greene or Spark for that matter—would make of Lamorna Ash, a British author who was recently interviewed in The (London) Tablet. In 2025 she published Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion, which grew out of a series of articles she wrote for The Guardian about young people searching for faith. Those articles lead to an unexpected turn: “It was as she watched the young men at prayer, rather than hearing them explain their theology, that she encountered an expression of faith that felt unsettlingly real, and this drew her into an unexpected journey of her own” (The Tablet Interview, April 11).

Ash may be on the road to the Catholic Church, but the stirrings she describes strike a familiar note. Listen up.

This article appears in June 2026.

Tim Reidy joined America’s staff in October 2006 and served as online editor for several years before moving into his current role as the deputy editor in chief. Tim oversees America’s newsroom, directing its daily news coverage as well as working with the editorial leadership team to plan each print issue. Tim also edits the magazine’s Ideas section, where he contributes book reviews and essays. Before joining America, he worked at the Hartford Courant, a newspaper in Connecticut, and Commonweal magazine. In addition to writing for America, he has contributed to The New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review and the Princeton Alumni Weekly. He has been interviewed about the Catholic Church on WNYC in New York, ABC, Bloomberg TV and other media outlets. Tim also serves on the board of directors of Jesuit Refugee Service USA. He lives in Bronxville, N.Y., with his wife and two children.