Catholic Literary Revival Research Articles

GEORGES BERNANOS’ WRITING AS MODERNIST CODE OF FRANCOPHONIC METAMODERNISTIC SENSIBILITY

The article analyzes the presence of an intertext between literary prose and political essay writing by a representative of the French Catholic literary revival of the first half of the 20th century. - Georges Bernanos - within the limits of modern intergenre French literature. The example is the collection of essays by the French-speaking writer Juan Asensio. However, the broader context of the reactualization of modernist writing in the contemprorary literary process is shown. The metamodernist sensibility of the 2000s is considered to be a result of the end of the dominance of the postmodernist discourse, its main theorists are investigated and the reasons for its appearance are shown. The dialogic character of metamodernism with the clue ideas of both modernism and postmodernism is noted, which is a middle way between modernist enthusiasm and postmodernist irony and skepticism, between hope and melancholy, between empathy and apathy, between truth and relativism, between totality and fragmentation, between experience and omniscience. Linguistic etymology and semantic plurality of the concept of “metamodernism” at the epistemological, ontological and historical levels are shown. The basic characteristics of the metamodernist worldview are named, such as: the return of metanarratives, belief in the truth, sincerity, empathy, the return ofhistory, the seriousness of religious experience, the search for the real, the importance of subjective experience. On the basis of these categories, the intertextual connection of the texts of Bernanos and Asensio is revealed according to four categories based on G. Genette’s narratology. It is about architextuality, thus citation at the genre level, narrative and poetic-stylistic closeness, explicit citation and allusions, and Bernanos’ meta-literary criticism provided in a comparative way. It is proved that the writing of Georges Bernanos became not only an intertext, but also a productive pretext of modern French literature, although the radical prophetism of the former was turned into a voice that just found the right to the truth and sincerity.

‘We are Scottish nationalist and Catholic’: Death’s Bright Shadow and Catholic literary nationalism

ABSTRACT This article contends that although the ‘golden age’ of the English Catholic novel has received (and continues to attract) ample critical attention, there is much still to be gleaned about contemporaneous Scottish Catholic literary works. In presenting George Scott-Moncrieff’s Death’s Bright Shadow (1948) as a case study, the article identifies a distinctively Scottish Catholic and nationalist imagination, which nonetheless owes much to the conventions of the French Catholic Literary Revival, as well as celebrated works by Greene and Waugh. Ultimately, the article suggests that political nationalism is a key feature of work produced by Scottish converts of the early to mid-twentieth century. It proposes that the geographical, cultural and political realities of place which inform the twentieth-century Catholic novel are a notable, if relatively under-explored, part of Scottish Catholic fiction.

WAR EXPERIENCE AND ITS REFLECTION IN GEORGES BERNANOS’ POLITICAL WRITING AND NOVELS

The article analyzes the reflection of the 20th century’s war experiences both in fictional writing and political pamphlet of Georges Bernanos, a representative of the Catholic Literary Revival movement in French interwar literature. A chronological classification of the entire writer’s heritage connected with the subject of war is offered and divided into three periods. The most representative texts are proposed for each. Further research attention is devoted to the early period, namely the experience of the First World War, in which the author participated as combatant, and the problems of the first novel «Under the Sun of Satan» (1926). The novel, which does not directly talk about the war in its plot, is nevertheless classified as warlike. Metaphysical evil and the deterioration of the human soul are regarded as the main ideological constants through the images of the two protagonists of the novel. Emphasis is made on the animalistic image of evil rooted in the biblical tradition and the creation of the image of saint is, according to Bernanos, the only answer to the triumph of evil, which he saw with his own eyes during the war. The explicit manifestation of the Civil War in Spain 1936-1939, witnessed by the author, reinforced by the eschatology and prophetic nature of the narrative, as well as the use of biblical archetypes to denote the nature of violence, is analyzed on the base of the political pamphlet «The Great Cemeteries under the Moon» (1938). It is this war that becomes a turning point in the biography of Bernanos, who as a right-wing nationalist and Catholic discovers for himself the illogical impossibility of supporting the Franco regime, because of the terror. This very problem of mass violence and the propensity of human nature to evil were analyzed using the theory of mimetic violence by the French anthropologist R. Girard.

FRENCH CATHOLIC LITERARY REVIVAL: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

The article focuses on the background of French Catholic literary revival of the first half of the XXth century. Among the fundamentals of the analysed phenomenon are distinguished three major ones: historical background, theological preconditions and the influence of purely literary predecessors of the XIXth century. The first one is presented through the research of French peculiarities of republican secularisation, its educational reforms and the social-cultural impact of the Dreyfus affair. The ecclesiastical context is described through the challenge of theological modernism and popes’ encyclicals as an attempt to deal with them. Specific French Catholic identity’s division between Gallicanism and Ultramontanism with its influence on the cultural context is also mentioned. Finally, the return of Christian spirituality and the birth of specific apophatic poetics are observed from symbolism of romanticists Chateaubriand and Lamartine through Baudelaire’s aesthetic of sin to decadent poetization of embodied evil and divided human soul of d’Aurervilly and Huysmans. Special emphasis is made on the tradition of political engagement of Catholic writers from J. de Maistre through Ch. Maurras to L. Bloy. Hence, Catholic literary revival is regarded as complex cultural, historical, theological and literary French phenomenon.

THE POETICS OF AFFLICTED BODY IN GEORGES BERNANOS’ NOVELS

The article hermeneutically analyses the poetics of sick body in the three novels by the French modernist writer, representative of Catholic literary revival – Georges Bernanos. Whereas «The star of Satan» (1926), «The diary of a country priest» (1936) and «Monsieur Ouine» (1948) belong to different periods in the author’s oeuvre, the article highlights Bernanos’ established approach to the problem of afflicted body and ruined soul. The article reveals that multiple diseases from which most of Bernanos’ characters suffer reflect the damage done to their souls. The body is inseparably connected to the soul, thus unhealthy body means affected soul and vice versa. The disordered body is represented as individual or collective, subsequently embodied in the metaphors of tabernacle and mystical Christ’s body directly referred to in the texts under discussion. Symbolically, the individual sick body is inscribed in the mysticism of sainthood, specifically problematized in the two priest figures called to sanctitude: Donissant and the cure of Ambricourt – the one healthy and physically strong, who takes his salvation in his own hands fighting for it, and the second dying of the terminal cancer, only hoping and asking to be saved. The collective body is associated with afflicted and disrupted mystic Christ’s body incarnated in the image of parish dying of multiple physical and mental maladies represented by cancer tumor in «Monsieur Ouine». Thuswise, the analysis proves that Bernanos speaking from a Catholic perspective unites the disability of individual body with the revivification of soul, concurrently using the disordered collective body as the illustration of ill secular society.

L’Écriture de l’abandon: esthétique carmélitaine de l’œuvre romanesque de Georges Bernanos. Par Philippe Richard

Like his intellectual precursor Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos is one of those major French authors now almost entirely unread by English-speaking academics. It is a tremendous shame, especially when there is so much still to be said about him, as Philippe Richard’s recent book amply demonstrates. Richard’s work deserves a place alongside that of Monique Gosselin, William Bush, and even Michel Estève for the magisterial and comprehensive way in which it synthesizes previous scholarship on Bernanos’s fictional writing and elevates it with a new hypothesis repeatedly and thoroughly tested. Acknowledging previous studies of Bernanos’s fascination with sanctity, anguish, and existential crisis, Richard plunges into the sources of Carmelite spirituality that offer again and again illumination about Bernanos’s narrative structures and even his expressive armoury. Here, Bernanos’s literary exploration of le vide and le néant, seemingly anticipated by Mallarmé and others, is shown to correlate strongly with, if not actually to be rooted in, what Carmelite spirituality describes as the dark nights of the senses and the soul. Throughout the book, Richard traces the intertextual pathways between biblical passages, commentaries thereon from John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and countless pages from Bernanos’s fictional œuvre. Richard impresses with his total command of the primary sources, and his scholarly awareness of the markers others have put down in the critical sand. In several fulsome appendices, he provides us with some of his analytical findings in detail, pinpointing where Bernanos uses Carmelite concepts such as l’abandon and la douceur, and their various cognates. On a deeper level, Richard runs counter to some Bernanos critics who are simply determined to nail the latter’s colours to the mast of modernity. According to the hypothesis of Bernanos the Carmelite, the experience of le vide or le néant is not an end in itself, a seedbed for mere literary creativity, nor even sincerely anguished expressivism, but part of a well-known Carmelite journey from the arid love of self to the fruitful love of God. From this starting point, Richard identifies in Bernanos’s writing an aesthetic of prayer, leading to a range of theologically inspired stylistics, all finding their fulfilment in the narrative implications of the night of Holy Saturday. In this last perspective, the night in Bernanos is not only the dark night of the senses and the soul: it is primordially the dark night of the separation of the Father and the Son that precedes the Resurrection. Here readers will detect the influence of Hans Urs von Balthasar for whom Samedi saint was the temporal locus for a dramatique divine (Mysterium Paschale (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970)). In other words, Richard’s interpretation shows Bernanos to be fully in line with so much of the Catholic literary revival of the Belle Époque, whose collective project was to render divine agency imaginable once more. In his conclusion Richard evokes the possibility of extending his analysis regarding the musical threads in Bernanos’s imagination. It is to be hoped this next work will not be long in coming.

Prospects of a Catholic Literary Revival

Prospects of a Catholic Literary Revival

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Tome 1: figures et fictions du Naturalisme ed. by Jérôme Solal

Reviews 243 différée jusqu’à la quatrième section, après un traitement de‘l’espace utopique’, ce qui entraîne quelques redites et laisse parfois l’impression d’un piétinement dans l’argumentation. On aurait également souhaité davantage d’éclaircissements, même spéculatifs, sur les causes de la rupture entre le Zola des Rougon-Macquart et des derniers textes, car malgré l’érudition impressionnante du livre, ce point capital demeure peu clair. Scharf a entrepris une tâche sans doute ingrate à bien des égards, mais il réussit à montrer que l’utopisme du ‘troisième Zola’ est une synthèse bien pondérée, encore que limitée par son époque historique, d’un grand défenseur des droits de l’homme. Arkansas State University Warren Johnson Solal, Jérôme, éd. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Tome 1: figures et fictions du Naturalisme. Caen: Minard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-256-91164-4. Pp. iii + 245. 23 a. A gifted prose poet and writer of short fiction, an important art critic whom Fénéon called “l’inventeur de l’impressionnisme,” the first president of the Académie Goncourt, Huysmans (1848–1907) was all these things, but perhaps above all a unique novelist ever torn between science and spirituality (i). Associated with Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Catholic literary revival, his remarkable career thus witnessed virtually all of the major literary and artistic mutations of the last three decades of the nineteenth century and beyond. This collection of thirteen essays, the first volume in a series devoted to the author and edited by Solal, seeks to examine the current state of Huysmansian studies while at the same time sparking new fields of inquiry. Using a wide variety of stylistic, sociological, historical, thematic, psychoanalytic , and comparative approaches, the book pays special attention to Huysmans’s ambivalent relationship to Naturalism—a movement that he never really abandoned, if only in his life-long commitment to research and documentation. Hence, the collection seeks not only to analyze Huysmans’s durable membership in Zola’s Naturalist school—one that shaped his worldview and methods—but also to demonstrate how that same affiliation granted him the freedom to break away and find his personal voice. Divided into two major sections titled“Figures”and“Fictions”respectively, part one examines Huysmans’s artistic affinity with the various “figures” of Naturalism— its “maître” Zola, its “initiateurs” like the Goncourt brothers, and its primary and secondary “acteurs” like Maupassant, Mirbeau, Alexis, Céard, Hennique, Caze, and Descaves (5). René-Pierre Colin shows how problematic these relationships were for a Huysmans who dreamed of an “intimisme” that would supplant Naturalism (5). In studying his Correspondance with Edmond de Goncourt, Pierre-Jean Dufieff underlines the ambivalence and complexity of the two writers’ relationship, concluding that they nevertheless shared a certain type of sensibility he calls“naturalisme artiste” (25). Among other interesting facts in Marc Smeets’s essay on Huysmans’s reception in the Netherlands, we learn that the author was greatly admired by the Dutch neoRomantic writer Arij Prins. Noëlle Benhamou compares the satirical representation of peasants in Huysmans’s En rade (1887) and Maupassant’s little-known Mont-Oriol, published the same year, while Samuel Lair compares Satanism, possession, hysteria, and the symbol of the bell in Huysmans and Mirbeau. Part two examines how the various Huysmansian ‘fictions’ are traversed by their own desires and obsessions like food, prostitution, hysteria, and bachelorhood. Laurence Decroocq treats Huysmans’s unique take on gastronomy while Éléonore Reverzy and Jeannine Pacque analyze representations of women. Céline Grenaud’s essay on hysteria in Là-bas (1891) sees Charcot and Lombroso as influential sources, but emphasizes how Huysmans took his depictions beyond facile scientific explanations. Sylvie Thorel explores fresh terrain in her essay on the Huysmansian flâneur while Jean Borie compares the notions of travel and luxury in Huysmans and Larbaud. The volume also contains two invaluable contributions that treat little-known or unedited works. Solal’s essay on Huysmans’s compassionate portrayal of a female protagonist in the unfinished novel La faim provides refreshing new insights into an author known for his bachelor heroes, while Philippe Barascud’s...

Revisiting the Catholic Literary Imagination

Revisiting the Catholic Literary Imagination Douglas Robillard Jr. (bio) Jeana DelRosso. Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives. New York: Palgrave, 2005. x + 203 pp. Farrell O’Gorman. Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2004. ix + 259 pp. Susan Srigley. Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2005. xii + 195 pp. During the last fifteen years we have seen some renewal of interest in the subject of Catholicism and literature. Since the publication of Arnold Sparr's 1990 study, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–60, Joseph Pearce, Ross Labrie, and others have published books on the influence of Catholicism on film, art, and literature.1 Much of the current scholarship examines what Sparr terms the post-World War II "Catholic literary revival" (xi). This development was sparked by European thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and others who brought the theology and aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas into the twentieth century. At the time, there was considerable interest in contemporary Catholic authors such as [End Page 174] Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. In the same period, Allen Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, converted to Catholicism under Maritain's personal influence and actively sought to promote an American Catholic literature. They also acted as mentors for two younger Catholic Southern writers, Flannery O'Connor and a convert, Walker Percy. In time, this literary trend ended. O'Connor died in 1964. Percy continued publishing into the 1980s. However, in many ways, Gene Kellogg's 1970 study, The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period of Convergence both summarized and brought an end to this period. Some of the questions posed during the Catholic literary revival have resurfaced. What is meant by the term, "Catholic literature"? Is there a distinct Catholic literature rooted in a definable aesthetic? What are the features of the Catholic literary imagination? How is the Church itself portrayed in literature? Three recent books examine the influence Catholicism exercises over the literary imagination. In its own way, each attempts to answer the questions posed above. Two studies deal specifically with Flannery O'Connor: Susan Srigley's Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Art and Farrell O'Gorman's Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Srigley locates the origins of O'Connor's aesthetics in Thomism and Catholic doctrine. She takes a deliberately restricted view of her subject, limiting her discussion to only three of O'Connor's works: the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and a single short story, "Revelation." Peculiar Crossroads divides its discussion between O'Connor and Walker Percy and examines biographical as well as literary and theological affinities between the authors. Like Srigley, he identifies Thomist thought as an important influence on O'Connor's aesthetics. In addition, he presents a fascinating account of the literary and theological interactions of O'Connor and Percy with Tate and Gordon. The third book, Jeana DelRosso's Writing Catholic Women: Contemporary International Catholic Girlhood Narratives, is an investigation of contemporary Catholic women's literature across cultural and ethnic lines, touching only briefly and peripherally on O'Connor. Instead, DelRosso is concerned with the broad question of how women writers of diverse ethnic and national origins "challenge and embrace" the Roman Catholic Church in their fiction and autobiographical narratives (5). Srigley and O'Gorman agree on the importance of Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism to the development of O'Connor's aesthetic. O'Gorman calls the book "the essential starting point in any discussion of O'Connor's and Percy's commitment to realism and an important source for their understanding of art's moral function" [End Page 175] (109–10). Srigley sees O'Connor's theology and art coming together in an "ethic of responsibility" toward others (10). "My concern is to demonstrate how O'Connor's ethics are inextricably linked to her role as a storyteller and how her moral vision is played out in the drama of her fiction" writes...

Joseph Husslein, S.J., and the American Catholic Literary Revival: “A University in Print”

I. Rationale and Organization of University in Print Arnold Sparr described the American Catholic Literary Revival of this century in To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: the Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960.1 Sparr mentioned the work and writings of such figures as Daniel A. Lord, Francis X. Talbot, and Frank O'Malley. Other Catholic writers also contributed to this revival, including Allen Tate and Joseph Husslein. Husslein is significant for his effort to promote Roman Catholic literature through his writings and more importantly through his project University in Print,in which he edited over two hundred books on Catholic thought and culture for a wide audience. Joseph Caspar Husslein, SJ. (1873-1952), was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin! In 1891 he entered the Society of Jesus at St. Stanislaus Seminary near St. Louis, Missouri. After studying and teaching at Saint Louis University, Husslein was ordained in 1905. From 1911 to 1930 Husslein worked on the staff of the Jesuit weekly America in New York and taught at Fordham University. During these years Husslein wrote over four hundred articles and ten books on such social issues as worker cooperatives, factory working conditions, woman workers, socialism, and unjust business practices. He produced one of the largest corpora of American Catholic writing on social issues. Husslein's most important books on social questions were The Church and Social Problems (1912), The World Problem: Capital, Labor and the Church (1918), Democratic Industry (1919), The Bible and Labor (1924), and The Christian Social Manifesto (1931).' Of particular significance is Husslein's The Bible and Labor In a method untypical for Catholic thinkers of this period, Husslein used the Bible-particularly the Old Testament-to develop principles for social ethics. This approach would not be repeated until after Vatican Council II. In 1930 Husslein curtailed his writing on social issues and moved to Saint Louis University, where he founded the School of Social Service and began his University in Print.4 Husslein's work at Saint Louis University coincided with a particularly vibrant period for the university. New journals were published: The Modern Schoolman, Historical Bulletin, and Classical Bulletin. The Institute for Social Order was founded. The figure from the University's Jesuit community to garner the most attention was Father Daniel Lord. A showman and promoter, he organized and ran the Catholic youth program Sodality. He edited the Queen's Work, produced musical pageants, and wrote hundreds of pamphlets. Lord and Husslein knew each other and believed they had the same mission of promoting Roman Catholicism, but Lord-flamboyant and gregarious-and Husslein-hardworking and quiet-were too independent for long-term co-operation. The St. Louis Jesuit community produced a number oflone stars. Husslein and Lord shared the American penchant for promotion. For all the difficulties of the 1930's, it was an age of growing confidence for Catholics. The worst of the anti-Catholic nativism had died down; American Catholics had proven their patriotism in World War 1; the National Catholic Welfare Conference brought some unity to the American hierarchy, and the calamity of the depression reaffirmed among Catholic social thinkers the conviction that Catholic teaching had much to say to the world. Radio provided a means for a number of speakers to disseminate a Catholic view. (It is unfortunate that Charles Coughlin is the most remembered of these voices.) The final and most important factor in the growth of confidence was simply the burgeoning Catholic population caused by large families descended from the immense waves of immigrants of the 1800's and early 1900's. Catholics had become the largest denomination in America. American Catholicism had the confidence not only to promote itself to the world, but ironically, and perhaps more importantly, Catholicism had to promote itself to its own members. …

An American Abbot: Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B., 1809-1887 by Jerome Oetgen

118BOOK REVIEWS sea. Lord Acton is "more nearly than any other figure the exception to the rule that the Catholic intellectual revival was a convert phenomenon" (p. 37). Future cardinals Newman and Manning, the architect Augustus Pugin, and various representatives of the "American Oxford movement" figure prominently. Chapter IV has a good section on Newman and Orestes Brownson. Ultramontane Catholicism's hardening against modernity is seen through the lives of Isaac Hecker and Richard Simpson (Chapter V) and St. George Mivart and George Tyrrell (Chapter VI). Chapter VH's women converts include the historian Elizabeth Kite, author Katherine Burton, and social scientist Eva Ross. The final six chapters treat the twentieth century with emphasis on the converts ' role in creating, between the two world wars, a transatlantic, Catholic literary revival for which Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward provided the books. Allitt conveys the revival's disillusionment with secular rationality and its conflicted relationship with totalitarianism. Chapter XI, on the historians Carlton Hayes and Christopher Dawson, and Chapter XII, on the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, are especially worthwhile. The preface and introductory chapter summarize Allitt's argument well. In the main, the argument succeeds. But there is one group Allitt ignores. Bishops such as John England, Francis R Kenrick, his brilliant and cantankerous brother Peter, Martin Spalding, and clergy such as James Corcoran, Herman Heuser, and the Roman-trained priests of the NewYork "Accademia," all carried on a formidable intellectual life. They belonged to a Latin-language, Romewardlooking , transnational intellectual culture, the eclectic modern scholasticism that preceded the Thomistic revival of 1879. Though their engagement with American culture was in the "immigrant" style, they stand, along with the bishops and clergy associated with the Americanist movement at the turn of the century, as a challenge to Allitt's construal of the intellectual life. Allitt thinks it time to offer "at least a guarded tribute" (p. 14) to the convert intellectuals and their work. He shows a genuine appreciation for their sensibilities and keeps his thesis sufficiently in the background that each figure breathes freely. His pages succeed in bringing the convert intellectuals to life. William L. Portier Mount SaintMary's College Emmitsburg, Maryland AnAmericanAbbot:Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B., 1809-1887. ByJerome Oetgen. Revised edition. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 1997. Pp. xxi, 466. $39.95.) In 1976 Jerome Oetgen published An American Abbot. It was the first critical and comprehensive study of the life of Boniface Wimmer. With its appearance , Oetgen was able to introduce a host of new readers to the formidable personality and historically influential trajectory of the founding abbot of the BOOK REVIEWS119 first Benedictine community in North America. Publication of this new edition of the work more than two decades later is significant for several reasons. It is a credit to Oetgen that he has made this a true revision. He has incorporated material from a wide range of important works in American Catholic historiography that had not been accessible in the original work. He also did an extensive re-examination of his original sources, refining and re-evaluating earlier historical interpretations. The result is a substantial improvement over the original. The Catholic University of America Press also deserves credit for agreeing to publish this new edition and thus ensuring a wider reading audience. Dominating Oetgen's perspective is a conviction that Wimmer's role has been underestimated in the history of American Catholicism. Despite the fact that no less a scholar than John Tracy Ellis described Wimmer as "the greatest Catholic missionary of nineteenth-century America," this patriarch ofAmerican Benedictines has been largely overlooked in most historical surveys of the Catholic Church in the United States. Oetgen's intent has been to redress that oversight and insert Wimmer's life and work in the context of that history. Like so many of the seminal figures of American Catholic history of the last century,Wimmer's life bridged two continents and cultures. Born and raised in Bavaria,Wimmer studied for the priesthood at the University ofMunich when it was just beginning its period of revitalization under such luminaries as Johannes Ignaz von Döllinger and Francis Bader. Wimmer, as a...

Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome by Patrick Allitt

BOOK REVIEWS117 The contents range from brief histories of less than a page to long descriptions of major parishes. The short entries typically locate the church geographically ,followed by a listing ofpastors and often information on membership and societies. The existence of a school if present is invariably noted, a reflection of Father Kruszka's strong interest in education. He is best at the large colonies where background on settlement development provides a helpful context to congregational histories. His extended treatments are heavily biographical with an emphasis on clerics. The parish leader, known to but not necessarily admired by the author, evokes strong opinions that enliven the pages. A good example is his lengthy and insightful discussion of Father Dominik Kolasinski of Detroit's St. Wojciech (Adalbert) Church. A controversial figure in his own time, he emerges from the pen of the Ripon priest as blessed with social graces but willful, demagogic, and a burden to his bishop. Bishop Caspar Borgess does not escape criticism for his clumsy handling of the situation, and Kruszka's description emphasizes his sense that in America the opinion of laypersons must be consulted, though not always be determinant. The History offers an alltoo -rare sense of the flavor of life in a new ethnic community by an intellectual from the leading stratum of this largely peasant group. For scholars the volumes , enriched by the notation, offer a readable and stimulating source of information on the formative years ofAmerican Polonia. William J. Galush Loyola University Chicago Catholic Converts: British andAmerican Intellectuals Turn to Rome. By Patrick Allitt. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 343. $35.00.) "Nearly all the major Catholic intellectuals writing in English between 1840 and I960 were converts to Catholicism" (p. ix). This is Allitt's thesis. Its significance becomes clear in the light of Newman's lament in 1853 that English was a Protestant tongue (p. 12). The first significant Catholic intellectual conversation in the English language since the Reformation, Allitt claims, was shaped decisively by the Catholic converts whose lives he chronicles in this book. Old Catholics in both England and the United States belonged to a small and longembattled minority. Immigrants swelled their number during the nineteenth century. But neither group was well positioned to participate in the intellectual life of the dominant Protestant culture. This engagement fell to the converts. As Scott Appleby has noted (America, February 28, 1998), the effect of Allitt's book is to make his thesis appear "self-evident." The book's thirteen chapters follow the chronology of European Catholic history with the study's subjects appearing at appropriate points. The first four chapters set the stage in post-Reformation England and introduce the first nineteenth-century English and American converts. John Lingard and Nicholas Wiseman are small islands of Catholic intellectual life in the English Protestant 118BOOK REVIEWS sea. Lord Acton is "more nearly than any other figure the exception to the rule that the Catholic intellectual revival was a convert phenomenon" (p. 37). Future cardinals Newman and Manning, the architect Augustus Pugin, and various representatives of the "American Oxford movement" figure prominently. Chapter IV has a good section on Newman and Orestes Brownson. Ultramontane Catholicism's hardening against modernity is seen through the lives of Isaac Hecker and Richard Simpson (Chapter V) and St. George Mivart and George Tyrrell (Chapter VI). Chapter VH's women converts include the historian Elizabeth Kite, author Katherine Burton, and social scientist Eva Ross. The final six chapters treat the twentieth century with emphasis on the converts ' role in creating, between the two world wars, a transatlantic, Catholic literary revival for which Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward provided the books. Allitt conveys the revival's disillusionment with secular rationality and its conflicted relationship with totalitarianism. Chapter XI, on the historians Carlton Hayes and Christopher Dawson, and Chapter XII, on the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, are especially worthwhile. The preface and introductory chapter summarize Allitt's argument well. In the main, the argument succeeds. But there is one group Allitt ignores. Bishops such as John England, Francis R Kenrick, his brilliant and cantankerous brother Peter, Martin Spalding, and clergy such as James Corcoran...

New Apologists in America's Conservative Catholic Subculture

AbstractTraditional Catholic apologetics is currently experiencing a revival in U.S. Catholic thought. Modeled in part on the apologetics of the preconciliar Catholic Literary Revival, the new Catholic apologetics draws strategically from the intellectual world of the pre-Vatican II church. Responsive to the conditions of postconciliar Catholicism and later-twentieth-century U.S. culture, the new apologists also exploit the resources of contemporary popular culture to advance a critique of secular society and the status quo in American Catholic life. While defending traditional Catholic doctrine, the new generation of apologists has contributed to the creation of a novel form of American Catholicism—technologically sophisticated, uniquely ecumenical, and aggressively separatist. Utilizing the lecture circuit, the print media, audio and video recordings, cable television, and the internet, the new apologists have made apologetics a vibrant industry of the conservative Catholic subculture in America.

To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960. By Arnold Sparr. Contributions to the Study of Religion 25. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. xvi + 221 pp. $39.95.

To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960. By Arnold Sparr. Contributions to the Study of Religion 25. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. xvi + 221 pp. $39.95. - Volume 62 Issue 2

To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960.

Series Foreword by Henry W. Bowden Introduction Origins and Development, 1920-1935 The 1920s: A Time of Troubles Francis X. Talbot and the Catholic Literary Emergence A Revival Is Organized: Daniel A. Lord and the Sodality Literary Campaign The Revival as Reaction, I: Catholics against Modernity The Revival as Reaction, II: Newman, Chesterton, and Babbitt, Catholic Revivalists The Search for the Great American Catholic Novel, I: Catholic Fiction to 1935 Transformation, 1935-1955 The Transformation of the Catholic Literary Revival in the American Catholic College During the 1930s and 1940s Frank O'Malley: Thinker, Critic, Revivalist Yes, We Have No Bernanos. The Search for the Great American Catholic Novel, II: Catholic Fiction During the Era of Transformation Dissolution, the 1950s and After Ought There to Be a Catholic Criticism? The 1950s and the End of the Revival Bibliography Index

Arnold Sparr. To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960. (Contributions to the Study of Religion, number 25.) New York: Greenwood. 1990. Pp. xvi, 221. $39.95

Arnold Sparr. To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960. (Contributions to the Study of Religion, number 25.) New York: Greenwood. 1990. Pp. xvi, 221. $39.95 Get access Sparr Arnold. To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960. (Contributions to the Study of Religion, number 25.) New York: Greenwood. 1990. Pp. xvi, 221. $39.95. James T. Fisher James T. Fisher Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 96, Issue 4, October 1991, Pages 1310–1311, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/96.4.1310 Published: 01 October 1991

To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960.

To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960.

Catholic Culture in Post-1920 America - Arnold Sparr: To Promote, Defend and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960. (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1990. Pp. xvi, 209. $39.95.)

Catholic Culture in Post-1920 America - Arnold Sparr: To Promote, Defend and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920–1960. (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1990. Pp. xvi, 209. $39.95.)

To promote, defend, and redeem: the Catholic literary revival and the cultural transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960

To promote, defend, and redeem: the Catholic literary revival and the cultural transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960

The Concept of Love in the French Catholic Literary Revival.

The Concept of Love in the French Catholic Literary Revival.