It has been remarked that the Israelis have a ‘slightly morbid fascination with things Roman Catholic, especially in relation to the Holy See’. Until 1993 a meeting between the Pope and the Grand Rabbi of Israel was vetoed because the leader of Catholicism was regarded as a ‘source of impurity’. Since Israel is the focus of one of the most combustible problems in the world, it is important to understand every filament of that beleaguered nation’s anxieties, one of which is its anxiety about Catholics. Well-known is its concern about the Church’s role during the Nazi era, and its historic contempt for Jewry. Perhaps less familiar is Israel’s anxiety about the Church’s supposed historic antipathy towards Zionism and the State of Israel. Such amorphous perceptions are the stuff of the Middle Eastern scene, which is a mirage built on sand, an ocean of propaganda, designed to conceal the drive for domination. Are there any grounds for Israeli suspicions that the Church has looked for a greater role in Israel/ Palestine without announcing it, and that it has been hostile to and worked to undermine Israel? Church policy towards Israel can always be presented by the Vatican in terms of true Christian concern; but the question here is: what do Jews see, and how do they see it?

One of the best guides through the territory of the pro-Fascist sympathies of the British Catholic literati is Robert Speaight, who, in his biography of Belloc and his autobiography, achieved a dispassionate view of 1930s English Catholicism, while making no secret of his own moderate temperamental inclination to the Right, even admitting to having been attracted to Action Franchise. Speaking of the 1930s Catholic intelligentsia he remarks:

He refers to both the influence of continental Rightists and that of the Church in teaching Catholics to fear Communism. Of Belloc he observes he had ‘nothing but contempt for the representative government. ... he seemed to think that, on the whole, fascism was a good thing for foreigners.’

It has often been remarked that in the 1920s and 1930s some British Catholics sympathized with Fascism; but the collocation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascism’ is alarming, the more so when it is realized that the Catholics in question were the writers, the intellectuals: civilized, educated, sophisticated and otherwise likable and mostly well- intentioned people, who expressed varying measures of attraction to what we now know to be the politics of megalomania, elitism, frustration, prejudice, deceit and brutality. How could cultured Catholics be even partially attracted to Fascism: what did they see to admire in it, and what were the conditions which permitted and provoked them to find good in it?

The present subject of ‘Catholic pro-Fascism’ is a minefield, with some of the mines laid by rightist Catholics, who, believing it to be damaging to the Catholic Church, do not wish the subject to be discussed by other than apologeticists. One such mine is to say that the word ‘Fascist’ cannot be used, either because it is a mere term of abuse, or because its meaning is so variable as to be worthless, or because it is generally confused with Nazism; so to speak the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Fascist’ in the same breath is to risk unjustifiably tainting the memory of good people. But the memory of such people can be clarified only by considering exactly what they were saying, and why.

English Catholics have been a recognisable body; yet they have also been individuals engaged in a disorderly, energetic,personal and doubt-filled struggle to create, experience, explore and affirm. Catholic literature has been grounded in the tension between liberal and conservative: categories which are a function not only of how an individual relates to doctrine, but also of personality, for Catholics, like everyone else, believe as they must, as their personalities dictate. Cardinal Manning—together with his associates Herbert Vaughan, W. G. Ward and Mgr. George Talbot—may be taken as the archetype of the conservative mentality (Manning the presiding spirit of Vatican I), while Newman may be taken as the archetype of the liberal (the presiding spirit of Vatican II)—even though he was at least as doctrinally meticulous as Manning: temperaments— rather than theological or political stances—which constituted the warp and woof of English Catholic literature.

Manning sought an infallible authority, and identified himself with it, so that he aspired to be, as he said, ‘more Roman than Rome', and proceeded to make English Catholicism like himself. He had no sympathy, he said, for ‘the watered, literary, worldly Catholicism of certain Englishmen', and wished to keep Catholics untainted by English intellectual culture. In 1876 he told a gathering of Catholic intellectuals:

English Catholic literature, invigorated by Celtic tributaries, has been of fast and luxuriant growth, rich in diversity and broad in achievement, contributing generously to the cultural mainstream. A torrent of poets, novelists, essayists, historians, journalists and spirituality writers have entertained, sustained, instructed, defended and promoted the Catholic community, and rendered it intriguing, even attractive, to outsiders by sharing their belief and their humanity. In so far as they are direct, Catholic writers reflect themselves in relation to Catholicism—their chief reference point. Lapsed writers are relevant if they continue to engage Catholicism in serious dialogue, or maintain Catholic values. Catholic writers can be spoken of as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative': the liberal values community, freedom and relevance, respects independence of mind, and aspires to understanding and toleration; the conservative values order, law and traditional forms, respects power, and aspires to conformity and exclusivism.

Since 1850 non-Catholics have generally thought that Catholicism is inimical to intellect and creativity; and the Church has indeed liked to picture itself as united, uniform, unchanging, righteous,infallible and ideologically lucid to the point of being mechanistic; and consequently there appears to be a conflict between the god-like Church and the human realities in which writers deal, between inflexible ‘Law’ and the fact that literature is of life, with the wind blowing where it listeth.

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.

Literary writings had a significant, if elusive and subtle, rôle to play in securing the position of the English Catholic community in the especially vulnerable period 1829–1850. It is questionable that the Catholic press and Catholic apologists and polemicists played so large a part in calming the anti-Catholic frenzy so evident in the 1820s as the subsequent more literary products of Catholics and those non-Catholics who were intrigued by Catholicism. Holmes remarks that in this period ‘most Catholic apologists attempted the fruitless and unending task of answering specific objections and those books or pamphlets which survive are merely gathering dust on the shelves of Catholic libraries’. It took greater art to get behind the defences of John Bull's anti-Catholic fortress mentality. The rôle of literature was to affect the perceptions and sympathies of the intelligentsia rather than political conditions: at the beginning of this period people felt with Dr. Arnold that ‘the [Anglican] Church, as it now stands, no human power can save'; while at its end, people could hold the expectation ‘that Popery will in a few years become the popular religion of these realms’. This sense of the seriousness of the Catholic presence was established mostly, of course, by Catholicism's actual presence; but that was amplified and consolidated in the mind of the educated public by literature, substantially in a positive direction.

Though Kenelm Henry Digby, a romantic convert, is a minor figure within the story of the development of nineteenth-century English Catholicism, his name is recalled in passing in many of the text books; and so, perhaps, some seventy years after Bernard Holland’s sketchy biography of him, there is room for a reassessment of his place within Victorian Catholicism, in which milieu his name was well-known, his books widely read, and his person much-loved. In W. G. Roe’s estimate, his writings ‘made a considerable contribution, if not to the thought, at least to the atmosphere of the Catholic revival.’ He was interesting as the first man to use the widespread fascination with the Middle Ages for the purpose of Catholic apologetic. When so distinguished a figure as Lord Acton noted his influence, and a contributor to the Dublin Review suggested in 1843 that Digby’s writings had helped to reduce anti-Catholic prejudice, it is of interest to reconstruct his views on, and his contribution to, English Catholicism. The task is difficult, for he was and remains an elusive figure, somewhat isolated, uncontroversial, obsessively restless and given to writing numerous volumes of poor prose and terrible meditative poetry, which, despite their autobiographical nature, are frustratingly unrevealing.

When, in 1905, G. W. E. Russell commented on converts to Catholicism in the period preceding the zenith of the Oxford Movement, he mentioned six names: three of these were the ‘Cambridge Converts’ Ambrose Phillipps [de Lisle], George Spencer and Kenelm Henry Digby. These permutations,’ he said, ‘were regarded as mere eccentricities, and no one dreamed that they were likely to have any effect upon the Church.’ Did they have any effect on Anglicanism via their point of contact, the Oxford Movement? What were their motives in respect of the Tractarians, and how did they relate to each other as a group? These converts—Spencer and Digby in particular have largely been ignored—illustrate the range of Catholic attitudes to Anglicanism, while Digby represents the main body of Catholic opinion, which was suspicious of Anglo-Catholicism.