English historian and Christian humanist Christopher Dawson stood at the very center of the Catholic literary and intellectual revival in the four decades preceding Vatican II. One can find his influence throughout the twentieth-century Catholic Right. Poet and social critic T. S. Eliot considered him the foremost thinker of his generation, and the founder of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, wrote that he had been “saturated in Dawsonian historical studies [and] my own books reflect Dawson’s concepts.”Dawson’s reputation declined dramatically during the cultural shifts accompanying Vatican II, and few remembered the English Catholic in the final decades of the twentieth century. A revival of interest of Dawson and his body of work increased dramatically in the last years of John Paul II’s and the beginning of Benedict’s pontificates.
