Catholic Converts, Then and Now
“So, why did you become Catholic?” a fellow graduate student asked me one day, with a hint of flirtation in her voice. I smiled and used John Henry Newman’s famous line that the answer was long and couldn’t be given “between the fish and the soup.” “Well,” she replied, “we’re not having fish.” She had a point.
I tried to explain how I had been catechized by evangelicals, fell in love with high church Anglicanism, learned more about the Church’s history and tradition, experienced the beauty of the Eucharist, and then come to the conclusion that these things were most fully lived and believed in the Catholic Church. Mine was an intellectual conversion that would grow deeper as I lived and worked with devout Catholics over the years that followed. It also very much fit a type. Though I only partially knew it at the time, I was following a trail blazed by John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century and trod by thousands of others.
Recent news stories have made much of increased interest in Roman Catholicism, especially among young people in urban centers like London and New York. They speak of their desire for roots deep in Christian history, the beauty of liturgy, purpose, and a moral foundation to life in the midst of a world in flux. These are the same reasons that Catholic converts have given for more than a hundred years. In her recent book Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, British journalist Melanie McDonagh tells the story of great British intellectual converts and gives some reasons for their conversion. McDonagh’s portraits are thorough and engaging, a mixture of thoughtful biography and analysis sprinkled with plenty of bons mots. She helpfully depicts conversion as being something both human and divine, a mystery of grace with sociological patterns that emerge. Four themes stand out as being enduring markers of converts, both Victorian and Zoomer.
Arguments and the Truth
For some Catholics, such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, conversion was a leap from atheism to faith in God. Others came as Christian believers from Protestant denominations. They shared a driving question: whether the Catholic Church was the natural and true continuation of the early Church—beginning with the apostles in the upper room and spreading across the world—possessing the authority to teach and govern in our time. If the answer to that question proved to be “yes,” the necessary consequences were obvious.
Since the reign of Elizabeth I, the Anglican Church had been an agreement to reconcile conflicting theological beliefs with united worship and governance. Converts found this untenable. By contrast, the clarity of Catholic doctrine was attractive, both in what the Church taught and how she taught it. Robert Hugh Benson was the son of an archbishop of Canterbury who was ordained a Catholic priest and became a novelist. Benson was unable to accept that on some fundamental questions, the Church of England was inconclusive. He described his conversion as a matter of wanting to find a truth that would be sure and certain to stand on: “I did not want to go this way and that at my own will. I wanted to know the way in which God wanted me to walk. I did not want to be free to change my grasp on truth. I needed rather a truth that should itself make me free.”
Decades later, Graham Greene wrote to his future wife, herself a convert, “I do all the same feel I want to be a Catholic now, even a little apart from you. One does want fearfully hard for something firm & hard & certain, however uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the general flux.” Greene would spend much of his personal life and fiction pushing against—indeed, flagrantly violating—those boundaries. But, as McDonagh observes, Catholicism heightened the stakes of human life for Greene. Its world of black and white morality and an eternal destiny invested single human decisions with great consequence, as he would explore in The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.
The example and the arguments of John Henry Newman persuaded many converts who sought religious certitude to move from the Church of England to Rome. Muriel Spark wrote that “it was by way of Newman that I turned Catholic.” When the poet Siegfried Sassoon read Newman, he remarked, “I wonder what effect it would have made if someone had given it to me ten years ago. Everything I needed is there, waiting for me!” Newman famously had inscribed on his tomb ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, “out of the shadows and images and into the truth.” Later Catholics such as the artist David Jones would likewise describe the Catholic Church as being “real” in a way that Anglican and Protestant churches were not, a reality they perceived in certain priests, the Mass, or the devotional lives of ordinary Catholics.
Converts Are Weird
Perhaps most converts to Catholicism are normal, but intellectual converts tend to be weird. McDonagh begins her story with late nineteenth-century Decadents, the aesthetic movement in France and England that rebelled against industrialization by rejecting morality and embracing sensual excess. In France, the most famous example was J. K. Huysmans, whose thinly autobiographical character Durtal leaves Parisian Satanism to become Catholic, ending life as an oblate at a Trappist monastery. Across the Channel, Oscar Wilde and most of his circle wound up converting to Catholicism. McDonagh argues that while Catholicism was both beautiful and transgressive—the highest Decadent values—ultimately for these aesthetes “it was the concepts of sin and redemption which mattered most.”
In the early 1900s, while serving as a priest in Cambridge, Hugh Benson attracted many undergraduates to his ministry. The Anglo-Irish convert Shane Leslie described them as a “coterie of roving Ritualists, aesthetes with or without a moral sense, reformers of Church and State—in fact all the budding brotherhood of cranks, for each of whom he sought his proper niche within the multi-moulded fabric of the Church.” Not much has changed in a hundred years!
From Newman’s time to ours, converts are seen as suspect, both inside and outside the Church, and can be difficult to deal with. They are like foreigners in a new country, or newly adopted members of a family. They upset the Church’s business as usual, not least because of their zeal for what she is supposed to believe and profess. Evelyn Waugh spent much of his life excoriating the modern world, but after the liturgical changes of Vatican II, he began to direct his vituperation toward the Catholic hierarchy. As McDonagh notes, “precisely because [Waugh] was a convert without a formation in deference, he had little truck with what he saw as overbearing liberal authoritarianism from the bishops, and their destruction of what was permanently valuable in the Church.” More recently, partisans of the Francis pontificate expressed repeated frustration with American converts, which inspired me to invent a cocktail, “The Convert’s Neurosis.”
Forgiveness and Beauty
G. K. Chesterton once wrote that there are only two fundamental reasons for joining the Catholic Church: “One is that he believes it to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other that he seeks liberation from his sins.” For the Decadents in particular, the power of clearly delineating vice from virtue and absolving it through the sacrament of confession struck home.
Aubrey Beardsley was a young illustrator and author who died of tuberculosis at twenty-five. The writer Max Beerbohm wrote that “he knew that life was short, and so he loved every hour of it with a kind of jealous intensity.” Beardsley became Catholic a year before his death, writing to the poet (and later priest) John Gray: “It is such a rest to be folded after all my wandering.” And Evelyn Waugh famously reflected on the power of grace in his own life: “I always think of myself: ‘I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.’ One of the joys of Catholic life is to recognize the little sparks of good everywhere, as well as the fires of the saints.”
Another great joy for many converts was the Catholic Church’s liturgical traditions, in particular, their historical continuity. For David Jones, the principle of sacramentality underlay not just theology, but all of art itself. A painting, he argued, not only represents its subject but is its subject under another form—a clear analogy to the doctrine of transubstantiation. And Jones reveled in the fact that the Mass connected him with antiquity and the whole history of Britain, both by providing the same living experience of prayer and ritual and re-presenting the same presence of Christ.
McDonagh’s narrative ends with that sense of continuity being shattered by the reforms of Vatican II and the “partly intended” cultural revolution that followed the Council itself. The problem was not just the changes to the liturgy and the spirit of theology, but the top-down, authoritarian way they were implemented. Many converts felt a sense of betrayal. When she attended one of the “new” Masses, Elizabeth Anscombe remarked to the philosopher Anthony Kenny, “This is not the Church I converted into.” Kenny, then a priest, replied, “It’s not the Church I was ordained into.” McDonagh thinks it’s not a coincidence that the number of converts plummeted after the Council and has never recovered.
Conversion Today
Except, she argues, that many young people still convert for many of the same reasons as their predecessors, though few do it for the beauty of the liturgy. Perhaps this is the case in England, but in America, not so much. Many American converts explicitly name the liturgy as a reason for conversion, finding in it a source of beauty and solace. Perhaps this is because liturgical reverence is now more common than it once was; it can hardly be a coincidence that many of the Churches with the most converts are ones with reverent and frequent liturgies.
McDonagh notes that in 2021 and 2022, the number of receptions into the Church in England was under 2,000 per year—lower than at any time in her book. But they have continued to rise, exceeding 3,000 in 2024. 2025 saw a report documenting that from 1992 to 2024, roughly 700 Anglican clergy and religious have been received into the Catholic Church, including sixteen former Anglican bishops. A third of diocesan and Anglican Ordinariate ordinations from that period were of former Anglican clergy. To cap it off, John Henry Newman was canonized and then declared a Doctor of the Church.
McDonagh’s account has lessons for young converts and those curious about Catholicism today. Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover who went on to convert after reading the anti-modernist encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, observed: “Converts are very apt to be censorious and to make a fatal attempt to be more Catholic than Catholics. I have been a Catholic now for more than 20 years and I hope that I am now much more charitable and broad-minded than I was just before my conversion or for a good many years after it.” Converts have much to learn from the longer-standing members of the family they are joining. And in an age of nasty online discourse, converts should bear in mind Newman’s admonition not to mock Protestant worship: “Such ridicule is not the weapon of those who desire to save souls.”
Ultimately, the question facing converts today faced the Decadents, Waugh, Greene, and so many others before: will they stay the course in the faith and let grace transform their lives? For while conversion may involve a love of beauty, a hunger for doctrinal security, the frisson of transgression, or a desire for the forgiveness of sins, it is ultimately a deep mystery of grace and therefore transcends our understanding. As the Jesuit Fr. Cyril Martindale put it: “When will men understand that between what is Catholic and what is anything else, there is a great gulf fixed? You have to have your bridge. Perhaps God drags you, squealing and squirming across it. It isn’t history, nor psychology, nor philosophy, nor the need for authority, nor the love of symbolism, nor any other thing created, that does it, but God does it, Christ does it, Grace does it.”