On the other hand, here and there one does still come across "interesting" Catholic nationalist figures from the not so recent past. One such, who may in fact have been a nationalist politician who happened to be a Catholic rather than the other way around, is Saunders Lewis, the founder of Plaid Cymru. And though I say he may have just happened to be a Catholic, it's also possible that, since he was a convert, there was rather more to it than that.
Lewis rejected both Anglicanism, which was of course the "religion" of the English, whom he considered foreigners, and the Methodism of his fathers. Well, he was a revolutionary, so he would, wouldn't he! And yet he did not turn to atheism. Nor indeed did he reject the "old" culture of his beloved nation and homeland. Far from being a republican, he was a staunch monarchist. And in due course he would be a vocal critic of the Novus Ordo Missae. Whereas Alex Salmond's attitude to kilts is not so different from Hitler's attitude towards beer and bratwurst, Lewis's desire, both as a medievalist and as a modernist, was, in his own words, to 'make Welsh Wales something alive, strong, powerful, belonging to the modern world.'
Indeed, Saunders Lewis shared T S Eliot's conviction that 'The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems.' [Eliot, The Sacred Wood] And in Lewis's opinion, moreover, the greatest flowering of the Welsh genius was in the late Middle Ages, specifically in the century before Henry VIII of England both "broke" with "Rome" and united England and Wales in the Act of Union of 1536.
That Plaid Cymru was founded in the 1920s at much the same time as other "interesting" parties were forming and reforming in Europe may or may not Saunders Lewis interesting depending on one's point of view. But there is little or nothing militaristic about Lewis's nationalism. His antiwar agitations in the 1930s and '40s were as much to do with pacifism as they were to do with sympathy (which others have claimed he had) for fascism*. And his nationalism was of the more wholesome sort based less on hatred of others than it was on enthusiasm for language and art. (His well documented friendship with David Jones was lifelong and as aesthetic and spiritual as it was political.)
So the decline of Plaid Cymru from being an authentic right-wing party into its current degenerate incarnation of just yet another centre left "modern" political (self-)interest groups (albeit one that chooses to spend money sending Welsh teenagers to study at English universities rather on the NHS, and despite the recent vote of the Welsh people in favour of Brexit) is yet another rather obvious example of how nationalism can and does so typically "go wrong".
But that its founder was an man of genuine and engaging vision is an edifying consideration.
*Which in any case, when one considers the sorts of endorsements that Hitler got from the likes of Churchill (in writing) and Lloyd George (in person, at Berchtesgaden itself), was hardly strange by the standards of the time!
