Free Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce

Robert Speaight, actor, writer and Catholic convert, in his autobiography, published in 1970. Although he had sympathized with the reforms of the Council, he complained that much had happened “far beyond the intention of the Conciliar fathers”:
The psychology of adherence to Catholicism has subtly changed; authority is flouted; basic doctrines are questioned. . . . The vernacular Liturgy, popular and pedestrian, intelligible and depressing, has robbed us of much that was numinous in public worship; there is less emphasis on prayer and penitence; and the personal relationship between God and man . . . is neglected in favour of a diffused social concern.
    Ultimately, Speaight’s frustration with the modernists was linked to their evident contempt for tradition: “What exasperates me in the attitude of many progressives is not their desire to go forward or even to change direction, but their indifference to tradition which is the terra firma from which they themselves proceed”.
    Alec Guinness was another thespian convert who found his initial enthusiasm for reform tempered by subsequent abuses of the Council’s teaching. “Much water has flown under Tiber’s bridges, carrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII”, he wrote in Blessings in Disguise , his autobiography. Yet he remained confident about the future, rooted in the belief that the essential traditions of Catholicism “remain firmly entrenched”:
The Church has proved she is not moribund. “All shall be well,” I feel, “and all manner of things shall be well”, so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the Idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.
    Guinness quoted one of Chesterton’s “most penetrating statements” as a prelude to his discourse on the reform of the Church. “The Church”, wrote Chesterton, “is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time.” Perhaps he may also have added that tradition, as guarded and guided by dynamic orthodoxy, is the one thing that saves the Church herself from being a child of her own time. Certainly Chesterton had something similar in mind when he employed the imagery of the Church as a heavenly chariot “thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect”. It was this vision of a militant and dynamic tradition combating error down the ages that had inspired the host of converts from Newman to Chesterton, and from Waugh to Sitwell and Sassoon. If the flow of high-profile literary converts has been more noticeable by its absence than by its presence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, perhaps it has something to do with the loss of that vision of tradition amid the fogs of fashion. No matter. Fogs pass and the clarity of day reasserts itself.
    Tradition remains. It not only remains, it also retains its power to win converts; for, as Chesterton also said, what is needed is not a Church that can move with the world but a Church that can move the world.

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TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLAND’S CHRISTIAN LITERARY LANDSCAPE
    T HE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH century was accompanied by the death of two figures, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, who were the products of the century that had just expired and who would epitomize the spirit of the century that had just been born.
    Friedrich Nietzsche, who died, after twelve years of insanity, in the opening months of the new century, was the most outspoken philosophical foe of Christianity to emerge in the late nineteenth century. Convinced that Christianity was bankrupt, he proclaimed Arthur Schopenhauer’s “will to power” and emphasized that only the strong ought to survive. He maintained that Christian charity served only to perpetuate the survival of the weak and contraposed the idea of the superman or overman (the