Drawing on extensive archival research, Fortress Church offers the first comprehensive account of the political attitudes and involvement of the English Roman Catholic bishops in the twentieth century. Kester Aspden’s path-finding study runs from 1903, a time when the Roman Catholic Church was consolidating the advances of the nineteenth century and beginning to establish its place in English society, through to the Second Vatican Council (1962-5).

The Catholic bishops of this largely overlooked period have been portrayed as colourless administrators, concerned overwhelmingly with the internal life of the Church. This book shows that an attitude of complete indifference to the wider society was not an option; issues such as Ireland, socialism, the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, the Spanish civil war, and the creation of the Welfare State, forced church leaders to look beyond their own parochial concerns. Kester Aspden’s book is a vivid and critical account of how some of the key personalities in twentieth-century English Catholicism responded to these demanding issues and events. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Catholicism in recent times.

Kester Aspden was born in Toronto in 1968. He was educated at the Bar Convent Grammar School, York, and Harrogate College of Arts and Technology. He is a graduate of Lancaster University and has a doctorate in History from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Currently he is a research fellow at the University of Leeds and a senior research associate at the Von Hugel Institute, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge.