Moral certitude and moral ambiguity in Bernard Bergonzi's The Roman Persuasion

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 received an immense amount of attention in the United Kingdom and elicited various responses from trade unionists, liberal intellectuals, members of the Roman Catholic and other churches, and numerous other segments of the population during that highly politicised decade. Largely overlooked in the extensive historiography of the repercussions of the war on British society are the ways in which British religious communities responded to the perceived crisis for both Christendom and European civilisation generally. In the most detailed study of this aspect, Bernard Bergonzi's fictional reconstruction of 1981, The Roman Persuasion, the dilemma of various members of an English Roman Catholic family are probed and analysed in terms of the conflicting mind-sets of English liberalism and authoritarian conservatism in the tradition of Hilaire Belloc.