These two books portray the impact of those changes for Catholics not just in the United Kingdom, but throughout the West

CATHOLICISM BEFORE 

AND AFTER 1963 TWO NOVELS

by Gerald J. Russello

In trying to understand the extraordinary changes the Catholic Church underwent in the middle of the twentieth century, I recently came across two illuminating novels. The first was the last novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, Unconditional Surrender. The three novels loosely trace Waugh’s own military experience, darkly satirizing the military and more broadly modern society. Specifically, Waugh uses the war as a backdrop against which to lay out a different battle, this one between Catholicism and the modern world. The trilogy is widely regarded as Waugh’s masterwork.

Piers Paul Read’s Monk Dawson was the other novel, drawn from his own experience at Ampleforth, a British Catholic boarding school. It was Read’s, third novel, and it follows the life of young Edward Dawson from Catholic boarding school through seminary, chronicling his loss of faith and disillusionment, laicization, and a kind of return and reconciliation. The novel was an immediate hit, winning several prizes and appearing a year later in the United States.

As it happens, the books were published only eight years apart. Unconditional Surrender came out in 1961, Monk Dawson in 1969. A Catholic born in Britain in 1941, like Read himself, would have encountered Waugh’s book at age twenty and Read’s at twenty-eight. Between those two dates was a revolution so complete it is hard to imagine now that both these books are of the same decade. Waugh and Read portray starkly different social and religious worlds, even though, according to the timelines of the novels, both main characters live at the same time.

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