Catholics: Britain's Largest Minority

Abstract

In the course of the 20th century Britain's Catholics have made a long journey from the margins of society through gradual acceptance and respectability to positions of great influence and power in public life. Dennis Sewell charts that journey through the lives of the Catholic men and women whose voices, whether in politics, journalism, literature or the arts, have made a distinctively Catholic contribution to our national conversation. From the terraces of Celtic Park to the country houses of the old recusant families, from the Knights of Malta to the Catholic peace movement, the author explores today's Catholic community in all its social variety and traces the lineaments of a contemporary Catholic identity. Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, David Jones, Eric Gill, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, Katherine Asquith, Tom Burns, Graham Greene, Barbara Ward, the Dowager Lady Hesketh, Paul Johnson, Hugo Young, Charles Moore, Cristina Odone, Lord Longford, Clare Short, Michael Portillo, Ann Widdecombe, Germaine Greer, Cardinals Hume and Winning, Michele Roberts, Mark Lawson, Harry Enfield and Richard Coles are among the many Catholics, cradle and convert, pious and lapsed, who join this procession down the years. And what of Tony Blair? Why does he hesitate on the threshold of the Roman Church when so much of his Third Way agenda has moved on to ground already staked out by Catholic social teaching? What are the prospects for a Catholic revival? Is Catholicism merely a fashionable, nostalgic accessory, as its critics allege, or the only ism to have survived the 20th century intact?

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