Catholic Cliques

“I wish I liked Catholics more,” Sebastian Flyte confesses to Charles Ryder during a visit to Brideshead, the Flyte family estate, in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. “They seem just like other people,” Ryder, an agnostic, responds. “That’s exactly what they’re not,” Sebastian objects. “It’s not just that they’re a clique—as a matter of fact, they’re at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time—but they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people.”