In 1938, Evelyn Waugh complained that bien pensant intellectuals were using “fascist” as an all-purpose epithet: “[T]he Means Test is Fascist. . . . [P]atriotism is Fascist. . . . [F]ox-hunting is Fascist. . . . Catholicism is Fascist. . . . Is it too late to call for order?” (Essays, Articles and Reviews of Waugh, 1983, 223). Such order has been particularly absent from the scholarship on British Catholicism and fascism, because authors have been inclined either to identify Catholicism and fascism reflexively or to disavow nervously any serious gravitation by the faithful toward a toxic ideology. Tom Villis, however, offers an analysis that is “neither apologetic nor accusatory” (183). He thus judiciously elucidates both the attraction that fascism held for British Catholics and the limits of its appeal. As such, his monograph is a pioneering contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history. But this trenchant study of the Catholic encounter with fascism could have been enhanced by greater awareness of how that engagement's participation in a broader countermodern discourse often prompted Catholics to reject fascism as itself a species of modern secularism.

Villis limns well the conflicted understanding of fascism that numerous interwar Catholics constructed. Faced with putatively corrupt and moribund liberal democracy, and openly atheistic, aggressive communism, fascism appeared to be the viable political system most compatible with Catholic social ideals, like corporatism, and the one most patient of conversion into a Christian regime. Yet even many Catholics favorable to such a modus vivendi with fascism had significant reservations about its beliefs and practices, especially what seemed to be its neopagan idolatry of nation and race as well as its statism. Villis hence wisely deduces that Catholic condemnations of modern materialism were “parallel rather than complementary” to cognate fascist denunciations (5).

This textured critique of fascism yielded complex appraisals of interwar events and issues. For instance, most British Catholics sought to remove the Spanish Civil War from the debate about fascism by casting the Iberian conflagration as a clash between Catholicism and communism. Their widespread support for the nationalists was consequently decoupled from any affinity for fascism by depicting Franco as a Catholic patriot battling Bolshevism instead of as a fascist ideologue destroying democracy. Similarly, even those Catholics, like E. I. Watkin, who were more unequivocal critics of fascism shared the disdain for liberalism and communism that had fostered their peers' flirtation with fascism. And some of those more indulgent Catholics eventually extended their radical reproval of modern politics to fascism as well, a dynamic that demands deeper exploration than Villis undertakes.

Indeed, for all the undeniable intersection of Catholicism and fascism as countermodern movements, several sapient Catholics finally saw fascism as a form of secularism, and that perception was a key source of their ultimate repudiation of it as part of their larger rebellion against modernity. Rather than embracing fascism, these Catholics' criticism of post-Christian polities came to encompass fascism, as it had liberalism and communism. Moreover, this Catholic critique of irreligious ideologies generated positive alternatives to all secularist systems that helped leading Catholic thinkers resist fascism's allure by transcending contemporary political categories.

For example, although (as Villis notes) G. K. Chesterton and Christopher Dawson showed some strong sympathies for fascism, their deeper allegiance to, respectively, distributism and Christian corporatism was finally countervailing. By the mid-1930s, Chesterton was declaring that, instead of subverting modernity, fascism actually was stamped by “heresy, license, undefined creed, unlimited claim, mutability, and all that marks Modernism” (G.K.'s Weekly, 20 April 1933). He thus persistently upheld distributism as the lone guardian of liberty against all other modern political systems, especially those, like fascism, that valorized order. He declared: “[A]ll the strong as well as the weak voices of our time are for the moment, in no unnatural despair, crying out only for Order. . . . [L]et us stand up under the derision of the whole earth and demand to be free” (G.K.'s Weekly, 1 June 1933). Likewise, Dawson argued contemporaneously that “the consecration of Folk” was one of the three main modern substitute religions, one that had taken political shape in the fascist version of “the mechanized order of the absolute State” (“Prevision in Religion,” 1934). To Dawson, this assertion of an all-powerful state rooted in race-worship “goes far to neutralize the constructive tendencies in the Fascist movement” (Religion and the Modern State, 1935, 139–40), so far that by 1939 he distinguished Christian corporatism explicitly from fascist corporatism, contending that he desired a corporative community of free agents rather than a corporative rule by elite diktat. Far from being a “third way” between liberalism and communism, Chesterton and Dawson therefore concluded, fascism was a further foe of the genuine via media—Christian humanist commonweals.

Some of the most profound interwar Catholic social critics, then, considered all secularist ideologies and polities to be radically flawed and regarded a regime grounded in orthodox Catholic sociology as the singular safeguard of human freedom and dignity. To them, only a civilization based on esteem for persons as made in God's image and likeness could resist effectively the dehumanizing tendency to see people principally as atomic integers or as members of a class or race. In short, these Catholics believed that an epoch premised on the will-to-power could be challenged transformatively solely by the paramount Christian virtue of charity. Evelyn Waugh explained this to George Orwell: “The Brotherhood which can confound the Party is one of love” (Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 1980, 302).