The Ones Who Didn’t Convert

Melanie McDonagh’s Converts, reviewed in First Things last month, allows us to gaze close-up at the extraordinary procession of eminent literary, artistic, and intellectual figures that made its way over the threshold of the Roman Catholic Church from the 1890s right up until the 1960s. Wilde, Waugh, Greene, Anscombe, so many others: It is a mesmerizing spectacle. But there was, one might say, another contemporaneous procession. It was similar in some ways to the first, containing figures of equal stature and interest. However, this procession circled the Church, hugging its outer walls, but never entered. And at the head, I would place C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot.