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This chapter sheds light on the paradox of French Catholic literary resistance to secularisation in the period 1880–1914, and on its coincidental parallels among English Catholic writers of the same period. The chapter explores individual secularisation and draws on Charles Taylor's analysis of the immanent frame in which the ‘closed’ or buffered individual treats knowledge as a mind-centred process, meaning as a mind-originated product, and purpose and choice as autonomous or self-directed pursuits. The tendency of Catholic writers to draw on this anti-Enlightenment tradition is even more acute in political matters. Their understanding and portrayal of the Church's capacity to gather its members in a hierarchical fashion correlate strongly with their search for a renewed religious porosity or shared meaning and purpose.

The secularisation of mentalities in France and England was denoted by the shift towards a more anthropocentric conceptualisation of humanity and by the way in which certain secular discourses came to dominate the public mind. This chapter addresses how the French and English Catholic writers seek to undermine what Owen Chadwick famously called the secularisation of the European mind. The chapter considers the critique of naturalistic readings of the material world, of mechanisation, scientism and the secularising influence of German thought. Such critiques exemplify the need they felt of being buffered against secular mentalities at large. It examines the views of intellectual and anti-intellectual Catholic writers about the proper methodology with which to attack secular thought. This study shifts through the ways in which they asserted meaning in the cosmos by re-establishing links between the material and the spiritual domains.

This chapter gives a detailed description of a paradox and a coincidence. The paradox is a period of profound secularisation in France, from which emerged a generation of Catholic writers and intellectuals who were convinced that the rumours about God's death had been greatly exaggerated. The coincidence is that, in the same period, English literature too saw a significant revival in Catholic writing. France's Catholic writers, their lives and works, are explored from a variety of perspectives. Though wide and intense critical attention focuses discretely on two contemporaneous literary tendencies, there are few comparative studies of them. The most ironic intellectual consequence of religious fragmentation and technological consciousness is the final emergence of relativism in the early twentieth century to answer the difficulties posed by the collision of differing worldviews. The chapter aims to place these writings back within the context of the conditions of belief and unbelief in which they were published.

Cavanaugh's analysis of the secular State indicates the role individualism played in the genesis of contractual political theories. The gathering into the Church envisaged by many French and English Catholic authors sometimes adopts supernatural or enchanted dimensions, especially through their depiction of prophecy, the miraculous and the mysterious sharing of grace between members of the Church. This chapter discusses the themes as they appear in the works of French and English Catholic writers. It encounters their view of the Church as an institution whose very dynamics illustrate their belief in the divine agency continually at work in the material cosmos. Miracles and prophecy, the fruit of some special gift or intervention of God, help enact the Church not hierarchically but charismatically. Vicarious suffering and sainthood provide an ecclesial context for those gifts and, at the same time, portrays most dramatically the unity that can be achieved between individuals.

This chapter provides a useful paradigm to analyse anti-secular alternatives. It outlines ways in which French and English Catholic writers seek to reimagine society and economics on a sacred basis. Cavanaugh's Eucharistic counter-politics has helped to draw out some of the governing dynamics at work in their writings. In spite of the religious shape of cultural and historic roots, the passionate neo-monarchism of the French Catholic writers—monarchism shaped more by Maurrassian influence than anything else—apes Republican State idealism, with its absolute confidence in monarchy as a panacea. The roots of such confidence arguably go back to the direction taken by the French monarchy under the influence of the divine right of kings, a paradoxically secular model—because conflating religion and politics and subjecting the former to the latter—in religious clothing.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the influence of the metaphoric representation of the Church as a body on Catholic thinking since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). It states that in addition to its influence on theological inquiries, this metaphor has helped shape a generation of Catholic fiction writers, poets, and playwrights. This book analyzes works relevant to Vatican II, including those of John Patrick Shanley, Louise Erdrich, and Annie Dillard.

This chapter examines the influence of James Joyce's Catholic nostalgia on Anglo-American Catholic writer Thomas Merton. It explains that though Merton had no Catholic childhood, no Catholic mother, and no Catholic home to arouse nostalgia for the trappings of Catholicism, he became a cloistered monk, a priest, and, arguably, the most influential Catholic writer of the twentieth century. It describes the traces of Joyce's influence on Merton's works including his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.

This chapter discusses the presentation of the Church as a body in the works of several writers. It suggests that most Catholic authors challenge the Church to take its own tradition very seriously. An example of this is Elizabeth Johnson's argument that Vatican II considers as basic doctrine the call for equal dignity of women and men created in the image of God, redeemed by Christ and graced by the Spirit. She believes that this doctrine constitutes nothing more than a network of sacred duties.