The novel Helena (1950) is analyzed as Evelyn Waugh’s profound statement on his most significant problems: the possibility to resolve the crises of the 20th-century consciousness through Christianity and on the nature of power. Cradle Anglo-Catholics were always suspicious of Waugh, seeing him as an errant Catholic; the paper uses the work of Waugh’s biographers and interpreters to pinpoint his personal reception of Catholicism as the most sophisticated, strictly logical system, firmly grounded in historical fact. Waugh’s story of St.
