3 - Catholic Questions

Summary

There is a distinguished roll-call of English writers who have been Roman Catholics: Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Waugh, Greene, David Jones, Muriel Spark. But nearly all of them were converts to Catholicism. This fact separates them from the majority of their co-religionists, the ‘cradle-Catholics’ whose religion was passed on from their families, and, who, apart from a small number of upper-class ‘Old Catholics’, were working class or lower middle class, with a strong admixture of Irish immigrants. Their educational attainments and ambitions tended to be limited, and did not often turn them towards literature. Young people from such a background who took advantage of new educational opportunities and became socially mobile often abandoned Catholicism in the process. This has long been the case with Irish writers, most famously Joyce, though his work remained profoundly marked by the religion which he had abandoned. A number of recent English writers have been lapsed Catholics, who look back on Catholicism with affection or hostility, or elements of both. Examples include John Braine and Anthony Burgess, both of Northern English Catholic origin, and a succession of women authors seeking revenge for their convent education.

David Lodge is unusual in being a cradle-Catholic from a lower-middle- class family in South London who is a successful writer and who continues to regard himself as a Catholic, though his ideas about religion have changed greatly over the years. In ‘Memories of a Catholic Childhood’ (WO 28–32) he described his origins, which were not altogether typical of cradle-Catholic culture, since he was an only child and his father was not a Catholic:

My mother was a dutiful but undemonstrative daughter of the Church. I was given a Catholic schooling, but the atmosphere of the home was not distinctively Catholic. There was no great profusion of holy pictures and statues in the house, religion was a topic rarely touched on in conversation, and there was little of the regular and complex social interaction with parish clergy and laity that is a feature of the typical large devout Catholic family. I had no brothers or sisters to reinforce the Catholic cultural code, and my friends in the same street happened not to be Catholic.