I’ve just replied to an e-mail correspondent who seemed to be suggesting that the literary converts at the heart of the Catholic Revival were “upper class” and that “it is not surprising that so many of the upper classes of Europe were drawn to Catholicism with its rigid emphasis on the divine right of the hierarchy and natural inequalities between people”.

  Here’s my response:

  I’m not sure that you make your perspective very clear so I’m not sure of the extent to which I agree with you.

  I will, however, make a few observations suggestive of my unease with what I take to be your drift.

  First, the majority of the literary converts were certainly not “upper class” in the sense in which that term is usually understood in Europe. Far from being blue-blooded aristocrats most of the converts were from the middle class, sometimes, as was the case with Tolkien, from the impoverished middle class.

  Catholicism does not teach “the divine right of the hierarchy” any more than it teaches the divine right of kings. It teaches the divine right of Divinity! It is true that within the Mystical Body of Christ, i.e. the Church, there is a divinely instituted hierarchy but it is perilous in the extreme to conflate the Body of Christ with the secular Body Politic.

  As for the Church’s alleged “rigid emphasis on the natural inequalities between people” this is always trumped by an even more rigid insistence on the supernatural equality between people as creatures made in God’s image. Whatever natural differences exist between people they remain co-heirs of the Kingdom. This is why the Church protects the weakest members of society, such as the disabled and the unborn.