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Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome. By Patrick Allitt. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 343. $35.00.)
Who were the most important British and American Roman Catholic intellectuals between 1840 and 1960? Why were nearly all of them converts to Catholicism rather than "cradle Catholics"? And how did these writers and thinkers sustain and share their ideas during a period of enormous demographic shift, social transformation, and religious ferment? These are some of the broad questions that Patrick Allitt takes up in his wide-ranging history of Roman Catholic thought in the century leading up to the watershed reforms and tentative glasnost of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). By tracing the fortunes of these Catholic convert intellectuals, Allitt demonstrates the consistency with which nearly all of them, in their distinctive ways, confronted the momentous and persistent query that haunts intellectual life in America even in our own day: "If not modernism, then what?"
Most surprising to some readers will be Allitt's premise that a coherent and sustained Anglo-American Catholic intellectual tradition existed during the years under investigation, but Catholic Converts succeeds admirably at showing the rich transatlantic religious culture that emerged after the early decades of the nineteenth century, with both the Anglican John Henry Newman and the New England transcendentalist Orestes Brownson converting by 1845 to assume their positions as the leading Catholic intellectuals of England and the United States, respectively. Significantly, most of the convert intellectuals that appear in Allitt's account were highly educated, far more so than most Catholics of the period, and this led to a cohort of Catholic enthusiasts who, on the one hand, could mount sophisticated and imaginative proposals for renovating the Church and society but, on the other, often...