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According to James T. Keane’s Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes [2024], present-day Catholic author Alice McDermott is the preeminent representative of a new generation of Catholic novelists who treat of religious practice and themes in the daily flow of life. This style is distinct from Catholic novelists of earlier generations where a “sinner” or “troubled soul” languishes in a disheveled state until God’s intervention brings redemption to the lost being. Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair [1951] and Caroline Gordon’s The Malefactors [1956] fall into the latter category of stumbling into grace after a long siege with the devil, or however one defines the dark night of the soul.
Alice McDermott’s novels drop us into “the middle of things.” In Charming Billy, we find ourselves in the Bronx, invisible guests and observers in the late 1980’s of an Irish wake and funeral for Billy Lynch. The observance of life’s passage in Irish culture is true liturgy, lasting for several days, with each attendant playing his or her assigned roles, no scripts necessary. Billy’s wife of several decades, Maeve, powered herself through the necessary arrangements, notably the selection of an appropriate family pub for the reception after the Mass—with a cash bar for hard liquor. Maeve was not particularly attractive, but she was wise. She knew her responsibilities to the guests to open herself to their outpourings of grief on the death of her charming husband. And she was wise enough to maneuver herself around a hard truth: that the true love of her husband’s life was an Irish girl, Eva, whom Billy met immediately after World War II. Billy worked laboriously to make money to bring Eva and her family to the United States, only to discover that Eva died of illness in Ireland…though there is mystery about reports of her demise. The soft discussions among the guests and relatives turned to the question of “what did Maeve know of Eva and when did she know it?” Billy’s male friends, those who had stood with him at his marriage to Mauve thirty years ago, agreed that he probably told her about Eva, but one of the gang noted that “men don’t like to talk about those things.” The deceased Billy bore two crosses in his life: the lost Eva and hardcore alcoholism. McDermott subtly picks up the contradictory emotions of those in attendance: that at his best Billy was charming, with children and adults alike. All the more reason, then, to feel regret and anger over Billy’s destructive addiction. At several points, a muted but lively discussion about Billy’s consumption held the floor. The old timers believed that excessive alcohol consumption was a matter of self-control. Others addressed the issue as a religious one, and in Ireland the Catholic Church was in fact actively engaged in societies, retreats, and religious pledges to uphold abstinence from alcohol. Some romantic souls traced his problem to the loss of Eve. The religious sister from the Bronx parish labored mightily to explain alcoholism as a disease, but this was not the moment for cutting-edge science. Her pastor, deeply engaged in socializing, did not partake of the alcohol [discussions, that is.] Death is finality, but the lives of the widow and friends would continue. Catharsis, Irish style, was achieved and, while there is no dramatic end to this tale, the reader comes away with a settled sense that “wherever two or three are gathered in my name,” the Lord is among them, lovingly and soberly.
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When I gathered my wood and bucket of nails to construct the Catechist Café in 2014, it was my hope and intention to have one corner preserved for Catholic novels and the people who write them. People still read novels, and while Kindle & Company has advanced the availability and the technology of reading, the print trade continues to thrive, if the daily email promotions I receive are any indications the print trade isn’t doing too poorly, either. To me, a printed book is a sacramental. It always amazes me how many people around the pool[s] of cruise ships are reading while they consume the drinks with tiny umbrellas, and mostly they are reading novels. It is worth noting, though, that the Celebrity Cruise Line ships have good libraries, and I have always been tempted to plant a hardcover copy of What Happened at Vatican II? in the stacks on the Celebrity Equinox. We evangelize even on the high seas.
But to our purposes for today, I’ll be frank that I know truly little about classic and contemporary poetry, short stories, and plays, period. My English professor in college, having read a few of my essays, told me I wrote like a small-town sports columnist, which in college is what I read. So, it would be patently dishonest to put a full Catholic “English Literature” title on the contents page of the Café. Novels, on the other hand, are often a pleasure to me and I wish I had more time to read them. I was unaware of the genre of “Catholic novel,” however, until my mid-forties when I crossed paths with the Catholic writer Amy Welborn. Amy was a teacher and religious educator who has written many Catholic commentaries over the years for youth and adults; see her Amazon page for an excellent sampling of her work, and she has an energetic blog site. Amy introduced me [and her students] to the State of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964], considered one of the most remarkable Catholic authors of the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes O’Connor’s writing in this fashion: “O’Connor’s corpus is notable for the seeming incongruity of a devout Roman Catholic [i.e., the author] whose darkly comic works commonly feature startling acts of violence and unsympathetic, often depraved, characters. She explained the prevalence of brutality in her stories by noting that violence “is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” O’Connor certainly did not canonize violence and depravity in her novels, but she did not run away from it, either. Her Catholic spirituality, which embraced the Crucified Jesus and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and her own lifelong painful illness that killed her before age forty, made her no stranger to the divine need for hope in suffering, and the more pathetic the situation, the greater witness to the power of God’s deliverance. The total opposite of O’Connor’s work would be Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather. I guess we’ve all seen the movie version. It too had violence and agony—and even a sacrament at the climax—but was anybody in that tale closer to salvation, of any sort, at the end? WHAT MAKES A NOVEL CATHOLIC? If you Google that question, you will become bogged down in a sea of opinions, lists of authors, schools of writing, etc. The offerings are not all wrong, simply hard to narrow down. The partner question is: how do you define a “Catholic novelist?” Can a non-Catholic write a “Catholic novel?” And does the Catholic Church ever pass judgment on a novel’s identity, character, or a particular book that author has written?? Again, I can only work from my personal history with texts from the United States, England, and Ireland in terms of the novel, from what I was force fed in school to works that I cherish and keep on my bookshelf to this day. [I will cite a few of those below.] First, I can safely say that there is no official office of the Vatican or of the United States Conference of Bishops that rates public books in your village library. There is no “Legion of Decency” for novels as there was for years for movies in theaters. True, the Church can issue a monitum or warning about a theological text which contradicts Church teaching, but that is a genre outside of this conversation. Bottom line: where novels are concerned, the Catholic is at the mercy of his or her judgment on what to read for recreation and/or artistic enrichment. Pornographic writing purely for its own sake [or on other mediums] is forbidden by the Catechism of the Catholic Church [para. 2354]. A “Catholic Novel” in my own words is a work whose plot unfolds into a greater good. This “greater good” need not be explicitly Catholic or even institutionally religious, but a good that most persons of conscience could affirm. Some examples: Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness [1961] about a middle-aged alcoholic priest who rediscovers himself and his call; Caroline Gordon’s The Malefactors [1956], in which a rich but highly dysfunctional and morally disjointed family finds its direction at a Catholic farm-retreat center; J.F. Powers’ Morte d’Urban [1961] which portrays a fictional Catholic religious order in the Midwest gradually dying of the loss of its soul; and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American [1955] where a war-weary British correspondent walks away from the fall of the French in Viet Nam and the arrival of the U.S. CIA in Saigon. [See my Amazon Review.] I am betraying my age here by citing books with a little mileage on them. In part, this is because I read most of them in my relative youth before I came into a fuller measure of maturity and life experience. Coming back to them at midlife and beyond was an amazing reawakening. As a laicized priest today, I have a much better understanding of the stories of priests who wrestled with their vocations, as well as of the people who seek pastoral shepherding. Many Catholic novels pivot around couples—married or otherwise. Alice McDermott, a prolific Catholic novelist, produced After This [2007], about a Catholic couple raising four children in the tempestuous 1960’s and 1970’s; it was a true parable/metaphor of struggling home life and parochial stress that is truer today than the day it was written. [See my Amazon Review.] It became clear to me that I needed a reintroduction to today’s Catholic novelists, and in 2021 I came across America Magazine’s review of Nick Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction. [2020, see my Amazon Review.] The author lays out a thesis I can stoutly agree with: the novel of excellence takes us to the heights and depths of the human quest for God even when God is not always recognized as the end of the hunt. Add to that the idea of the novelist as prophet, disconcerting us in our complacency. Ripatrazone does not mention this book in his work, but I immediately thought of a novel from my youth that drew wholesale criticism as a scurrilous influence, namely Peyton Place [1956]. In reading it for the first time during the Covid shutdown, I felt the book was written fifty years too early. For today we have more outrage and shame over matters of sexual abuse and economic bondage, and this work would have highlighted our growing sense of “we should have known years ago.” I did not realize that the famed modern novelist Toni Morrison was Catholic, and her description of a family’s anguish in her Beloved [1987] I reviewed two years ago in an earlier post here. As we come to appreciate the inculturation of America, Ripatrazone reminds us not to overlook Minnesota’s Catholic author Louise Erdrich; her bookstore, Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, is something of a cultural hangout where Louise will autograph your purchases. There is, I understand, an actual confessional in the store. Erdrich’s mother was Chippewa and part of her store is devoted to Native American art and atmosphere. I must admit that on my top ten best novels list, i.e., what I have read in my lifetime, her The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is on that list. My jaw still drops every time I replay the plot in my mind. I wouldn’t give the plot away—and some might [might?!] find the entire narrative sacrilegious. But set, for the most part, around a poor Native American Catholic reservation parish in North Dakota, Last Report is a tour de force of Catholic imagination [adult imagination, to be sure]. I did recommend this work to my wife’s social reading circle a few years ago. They have never asked me for another recommendation. HOW TO ACCESS CATHOLIC NOVELS Nick Ripatrazone’s book is a good place to get an overview of recent and present-day Catholic novelists with a thoughtful treatment of the novel in Catholic life and thought. The Flannery O’Connors and the J.F. Powers can get away with frank assessments of life and faith that you would never hear from the pulpit or in the Catholic classroom, and yet we have never explored integrating our Catholic fiction writers into adult faith formation in some way, shape or form. An excellent and eminently readable sourcebook which just came off the press is Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes: 50 Writers, Thinkers, and Firebrands Who Challenge and Change Us [2024] by James Keane, book review editor of America Magazine. The advantage of this work is its inclusion of nonfiction Catholic authors of note as well as non-Catholic writers who enrich Catholic thought with their pens. If you live near a Catholic college—particularly if you are a donor, LOL—put a little pressure on the school’s English Department to expand its considerable bank of knowledge beyond the ivy-covered walls. I will continue to post Catholic fiction reviews several times annually, for my own sake as well as yours. This fall I am taking a three-month sabbatical to Ireland—an immensely exciting prospect—but to keep my feet grounded in the suffering of my Irish ancestors I decided to pick up a new copy of Trinity [1975] by Leon Uris. Trinity was a remarkably popular novel in the 1970’s, running 21 weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller List in 1975 and 14 weeks in 1976. What is equally remarkable about its popularity is its size [my new copy runs to 1034 pages], its complexity [multiple family narratives], and the sufferings of the Catholic Irish in the nineteenth century in their struggle for independence from England.
I read this work in my 20’s, and many personalities and events have remained with me over the next half-century, enough so that I made an exception and included Leon Uris in my “Catholic Novelist” blog stream. Uris [1924-2003] was in fact Jewish and many of his novels centered upon the establishment of the State of Israel after World War II and the bitter struggles to establish that nation. Perhaps Uris saw in nineteenth century Ireland something of the sufferings and determination of the new Jewish nation of the twentieth century. The ongoing violence between Israel and Hamas, which we have witnessed with grim hearts over the past eight months, is a present-day reminder that many around the world feel their cultural and political existences in danger of eradication. Such is Trinity. Ireland has had massive influence upon the Western or Roman Catholic Church. If you know little about its impact—Irish monks invented the rite of repeatable personal confession with absolution we use today, for example—I would add to your summer reading list How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe [1995]. Historians do debate the extravagance of the claim, but no one denies that Ireland was one of the Church’s anchors throughout history. It is little wonder then that England, which had broken from Rome under Henry VIII, was eager to suppress Irish faith and independence, though it took much of the sixteenth century to do so. For the sake of brevity, I would describe the next three Irish centuries in this way: a small but powerful English aristocracy in the province of Ulster governed the bulk of the Island, Catholics, for the convenience of the English crown. The economy was managed to farm desirable meat and produce for English tastes, leaving the Catholic populace to live off single crop ventures requiring backbreaking labor. In the mid-nineteenth century, the staple of the Irish table, the potato, was struck with a fungus, causing mass starvation. “The Potato Famine” [1845-1849] had multiple effects upon Irish living. There was a significant decline in population due to death and, increasingly, emigration, which continued until well into the twentieth century. Relocation to the United States had begun earlier than the famine. In her The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 [1997] historian Carol Sheriff describes the contribution of Irish laborers who arrived in sizeable numbers to complete the Albany to Buffalo dig. [Later, many Irish Americans served with distinction for the Union cause in the Civil War.] The famine, a political and agricultural crisis engineered to demoralize and depopulate Catholics, gave birth to a small but deeply committed generation of young people who could no longer endure watching their fathers grow prematurely old while farming rocky landscapes. Trinity is the story of one such family, the Larkin family, over a stretch of time from about 1885 to 1916. Uris embraces three generations of experience by opening his epic with the funeral of old Kilty Larkin, the father of the clan. Kilty had lived through demanding times, and we hear the vivid tales of the famine, for example, as he lay dying with two younger generations of Larkins in attendance. The funeral itself reminded me of the opening of “The Godfather” epic where we meet the entire Corleone family at Connie’s wedding. In Trinity we meet the Larkins in Kilty’s funeral and observe how they grieve, what they believe, and the role of church and country in their small Irish town. With Kilty’s death, for example, the mantle of familial leadership passes to his son, Tomas, a giant of a man who hates England, to be sure, but despises the Catholic pastor, too. Uris suggests that some priests—and certainly some bishops—curried favor with England by pouring pastoral water on the smoldering embers of Catholic and patriotic resentments. Tomas’s wife and her women friends are devout Catholics, buttressed by tales and practices to ward off evil spirits. His oldest son, Conor, will carry the story most of the way. As a teenager Conor did not attend school, to assist his father Tomas with their meager farm. But his younger neighbor and sidekick, Seamus O’Neill, had the good fortune of schooling, with a dedicated literature instructor who takes a healthy interest in both Seamus and his older friend Conor. The latter learns to read, and later in the book we find Conor devouring the likes of Karl Marx in his analysis of how his fellow Irishmen might attain their rights and dignity. Like his father, Conor had little use for the Church. Had he known how the local pastor ruined his parents’ marriage, this novel might have taken a different road. The one true joy of Tomas Larkin’s life was his wife, and the couple enjoyed a ravenous and imaginative sex life together. On one occasion his wife Finola enters the confessional and confided to the pastor—who bore a years’ long hatred of Tomas—that she enjoyed the pleasures of the bed. The priest—in a way that would be considered abusive today—demanded that she identify every detail of their conjugal life, in part to pleasure himself and in part to inflict the greatest pain on his adversary’s life. He instructs Finola that the only way she will save her soul is by living chastely, without sexual intimacy. Tomas, already a stout drinker, thus turned to the other comfort of his life and began his downward spiral. Conor, for his part, gradually moves from farming to the forge and artistic iron working, relocating north to Ulster and the watchful eye of his personal Protestant clients, the Hubbles, and his factory owner, who recruits Conor for his company’s rugby team. Uris provides lengthy portraits of the rich business aristocracy of Northern Ireland and the workers’ conditions in the factories, highlighted by a massive industrial fire that kills many. Even though the English Parliament itself was making its first ginger forays into its “two-Ireland” problem, Conor’s intimacy with his employers and their methods, on the one hand, and his growing position of power among underground Irish republicans on the other hardens his radicalism. Conor engages in several powerful love affairs with women his intellectual equal, women prepared to leave their lives and engage in his cause. Conor, who knows the dangers that face him if his cause is discovered by authorities, is highly reluctant over the years to put them in danger’s paths. He intuits that he will not live to a ripe old age, and in this he is correct. As a trusted agent for his Protestant employer, Conor develops an ingenious method of smuggling guns on his company’s rail line to small Irish republican units in preparation for an armed insurrection. While the reader has some idea of the book’s climax, the courage and drama of Conor and his comrades is gripping through the final sentence. In the novel’s epilogue, Conor and his senior comrade lie in state in Dublin’s City Hall, and then are borne in a procession of 100,000 of his compatriots to the burial sites of earlier Irish heroes Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. The novel portrays these events in1915. The famous “Easter Monday Uprising” did break out one year later, in 1916, leading eventually to Ireland’s becoming a self-governing republic. FINAL THOUGHTS Leon Uris concludes his epilogue with this thought: “When all of this was done, a republic eventually came to pass but the sorrows and the troubles have never left that tragic, lovely land. For you see, in Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over.” [p. 1034] Uris lived until 2003, long enough to witness “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland which extended into the twenty-first century. The highly popular NETFLIX comedy series, “Derry Girls,” is set amidst the social struggles of the late 1990’s. The problem with aging is the gradual realization that all the hopes we harbored in our youthful years are not going to be fulfilled in our lifetimes. I am a baby boomer, and I guess we rode the wave of postwar [World War II] prosperity to the conclusion that all war, hunger, hate, and disease would be corralled in our lifetime. Many of us Catholics felt the same way about the Church, that after the final session of Vatican II [1965] we would have a “better church,” though precisely what and how this would happen was never truly discussed. As a church guitarist myself in those days, I must admit that most, if not all, of our music back then proclaimed that the Kingdom would arrive so long as we were awake and shaking our tambourines in “community,” whatever the psychological meaning of that term. Now, in my late 70’s, I have become more realistic about the power of original sin and the need for salvific grace as I prepare to seek the one perfect kingdom, the one Jesus described to Pontius Pilate as “not of this world.” The treatment of the Irish by the English reflected the thinking of oppressors who believed themselves to be messiahs of this world. While only Catholicism makes the public claim of infallibility, most of us on the planet live as if we own the wisdom behind that claim to divine power, individually and collectively, when it is in truth the life of the Holy Spirit. How much human interaction—personal, political, economic, military—can we honestly say is borne of the Spirit? Truly little, I fear. The Gospels are clear that passage into the eternal kingdom depends exclusively upon the practical charity and love that pours from our hearts, meaning that so long as we breathe, we do what we can to love one another in this imperfect kingdom. I am lucky enough to enjoy good health, and I try to remember each day that “to whom much is given, much is expected.” But what strength I have must be put to service, in a humble, servant’s mode. Uris’s closing thought that “the past is happening over and over” must be nuanced; it cannot be interpreted to mean that charity, prayer, and good works are a waste of time. On the contrary, there is a timelessness to the sacrifices of Conor Larkin’s generation, as there is in ours. Mother Teresa’s words, which came from the depths of a ministry to the broken poor and dying, told a reporter “We are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.” The next time you pay your cable TV bill, remember that a tiny bit of it is bringing the world of Catholic fiction writing onto the world stage. The first Father Brown detective story was penned in 1911 by the Catholic thinker and novelist G. K. Chesterton; in 2013 the series of Father Brown mysteries put to video—not for the first time--became a staple of the BBC and at present I am enjoying the eleventh season. But the Father Brown books do raise an interesting question: what, exactly, is Catholic fiction? It is a matter of no small debate.
I, for one, believe that Catholic novelists of the modern era, the past two centuries—have been the true practitioners of what we have come to call “synodality,” the exchange of deeply held sentiments and insights for the identity and renewal of the Church and humankind. This is no discredit to such insightful minds as Geoffrey Chaucer [c. 1340-1400] who produced the provocative Canterbury Tales before the invention of the printing press. Today’s novelists have considerable advantages over their literary ancestors—time, publishing houses, political safety as a rule, and a populace that can read, though I hedge on that last point. In my lifetime a good example of a Catholic novelist who translating the times and made them better was J.F. Powers, whose works—short stories and two novels—situated in 1947, 1963, and 1980—are commentaries that reflect an intimate knowledge of the institutional and personal shortcomings of the Church from the top down. Powers, a layperson, was a true genius in describing American superiors and priests in the mid-twentieth century who utterly failed [and continue to fail] to stem the withdrawal of millions of Catholic laity from the institutional Church. One wonders where we might be if religious leaders had taken Powers’ novels seriously. In the 1963 best seller, Morte d’Urban, the central character Father Urban, fundraiser for his fictitious order, the Clementines in the Midwest U.S., lays bare almost every decaying branch of consecrated life, particularly the U.S. Church’s anti-intellectualism. Powers’ masterpieces should be required reading for Catholics pining for the “good old days, and certainly in seminaries. We do not think of Catholic novelists as important voices because, truth be told, Catholics don’t know that a goodly number of their confreres in faith are among America’s best novelists. We are not, frankly, a reading Church. Stroll through your parish bookstore some time. Do not blame the store managers for an absence of college level reading, whether Catholic novels, or, for that matter, formative Catholic non-fiction works beyond Confirmation age. Few folks are pounding the doors for Catholic intellectual enrichment, fiction, or non-fiction. In 1955 the renowned Church historian Monsignor John Tracy Ellis stunned the Catholic educational establishment with a 40-page journal piece, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life” [see America’s 1995 analysis here.] Ellis stated, in so many words, that American Catholicism was, well, dumb. As a layperson student, he hoped to earn a doctorate in history at Catholic University but was so disillusioned by the quality of instruction at CU that he attempted to earn the degree in a Big Ten school. He could not afford the tuition, however, and eventually took his degree at CU, where he had a scholarship. Later the school hired him to teach the History of American Catholicism, but he was so embarrassed by the quality of his training that he took a year’s sabbatical at Harvard before taking the Catholic University position. Later, Ellis, along with his other duties, served with accreditation evaluators for the National Catholic Educators Association, which meant he visited many of this country’s Catholic colleges. He was distressed at the abundance of so many Catholic colleges [200-250] on shoestring budgets, with mediocre faculties, marginal libraries, little or no endowments. His own college seminary, St. Viator in Bourbonnais, Illinois, [where Bishop Sheen had studied some years earlier] was graduating classes of under twenty when it closed in 1937. Ellis argued that there were too many colleges and seminaries for the limited funds and particularly suitable personnel available, and he recommended that the American Church close many of them and consolidate into fewer institutions of academic excellence. His writing on Catholic education in 1955 was read by a small professional circle at the time, but for those motivated Catholics—in school but just as importantly, living full lives in adult society—the place to find meaty commentary and intellectual religious inspiration was the Catholic literary world, where usually Catholic authors were published by secular presses. Catholics in the U.S. began attending college in large numbers after World War II with the passage of the GI Bill and other opportunities. Catholics became “whiter collar.” Their tastes were more critical; some had read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath [1939] or seen the movie, though in conservative wartime America and from the pulpit, such books were suspected of anticapitalism and communist sympathies. [The film “Lost Horizon” was banned during World War II for similar reasons.] After the war, though, consider the kinds of books that Americans—particularly Catholics—were buying, reading, and discussing—though probably not from in-house Catholic outlets. Catholic authors were topping the secular American best-seller charts. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain [1949] was the 75th best seller of the twentieth century. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood appeared in 1952 and her style and influence opened the floodgates for the future works of numerous Catholic authors. J.F. Powers, whom I cited above, released his first volume of short stories, The Prince of Darkness, in 1947, and his national best seller Morte d’Urban in 1962. The English Catholic Graham Greene’s novels were secretly enjoyed by Pope Paul VI, who advised him: ““Some aspects of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.” JON HASSLER [1933-2008] AND THE DEAN’S LIST [1998] According to Wikipedia, much of Catholic Jon Hassler's fiction involves characters struggling with transitions in their lives or searching for a central purpose. Many of his major characters are Catholic (or lapsed Catholics), and his novels frequently explore the role small-town life plays in shaping or limiting human potential. In a 2008 obituary piece review of Hassler’s works in America Magazine, the late priest-sociologist-novelist Andrew Greeley summarizes the role of a Catholic novelist: “A long time ago a controversy raged in Catholic journals about whether a “Catholic novel” was possible. The “right” contended that a novel could be called “Catholic” if it presented orthodox Catholic teaching and edifying Catholic people (no “bad” priests) and was written by a “practicing” Catholic author. The “left” said that any quality novel was by definition “Catholic,” like James Joyce’s Ulysses. Most of the French “Catholic” writers were not Catholic enough by these standards—Francois Mauriac and Léon Bloy. Neither were their English counterparts—Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. The rector of the major seminary I [Greeley] attended publicly denounced Greene. Sister Mariella Gable was banished from her monastery in Minnesota by the Bishop of St. Cloud for putting Catcher in the Rye on her reading list. The courses in “Catholic Fiction” disappeared from Catholic colleges and universities, even from Notre Dame, where some writers of allegedly Catholic fiction taught. I went through the catalogues of a few dozen such schools 20 years ago and found that even G. K. Chesterton’s fiction had disappeared from public sight…” Greeley might have added that “the children of this world” are more religiously energetic in their reading than Catholics. I checked the library of the University of Central Florida recently and discovered fifty distinct works of the Trappist Thomas Merton. Later in the piece Greeley refers to Hassler, who died in 2008, as “the last Catholic novelist in America.” As it turned out, Greeley was overly pessimistic: the last half century has seen a renaissance of interest and creativity in fiction written by Catholics. Think Toni Morrison…Flannery O’Connor…Walker Percy for starters. A devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964] jolted the Catholic literary world with three powerful novels that embodied her belief that the Kingdom of God will be seized by force from the powerful evils of this life. There is nothing dainty here. [O’Connor once stated in a social gathering that “if the Eucharist is merely a symbol, then the hell with it.”] She was an inspiration to her novelist colleagues in a remarkable circle of U.S. authors particularly in the south, a surprising number of whom were Catholic including Percy and Caroline Gordon. It is fair to say that O’Connor was to Catholic novels what Thomas Merton was to mystical monastic Catholic writing in breaking new ground. Merton died just four years after O’Connor, electrocuted in Burma. The Baby Boomer Catholic reading generation [my generation], particularly those of us in Catholic schools and seminaries, were not exposed to a steady diet of contemporary novels in our education. Our superiors fed us classical and safe works for summer reading, or so they thought: An American Tragedy [1925] by Theodore Dreiser was one title I can recall, but years later I read an earlier Dreiser tome, Sister Carrie [1900] on my own time. I discovered that both of Dreiser’s works were banned at various places: Nazi Germany, because of the immoral conduct of the characters [!], and Boston because of the sexual innuendo. Whoever inadvertently inserted An American Tragedy into our seminary summer reading lists need not have worried; most of us were not reading The New York Times Book Review on weekends during high school, anyway. As students in the 1960’s we were not exposed to any of the contemporary giants of the Catholic writing scene from England and the United States, perhaps because our superiors and the Catholic hierarchy in general were disturbed by or did not understand—or were blissfully unaware of--the themes of contemporary “secular” authors, including the Catholic ones. This does not mean we did not read them on the sly. I discreetly read Morte d’Urban in high school but did not understand its purpose at the time. Similarly, many of us read Catcher in the Rye in the 1960s [again, in secreto] as our entry—so we thought—into the revolution of the 1960’s, blissfully unaware that J.D. Salinger began the composition in 1947. I would like to revisit this book and its alienated hero again after having treated depressed young people for a quarter-century. I never heard of the Catholic novelist Jon Hassler [1933-2008] until a year or two ago when I read North of Hope, which I reviewed for Amazon. North of Hope is a teaching drama of the conscience. The Dean’s List [1995], by contrast, is a subtle/humorous/despairing social statement about higher education, seen through the eyes of the aging dean of Rookery State College, Leland Edwards. Kirkus Reviews has a fine plot summary which I heartily recommend, and America describes how Hassler’s Catholic outlook weaves through his writing. “The novelist was not just a Catholic version of Garrison Keillor, chronicling small-town Minnesota. Jon Hassler and his comic Catholic vision exposed the crassness and brutality of postmodern superficiality and post-postmodern cynicism.” Rookery State College [I love that name] is a Minnesota public college, not a Catholic institution, but it manifests all the decay of dying colleges described so aptly by Monsignor Ellis forty years earlier. Dr. Edwards the Dean knows this to some level, but he is chained to the wonderful ice fishing of the north country, and the possibility of entering a late-in-life marriage. He is also chained to the care of his elderly mother, who is still spry enough to host a local radio talk show and create fuss; one of her causes being her son’s ascendancy to the college presidency. Rookery itself is not as spry as Mother Edwards. All the vital signs of a fruitful legacy are missing. The faculty cited in the story are empty-headed, eccentric, past their prime, antisocial, narrow, and in some cases all the above. The current president of the college believes that Paul Bunyon was an alum. There is no endowment to speak of, and it seems that the future of the school—and the identity of the next president—will rest upon some extraordinary event to put the school in the regional, even national, eye. At Rookery, there is a school of thought led by the athletic director and his supporters on the board of trustees that the key to the college’s financial future is its emergence as a sports power. Granted, the school’s only salvageable sport is hockey. But the AD has made friends with sports mammon, specifically a brewery with name recognition which he believes will lift the college’s reputation and its cash flow. [My college engaged in a similar strategy, but it linked itself to the Koch Brothers instead. Rookery, in retrospect, aimed too low.] Dean Edwards, however, in a move to highlight the liberal arts potential of the school, counters with the idea of a campus visit [and famous author in residence?] by the nation’s preeminent poet, Richard Falcon. Surprisingly, the appearance is agreed upon. Perhaps too easily. A public reading and lecture by Falcon are scheduled and promoted in every coffee house and bookstore north of Sioux Falls. Miracle of miracles, the poet arrives in one piece, and 5,000 avid Falcon admirers arrive hours early to gather in the new hockey arena with the giant neon beer ad blazing full tilt. However, Edwards discovers that there is more, much more, to Falcon than his poetry, popular as it is. Falcon, no surprise, is a chain-smoking, unpredictable artist. More problematic is his history, due to his self-imposed alienation from the Internal Revenue Service. Falcon arrives at Rookery with the FBI closing in. Edwards finds himself harboring a fugitive; the last thing Rookery needs is a dramatic arrest in front of thousands of families. By this time there are plenty of loose ends for the reader to digest. I will not spell out the endings except to say that, under the circumstances, Rookery probably labored on for a time after the events depicted in this novel, but its future is anyone’s guess. ]By the way, Erie Community College outside of Buffalo will be demolished as the new Highmark Stadium is constructed for the Buffalo Bills football team.] So, what does a Catholic take away from The Dean’s List? First, it is artful writing. Not Dr. Zhivago, but worthy of the investment. Art is embedded in the Catholic charisma. Second, dear old Rookery is failing miserably in its mission as a liberal arts college to bring what the Greeks would have called “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” After this book was published at the end of the last century, we have seen a push for more small colleges to become “vocational tech schools,” the argument being that today’s college aged population would be better served by schools that empower their graduates to make a decent living and serve the national economy. I get that. At the same time, such a pivot denies our citizenry substantive exposure to the basic truths of human experience. The American Founding Fathers, as I understand it, believed that democracy would survive only with an educated citizenry. The flame of scholarship at Rookery has already died in the breasts of most of its faculty in this narrative. Why? [During Falcon’s lecture, Dean Edwards is incensed that none of the English Department faculty is in attendance.] I served as a public college adjunct instructor for eight years in two departments, religion, and human services, and in that entire time there were no faculty meetings in either division—none. Rookery clearly has no common mission statement or common mission, either, but for that matter, neither do many Catholic dioceses. In many ways a diocesan mission statement is more important than the parish statement, particularly in areas such as faith formation beyond First Communion and Confirmation. We have no structured plan or program for religious education emanating from my diocese as of this writing. We are becoming a religious stepsister of Rookery in terms of sustaining and enriching what we love. Hassler does not play the prophet, but he does give hints of where he thinks colleges are heading as American institutions. This book was published in 1995. In 2024-25 Vanderbilt University’s annual room and board fee will approach $100,000. The television contracts for large conference football and basketball programming extend today to many billions of dollars. On the philosophical side, recent Congressional hearings revealed that on matters of major American life—a surge in antisemitism, for example—some of our leading institutes of higher learning cannot sort out even the most basic principles of human sanctity and respect. Jon Hassler died in 2008, but I doubt that he would be surprised by the collegiate changes in our current generation of schools because, where it counts, he brings a Catholic mind to the subject. "North of Hope" is the story of Father Frank Healy, set in post-World War II Minnesota and extending into the 1980’s. Healy’s mother died in his childhood, and the lad is more than tended to by the housekeeper of his parish church, Eunice Pfeiffer, who is making a play to win the newly widowed Mr. Healy. Pfeiffer, tending the boy’s mother at her moment of death, reported to all that the woman’s last wish was that her son Frank become a priest.
An introvert coping with maternal loss, Frank Healy progresses through high school—a very handsome, intelligent, and athletic figure but something of an enigma to his peers, and thus even more intriguing and desirable to his women classmates, none more than Libby Girard. It is Libby who brings the energy to this story, albeit in a pathological way. Desirous of Frank as both a lover and a protector from her abusive father, Libby makes her play for Frank in a way that forces him to fish and cut bait on his decision to enter the college seminary. When Libby makes her final desperate play for Frank—pursuing him to his new home, the college seminary, of all places—he keeps her at arm’s length and she begins her long dolorous adulthood through three highly dysfunctional marriages and a severely troubled bipolar daughter, Verna. There is a long break in the narrative, and we pick up Frank [now Father Frank] and Libby in a most unlikely setting, as neighbors in the Basswood Native American Reservation. Several Amazon reviewers criticized this quarter-century gap as disruptive to the rhythm of the work. On one level I agree: we learn precious little about Frank except that he was ordained and immediately assigned to teach math at an exclusive Catholic academy, where he spent the first quarter century of his priesthood. When the academy closed, and after a brief stint at the Cathedral parish where he developed panic attacks while preaching, Frank receives the bishop’s reluctant permission to rediscover his priesthood in the poorest throes of his diocese. On the other hand, this gap in the narrative sets the stage for Libby, now working as a nurse at the reservation health center with her third husband, a seedy physician, to unfold her life’s narrative to Frank in a series of episodic crises prompted by Libby’s [and Verna’s] lifetime of trauma, poor choices, and in Libby’s case, likely undiagnosed major depression. She makes repeated and more open appeals to Frank to leave the priesthood and pick up the relationship she remembered from high school days. To his credit, Frank, who is in the throes of depression and midlife identity crisis himself, is able to save Libby from her worst self as her life continues to unravel in a series of shocking revelations and criminal conspiracies. To focus on the plot exclusively, though, does not do justice to the full work. The bulk of this novel pivots around grimy reservation life and dysfunctional rectory life, each with a culture all its own. The story is peppered with colorful “parish people” who alternately humor and infuriate us. Frank lives with an ineffectual pastor Father Adrian, a monsignor whose life as a pastor and chancellor of the diocese was marked by extraordinary mediocrity but a private, charming piety. Playing out the string, the old pastor has few friends in the diocese, but Frank finds him a comforting presence. As the novel reaches its climax, Father Adrian demonstrates an unexpected energy of tolerance and understanding that contributes to the plot resolution. On the other hand, there is the rectory’s housekeeper, Mrs. Tatzig. If you have ever watched an episode of “Father Brown” from British TV, you have a decent representation of the power of rectory housekeepers, at least in recent history. In a J.F. Powers short story, “The Prince of Darkness,” [1947] an aging assistant pastor prays for a pastorate so that he might install his mother in the position before she is too old. In our story here, Mrs. Tatzig lives in the rectory and assumes the care of the old monsignor, particularly after his heart attack. Mrs. T. does not take to Father Frank. His drinking and his preoccupation with Libby obviously do not sit well with her, but his main transgression against her is his penchant for playing cards close to the vest. She cannot read him. Libby’s crises finally disrupt rectory life, and certainly the housekeeper’s, but in this madness Frank comes to realize that his stoic and blunted interpersonal style may indeed be hurtful to Mrs. T., and he takes her into his confidence about the gravity of the crises around them. It is a subtle indication that Frank the priest is finally learning about himself, to the degree that there might be hope for his priestly vocation. While the novel does not wrap up in a Pollyanna happy conclusion, most of its human trajectories appear more hopeful. Even the bishop reluctantly decides to keep the reservation church open with Father Frank at its helm and Father Adrian and Mrs. Tatzig in support. While not a classic, North of Hope is a good read that conveys how a Catholic church of fallible beings can still rise to the occasion in time of crisis. David Lodge earned his doctorate at the University of Birmingham, England, and according to Wikipedia, “was brought up a Catholic and has described himself as an ‘agnostic Catholic’. Many of the characters in his works are Catholic, and their Catholicism, particularly the relationship between Catholicism and sexuality, is a consistent theme. For example, The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) and How Far Can You Go? (1980; published in the U.S. as Souls and Bodies), examine the difficulties faced by orthodox Catholics vis-a-vis the prohibition of artificial contraception. Other Lodge novels where Catholicism plays an important part include Small World, Paradise News (1991) and Therapy (1995). In Therapy, the protagonist Laurence Passmore (‘Tubby’) has a breakdown after his marriage fails. He reminisces about his adolescent courtship with his first girlfriend at a Catholic youth club and seeks her out while she is on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the legendary and contemporary hike to the Cathedral of St. James in Spain where the saint’s bones are reputed to rest. Lodge has said that if read chronologically, his novels depict an orthodox Roman Catholic becoming ‘less and less so as time went on’.”
To be honest, I was not familiar with Lodge or his body of work until Souls and Bodies, and from scanning reviews of his body of work he is not regarded with the same esteem as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, or Flannery O’Connor. But any fair Catholic novelist, in a Catholic milieu, is always a matter of considerable interest to me. Novelists—even the agnostics, maybe in particular the agnostics--bring two considerable advantages to the Catholic populace—they can bring the nuts and bolts of Catholic worship and discipline to the public in compelling and blunt ways, and as non-clerics they suffer no repercussions for addressing matters of controversy with a brutal honesty that we rarely see in the Church’s everyday public life but take very seriously in private. Flannery O’Connor, a devout communicant till her death, observed to anyone who asked that the biggest miracle at Lourdes is that more people don’t die from contagion at the facilities. Catholic novelists can call ‘em as they see ‘em. Souls and Bodies [1980] is a period piece, to be sure—twice removed, one might say. Lodge completed this novel in 1980 as a retrospective piece on young Catholic collegians in the late 1950’s, daily Mass attendees at their college chapel, who go on to navigate the next two decades of the “Vatican II era” through their twenties and thirties. It is captivating in a way to look back on the sexual mores—particular Catholic teachings—of the pre-Vatican II era. Lodge captures the ambiguity of the time—a feeling among many, if not all Catholics, that the Conciliar age of religion was on the cusp of a more humane approach to the strict mandates of the Church in matters of the body and sexual pleasure. A recent theologian has noted that the Sixth Commandment [“thou shalt not commit adultery”] has been stretched so far that it is the only commandment against which it is impossible to sin only venially. Every sexual misstep was [and still is, by the books] held to be mortal in nature, i.e., the road to eternal damnation without sacramental confession to a priest. Souls and Bodies traces the passage from college to full adulthood of Dennis, Angela, Michael, Polly, Ruth, Edward, Miles, and Adrian, with primary emphasis upon the triad of Catholic religion, sexual desire, and that elusive mix of purpose and identity we struggle to find in our twenties. This would not be much of a book if the players were not Catholic. In that case, the reader would yawn and say, “they’ll figure it all out eventually.” In fact, this is true for the protagonists in Souls and Bodies, except that they bear varying degrees of allegiance to a church which plays a heavy hand in human sexuality. Lodge’s coterie of young people, in addition to the universal challenge of “finding themselves,” are faced with the added burden of the will of the divine, as the Church proclaimed it, which doubled and tripled the ante of their sexual exploration. The curiously titled second chapter, “How They Lost Their Virginities,” is a tug of war between the restraints they have been taught, their own curiosities and hungers, and a society becoming more permissive. For several, the confessional is a lifebuoy until its penitents awaken to the sin/guilt/absolution/sin matrix they have fallen into and begin to question the very meaning of moral revelation and Church authority. One would think, then, that by the time many of the old gang had married and the premarital moral challenge had abated, the moral conundrum would have eased as a disturbing factor in their lives. But the sixth commandment was the guardian of the Church’s teaching on matters of sexuality within marriage as well as outside of it, at least in the second millennium of the Church. Married couples in Souls and Bodies faced new moral crises—how many children, and how to space them. Specifically, the invention of the birth control pill around 1960 and its contraindication by Pope Paul VI in 1968 became the chief moral neurosis of those Catholics who still tried to remain faithful to Church teaching. The pill was more attractive and practical than barrier methods of contraception, and certainly a more tasteful solution than Natural Family Planning, the one method tolerated by the Church. I give credit to Lodge for working in the frank details of NFP, which in the 1960’s were quite complex and not always effective. To be truthful, I have no idea if the NFP programs presented by Catholic dioceses today as part of their pre-Cana or pre-marriage preparation package are as complicated as it was two generations ago, nor do I know if Catholics must attend before getting married in the Church. [As a pastor, a teacher, and a psychotherapist, I have never been asked or consulted about NFP.] Lodge narrates how his characters attempt to reconcile the permissibility of NFP with the prohibitions against pharmaceutical and barrier birth control methods. All methods work toward the same end, they reasoned, and it appears that no clergyman had explained to them the incompatibility of physical birth control devices with the “natural law,” a broad principle dating back to the Roman thinker Ulpian, who describes natural law as “that which man has in common with the animals.” [Not that the historical explanation of natural law was or is a panacea of self-evident logic.] Although the Bible commands us to “be fruitful and multiply,” there is nothing strictly speaking upon which one could hang his hat as a condemnation of the pill. Lodge notes that his players, some of them at least, were aware that a commission of cardinals and Catholic laity were debating the moral philosophy of contraception quietly as Vatican II was still in progress. Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae [1968] overrode that commission’s recommendation of a reset. The story line navigates other trials and tribulations of these adults as they approach the first light of early middle age. Divorce, mental illness, homosexuality, substance abuse, abuse of power in sexual encounters, and Downs Syndrome are among the challenges through the plot. Relationships to the Catholic Church of their youth vary widely, as the reader might expect. One curious episode is infatuation with an extreme grassroots liberal movement with a national following, a splinter group from official Catholicism, “The Catholics for an Open Church.” It was established to complete the unfinished business of Vatican II, although I cannot recall many unfinished discussions by the Council itself. I remarked earlier that Souls and Bodies was a period piece, perhaps twice so. I was referring first to the text itself and its times in English Roman Catholic history. Lodge completed this work in 1980, over four decades ago, and I could not help but reflect upon the 40+ years since the publication of Souls and Bodies. The fictional children born in this book would be nearing middle age themselves, born in the papacy of Paul VI and making their way through John Paul, Benedict, and Francis. Certainly, this “second generation” does not carry the angst of their parents over artificial birth control, which is peculiar since every pope in their lifetime—including Francis—has left Paul VI’s teaching on contraception abandoned along a lonely roadside. I attend a weekly Saturday night Mass here in the United States, in a large parish with a healthy school and lots of two and three child families who receive communion routinely. I would strongly bet against the probability that all these parents regulate their family size via the NFP method. If they are using the pill [and there is strong research to indicate that they are], then technically speaking, they are living in mortal sin. But where have you heard that anomaly preached or discussed lately, like in the past forty years? It is very likely that the second generation of children from this book’s protagonists would carry within them the same amount of stress as their parents, but their stressors may be different. Whereas their parents wrestled with the authority of a church that permeated their lives, today’s young people—at least in the U.S.—seem torn about where they belong, period. I suspect that the rise of the gender transitioning movement is one response to this lost identity. [I am not current with the mental health literature about transitioning, but I am registered for a therapists’ convention on the issues next February.] I do know that mental health distress measures among teenagers and young adults are high for mood disorders—depression, anxiety—as well as substance abuse and higher suicide rates. It would certainly be intriguing to build another novel of this sort around children born in, say, 1960, living through the church life of the latter half of the twentieth century. That generation would have lived through the loss of priests and religious, many of whom had significance on young people in earlier times. Their religious education since Vatican II—if they had any—was/is of the “gas up and go” model, consisting of Confirmation and prepackaged answers to issues still germinating in youthful minds. They have been exposed to wholesale clerical scandal in the United States and elsewhere. The closing of parishes has removed one of the few genuine watering holes for youthful community building around the home of Christ. [Remember the CYO gatherings in the church basements?] As I type this in 2023, we in the United States are struggling to stay afloat not just as parishes, but as the “salt of the earth.” Time will tell how we address that Gospel challenge. But works like Souls and Bodies remind us that the chessboard of salvation facing each generation will, to paraphrase the Gospel, “call forth new moves and old.” In The End of the Affair [1951] the Catholic novelist Graham Greene takes us into the middle of an illicit relationship and explores the moral deprivations and emotional starvations of three distinct parties—and eventually a fourth—to explore resolutions in which moral salvation, or at least something akin to it, might be retrieved and ultimately achieved. A moral twist should not be unexpected in Greene, whose own adult life was an exercise in “practicing” Catholicism in the true sense of the word “practicing,” as in trying to get it right. With that in mind, it is no surprise that this novel’s tale of moral and psychological turmoil lasts long enough to see the light of dawning salvation just below the horizon. But it is a long night, albeit a captivating one. The narrative plays out in London during and after World War II. Maurice Bendrix, a bachelor, and middling novelist approaching middle age, had been passionately engaged in an affair with a married woman, Sarah Miles. Sarah’s husband, Henry, a career British bureaucrat, was not drafted into the front lines given his government position, nor was Bendrix, who had a medical deferment. Several years after the affair ended abruptly at Sarah’s initiative--Bendrix finds himself sharing drinks with none other than Henry Miles, who confides in him his fear that his wife might be having an affair and that he is considering employing a private detective. Not unexpectedly, this revelation piques a renewed surge of interest in Sarah Miles for Bendrix for a number of reasons, not least of which is to learn who had replaced him in the affections of his former partner, and why she ended their affair in the first place. As Henry Miles broods over what to do, Bendrix himself employs the investigator, a widower named Parkis who is breaking in his 12-year-old son, Lance, to the family business, so to speak. Parkis is not cut from the Humphrey Bogart/Sam Spade cloth; his is grunt work, and there is a sadness in his personal reports to Bendrix as he describes in excessive detail the tricks of his trade, because there is no one else to tell. When Bendrix inquires about the age of Parkis’s son, the investigator replies, “Gone twelve. A youngster can be useful and costs nothing except a comic book now and then. And nobody notices him. Boys are born lingerers.” But Parkis delivers. He identifies the location of Mrs. Miles’ present-day afternoon jaunts, and he discovers and provides for Bendrix his former lover’s diary dating back to their torrid years. [Stealing the diary did not seem, well, cricket to me.] Here Greene pivots to the contents of the woman’s diary and we come to understand the powerful if impulsive reason for Sarah’s sudden departure from the relationship. It also becomes clear that her new “interest” is nothing like Maurice, but more of a catalyst for profound changes in her own life, not to mention husband, ex-lover, and even young Lance. Some years ago, pursuing my licensure as a psychotherapist, I had the opportunity to study the current literature of the 1980’s on marital affairs, and came upon several theories as to what psychological needs were met in such relationships. Greene does not psychoanalyze, but the profiles of his characters are insightful as to why each character behaves as he or she does. He does not justify the behaviors here or explain them away—Bendrix is at the core a very selfish man--but rather, he paints the emotional prisons of each player with considerable depth, such that the reader comes away with multiple faces of healing and a hope that no one’s pain or history is so bizarre as to lie beyond redemption. If this preceding paragraph has a ring of “Catholic confession” to it, this is no accident. The End of the Affair is considered by many critics to be among Greene’s most Catholic novels, so it should come as no surprise that the concluding chapters involve full blown conversions as well as minor victories of faith and decency, and even a possible miracle. [All of this notwithstanding a very cold-blooded Catholic priest in his cameo role.] It has also been said of Greene—as about a number of his English contemporary novelists—that they are most at home writing about Catholicism from the starting point of sin, as Greene certainly does here, and allowing for the graces of the Lord to manifest themselves in strange ways indeed. It is unfortunate that those of us in the Catholic tradition are, for the most part, unaware of the treasury of fictional literature from Catholic pens. The Graham Greene’s of the world are the modern-day parable spinners who wake us from complacency and show us what a heart-rending confession of sin and the gift of grace actually look like. During my daily 5-mile walk I am periodically joined by two genuine characters, Marlon James and Jake Morrissey, through the medium of their intriguing podcast, “Marlon and Jake Read Dead People” from Penguin-Random House Publishers. Marlon James is a noted Jamaican novelist now teaching at St. Francis College in New York. Jake Morrisey is senior editor for Penguin Books and Marlon’s editor to boot. Their “Dead People” podcasts are insightful exchanges about novelists who are no longer with us, and “about whom we can say anything we want.” I find them funny—in a very adult way, to be sure—as well as massively informative; each has read thousands of novels in their respective careers; Marlon has won awards for writing some. Most of all, they make me feel like a literary peasant. I have read novels recreationally throughout my life, but only since I started Catholic blogging did I take to more serious analysis of novels, particularly those by Catholic authors—and there are an amazing number of very good Catholic authors frequently cited as such by my pod-friends, who have a special love for Toni Morrison. I came to this late-in-life interest in Catholic novelists through recollections of interactions years ago with an old friend, colleague, and author Amy Welborn, [parents, catechists, general readers--check out Amy's books] who introduced me to the writing of Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964], as part of a teenaged faith formation venture, and later through author Nick Ripatrazone, whose Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction [2020] intrigued me with its fascinating collection of essays on outstanding Catholic novelists. When I reviewed Longing for an Absent God, I wrote this: “Ripatrazone has opened the door to the possibility that Catholic artists of the pen may be serving up realistic templates for Christians torn by sin and doubt and the improbable roads to God’s grace.” Flannery O’Connor had no use for Catholic fiction that was little more than covert institutional evangelizing. For her, the individual and cultural sins of her characters—their rage and violence—were the embodiment of the world’s original sin and no one needed to coin a special name for it. She pulled no punches in describing the ugliness and madness of evil and the miracle that redemption surely is. [She could be typically blunt about theology, too. At a dinner party of Catholics, she announced that “if the Eucharist is only a symbol, then the hell with it.”] Catholic fiction writers have for centuries been providing the Church with truth that rarely comes from the pulpit. Consider the satire in The Canterbury Tales, written just before 1400 A.D., which takes to task most officers of the Church for corruption, greed, or hypocrisy. Modern day Catholic novelists talk to us about the deepest mysteries of life in a way that we accept and understand, though not necessarily happily or cheerfully. Some tackle Church institutional life head on, such as J.F. Powers’ 1962 best seller, Morte d’Urban, where an inventive priest in the American Midwest tries to salvage his tired, dying order by building a luxury golf course next to the order’s ramshackle retreat house in Minnesota. Powers’ works never mentioned Vatican II, then in its planning stages as he wrote, but there is no stronger argument for the need of a reform Council in the United States than Morte d’Urban and his earlier short stories under the heading Prince of Darkness. [1947] Some of today’s greatest Catholic novelists never even mention a church or a creed in their story lines; their characters play out the sacramental mysteries that we Catholics recognize, or should recognize, because their narratives resonate with the Christian bedrocks of Incarnation and Redemption. Some authors, like Graham Greene, can have it both ways. His “Whiskey Priest” in The Power and the Glory [1940] is one of literature’s most enduring figures, but in his purely “secular” The End of the Affair [1951], my current Kindle read, the grace of God arrives in decidedly unconventional ways. My general impression is that Catholic novelists were and are a necessary antidote to the congenial façade of life that parish Catholicism often presents. Toni Morrison’s [1931-2019] literature and commentary will serve the Church for generations to come, whether the Church welcomes her literature into its pastoral-cultural life or not. Her most notable novels, particularly Beloved [1987], are civilly banned in school and/or public libraries in parts of Florida, Missouri, New York [New York!], Utah, Virginia, Oklahoma, Michigan, Tennessee, Kansas, Georgia, Idaho, Texas, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania. In a January 31, 2022, essay, Time Magazine explored the reason that the second most referenced female novelist in American colleges is targeted in so many places: “Scholars say one of the reasons Morrison’s books in particular are controversial is because they address, unabashedly…dark moments in American history that can be uncomfortable for some people to talk about. Beloved, for example, is inspired by the true story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter in 1856 to spare her from slavery.” I do understand that parents might want to protect their children from inappropriate material for which they are not prepared, and even we adults may not want to habitually hit ourselves on the head with a hammer of pain and guilt. When I was growing up, we weren’t allowed to see Brigitte Bardot movies because there was too much ooh-la-la in them, and we sure couldn’t visit Buffalo’s Palace Burlesque House, though I know some Catholic high school boys who cut out of class early for the 2 PM show. But I do not hold with Jack Nicholson’s “You Can’t Handle the Truth,” either. There are painful things in our individual and collective histories which we cannot run away from, much as we may be tempted. In my State of Florida here, there are various legislative movements to repress elements of American history that students and citizens may find disturbing. How convenient…and how dishonest. This is a curious attitude in a nation which many folks consider a “Christian Country.” Christianity is built upon memory—the annual observance of the New Passover, in which Jesus commands us to “do this in memory of me.” Those memories include grotesque crucifixion and the betrayals of Judas and Peter. We read this every year because we must—redemption is found only in the deepest contrition for sin. I heard a priest recently state from the pulpit that once we have confessed a sin in confession, the sin “disappears” from all existence, even God’s mind. This is not canonically correct, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church [paras. 1472ff.] speaks of the temporal punishment due for sins forgiven in the confessional. The Catechism expresses that all sins leave scars, and it is impossible to walk away from them, in this life, or in Purgatory where we come to full understanding of our evil choices once and for all. Not for nothing did Francis of Assisi, in the final years of his life, pray repeatedly: “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a worm, not a man.” I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved during Holy Week this year. It proved to be a remarkable examination of conscience experience, for it got me to seriously reflect upon the sinful attitudes of my own life—and of the society around me —that I live with so casually. Beloved is set in the 1855-1875 era of the United States when a large chunk of our country lived tranquilly with an economy built upon the uprooting of millions of indigenous peoples from another continent to the American shores where they would live in circumstances none of us can imagine. One of the largest slaveholding corporations in the U.S. was, regrettably, the Catholic Church, as historians are now discovering. It all made me wonder if, a century or two from now, thoughtful citizens will look back on the 2020’s and marvel at what we live with casually as our societal sin. Recently a mother who protested the assignment of Beloved to her teenaged son as part of an honors program in his school complained that the book contained, among other things, episodes of bestiality. As it turns out, I remember the circumstances of that chapter very well—it was morally appalling but not exactly for the reason the mother raised. In Morrison’s story line a young prepubescent slave girl is growing up in proximity to five older brothers who are waiting for her to mature to the point where they can each have their way with her as they wish. The author notes that as these young men burned with sexual anticipation, they satisfied their lusts with barnyard animals. The real outrage here is what would and did happen to the young girl, who had no recourse to law or custom. In fact, impregnating a slave girl or a slave woman against her will was a capital gain to the owner by increasing his holdings. The indignities of a slave’s life are nearly impossible for us to imagine, and Beloved is based upon a true story of a runaway slave who escaped to Ohio. When slave catchers discovered her, she killed her two-year-old daughter rather than let her grow up in a slave’s existence. In a commentary of the times, the mother was not found guilty of murder but of destruction of stolen property. In Morrison’s novel the child returns from the dead eighteen years later to take her place in the family in a mysterious reincarnation. In the unfolding of the story, we get an intimate portrait of slavery and its aftermath that few of us ponder—and it remains a mystery to me how anyone thought the slave system was a good idea, a sobering prompt to look at my own tolerances. And I am not the sole voice crying in the wilderness. In 2023 renewed discussion on the Doctrine of Discovery has added more attention to the grievous denial of rights and dignity of indigenous peoples on the part of the Catholic Church and the crowned heads of popes and monarchs. Morrison, who converted to Catholicism at the age of thirteen, is a prime example of an author who puts her narratives to the prophetic service of church and society. Prophets are not always welcomed and many of them, as Jesus himself noted, were killed. As Catholics, we are called to a reckoning of our past collaboration, not just with American slavery, but with the subjugation of native cultures in many sites on the globe, particularly after 1492. But in the present day we are confronted with violence—in many cases systematic and legislative—against various segments of the population on matters of sex and race. Violence against women remains endemic, for example, and it deserves a much greater hearing in Catholic moral discussions and state legislative houses when punitive assessments of abortion are discussed, for example. But sermons against such massive outrages are more often preached between the covers of insightful novelists than in any cathedral and we, as readers, own this invaluable piece of adult faith formation. It is becoming evident to me that when I opened a Café Stream on Catholic novelists, I had no idea that [1] there were and are so many Catholic novelists, and [2] there is an ongoing and heated debate in some circles of the Church about exactly what constitutes “a Catholic novel.” The late priest/sociologist/novelist Father Andrew Greeley [1928-2013] authored an excellent essay on this debate in a 2008 issue of America Magazine in his discussion of the work of Jon Hassler, author of about a dozen major novels during the second half of the twentieth century. His North of Hope [1990] is the subject of this entry’s review, but before I plunge into that, a word about defining a Catholic novel.
Father Greeley, who rarely minced words, explains the two schools of thought on the nature of a Catholic novel: “The ‘right’ contended that a novel could be called ‘Catholic’ if it presented orthodox Catholic teaching and edifying Catholic people (no “bad” priests) and was written by a “practicing” Catholic author. The ‘left’ said that any quality novel was by definition ‘Catholic,’ like James Joyce’s Ulysses.” The two authors, in my opinion, who threw the window open on expanding the definition of a “Catholic novelist” are Graham Greene [1904-1991] and Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964]. Both authors eschewed pious, conventional treatments of Catholic subjects and found their subjects in the blunt world of human sin and weakness in which God’s saving grace appears in the most unusual of circumstances. One of Greene’s most enduring characters is “the whiskey priest” in The Power and the Glory. Britannica describes Greene’s approach thusly. “The world Greene’s characters inhabit is a fallen one, and the tone of his works emphasizes the presence of evil as a palpable force. His novels display a consistent preoccupation with sin and moral failure acted out in seedy locales characterized by danger, violence, and physical decay. Greene’s chief concern is the moral and spiritual struggles within individuals, but the larger political and social settings of his novels give such conflicts an enhanced resonance. His early novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken Europe sliding toward fascism and war, while many of his subsequent novels are set in remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions, or other political upheavals.” Wikipedia provides a fine summary of O’Connor’s work. “She felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by [St. Thomas Aquinas’s] notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she did not write apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that, to her thinking, brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as open to the touch of divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. She wrote: ‘Grace changes us and the change is painful.’” Greene and O’Connor stretched the limits of both the identities and the subjects of Catholic writers and allowed future generations of Catholic writers to express themselves and their theological worldviews with a variety of brushes. One such author is Jon Hassler, who produced twelve novels between 1977 and 2005, including the work I am citing here, North of Hope [1990]. He was an English professor for many years and novelist in residence at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. I came across his body of work very recently in an essay in America Magazine this past May. America features Catholic novelists as one of its regular literary contributions and, in my view, this journal is the finest periodical for Catholic adults undertaking ongoing study of Catholicism. Hassler’s writing is not as secular as Graham Greene’s or as hardball as Flannery O’Connor’s, but he does not shy away from the grim realities of life, either. North of Hope combines tragedy and sin with the chronic malaise of clerical rectory life. Later in his life the author admits to an interviewer his penchant for “happy endings” in his novels—but I guess we all have our definitions of “happy.” Hassler spent his entire life in Minnesota, and literary scholars are beginning to recognize that the Gopher State has produced more than its share of Catholic clerical novels. When I began North of Hope a few weeks ago—it is a 500+ page novel—I had to laugh. In the past year alone, I have read three novels about troubled clerics based in Minnesota by three different authors--Morte d’Urban [1963] by J.F. Powers, North of Hope [1990] and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse [2001] by Louise Erdrich. One explanation is the influence of St. John’s University in Collegeville, the Benedictine school that excelled in English literature as well as liturgical studies. Many of you have the Collegeville Biblical study aids in your libraries. [Hassler and Powers often bumped into each other at the St. John’s library.] But to our novel, North of Hope is the story of Father Frank Healy, set in post-World War II Minnesota and extending into the 1980’s. Healy’s mother died in his childhood, and the lad is more than tended to by the housekeeper of his parish church, Eunice Pfeiffer, who is making a play to win the newly widowed Mr. Healy. Pfeiffer, tending the boy’s mother at her moment of death, reported to all that the woman’s last wish was that her son Frank become a priest. An introvert coping with maternal loss, Frank Healy progresses through high school—a very handsome, intelligent, and athletic figure but something of an enigma to his peers, and thus even more intriguing and desirable to his women classmates, none more than Libby Girard. It is Libby who brings the energy to this story, albeit in a pathological way. Desirous of Frank as both a lover and a protector from her abusive father, Libby makes her play for Frank in a way that forces him to fish and cut bait on his decision to enter the college seminary. When Libby makes her final desperate play for Frank—pursuing him to his new home, the college seminary, of all places—he keeps her at arm’s length and she begins her long dolorous adulthood through three highly dysfunctional marriages and a severely troubled bipolar daughter, Verna. There is a long break in the narrative, and we pick up Frank [now Father Frank] and Libby in a most unlikely setting, as neighbors in the Basswood Native American Reservation. Several Amazon reviewers criticized this quarter-century gap as disruptive to the rhythm of the work. On one level I agree: we learn precious little about Frank except that he was ordained and immediately assigned to teach math at an exclusive Catholic academy, where he spent the first quarter century of his priesthood. When the academy closed, and after a brief stint at the Cathedral parish where he developed panic attacks while preaching, Frank receives the bishop’s reluctant permission to rediscover his priesthood in the poorest throes of his diocese. On the other hand, this gap in the narrative sets the stage for Libby, now working as a nurse at the reservation health center with her third husband, a seedy physician, to unfold her life’s narrative to Frank in a series of episodic crises prompted by Libby’s [and Verna’s] lifetime of trauma, poor choices, and in Libby’s case, likely undiagnosed major depression. She makes repeated and more open appeals to Frank to leave the priesthood and pick up the relationship she remembered from high school days. To his credit, Frank, who is in the throes of depression and midlife identity crisis himself, is able to save Libby from her worst self as her life continues to unravel in a series of shocking revelations and criminal conspiracies. To focus on the plot exclusively, though, does not do justice to the full work. The bulk of this novel pivots around grimy reservation life and dysfunctional rectory life, each with a culture all its own. The story is peppered with colorful “parish people” who alternately humor and infuriate us. Frank lives with an ineffectual pastor Father Adrian, a monsignor whose life as a pastor and chancellor of the diocese was marked by extraordinary mediocrity but a private, charming piety. Playing out the string, the old pastor has few friends in the diocese, but Frank finds him a comforting presence. As the novel reaches its climax, Father Adrian demonstrates an unexpected energy of tolerance and understanding that contributes to the plot resolution. On the other hand, there is the rectory’s housekeeper, Mrs. Tatzig. If you have ever watched an episode of “Father Brown” from British TV, you have a decent representation of the power of rectory housekeepers, at least in recent history. In a J.F. Powers short story, “The Prince of Darkness,” [1947] an aging assistant pastor prays for a pastorate so that he might install his mother in the position before she is too old. In our story here, Mrs. Tatzig lives in the rectory and assumes the care of the old monsignor, particularly after his heart attack. Mrs. T. does not take to Father Frank. His drinking and his preoccupation with Libby obviously do not sit well with her, but his main transgression against her is his penchant for playing cards close to the vest. She cannot read him. Libby’s crises finally disrupt rectory life, and certainly the housekeeper’s, but in this madness Frank comes to realize that his stoic and blunted interpersonal style may indeed be hurtful to Mrs. T., and he takes her into his confidence about the gravity of the crises around them. It is a subtle indication that Frank the priest is finally learning about himself, to the degree that there might be hope for his priestly vocation. Caesar Pipe gives us a flavor of reservation life and ambiguity. Pipe draws half of his salary from his position as president of the tribe, the other half as local law enforcement officer. His laissez faire approach to the law component allows a significant drug operation to prosper among his brethren by blood. He has a basic contempt for white men, particularly their habit of fishing through holes in the ice. He is nominally Catholic, but he believes Father Frank’s daunting effort of saving the reservation church is a fool’s errand. While the novel does not wrap up in a Pollyanna happy conclusion, most of its human trajectories appear more hopeful. Even the bishop reluctantly decides to keep the reservation church open with Father Frank at its helm and Father Adrian and Mrs. Tatzig in support. While not a classic, North of Hope is a good summer read that conveys how a church of fallible beings can still rise to the occasion in time of crisis. I see that the recent movie “Father Stu” was less than successful at the box office, which makes the following post even harder to believe. But in 1963 J.F. Powers [1917-1999] won the National Book Award for Fiction for his Morte d’Urban, a tale of a Midwest religious order priest who wins followers for his order’s ramshackle retreat house by building a championship golf course. Powers was a layperson, but he knew the clerical landscape and the language of priest-talk to a stunning degree. I lived in a religious order for a quarter-century; this work is close to home.
* * * * * * The very title of the book invokes the specter of decline, most obviously in reference to Father Urban Roche himself, a 1950’s master preacher and fundraiser for his [fictional] Midwest religious order the Clementines, a group outstanding for “exactly nothing,” as Urban knowingly puts it. Based in Chicago, Father Urban radiates through the Midwest and the Great Lakes region moving parish throngs to piety and generosity through his retreats and missions. He does much of his best work over long dinners with rich Catholics and blue pencils his sermons in fine hotels. By his own estimate he had five truly talented confreres in his order. The rest were nondescripts kept afloat by his efforts, but regrettably for him some of those lesser stars had been elected to positions of leadership in his community, to the detriment of the Church, to be sure, but particularly to Urban himself. The homebound harbor jealousy of the sort-of-rich and sort-of-famous. It occurred to me that the story of the fictional Father Urban is set in the late 1950’s, while the famous American Trappist monk and spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, was in his prime. Powers would certainly know of Merton. Merton’s name never appears in the novel, but he and Urban are cut from the same cloth. Both lived their vows in a fashion that suited them while doing much good for the Church and their orders. Urban was chaste, to be sure. But poverty and obedience he played like a Stradivarius, though it is hard to get too angry with his shortcomings. In the Church of his day, many were quite forgivable. For despite his liking for five-star hotels and smooth scotch he is a gentleman missionary, too, and something of a pastoral visionary for the postwar United States Church. He obtains for his order a prime piece of downtown street level Chicago real estate which he envisioned as a religious/cultural think tank for professionals and intellectuals, where the best philosophical and theological texts and journals are featured and noted international scholars would lecture and lead discussions among the GI-Bill graduates of Catholic colleges. To his dismay, the Clementines decide upon old seminary castoff décor with a library of its inhouse publications and devotionals instead [“Ask Father Clem’ pamphlets], material we seminarians of the 1960’s would have referred to as “pious drivel.” Urban comes to a crossroad of his own when his provincial pulled him off the road and reassigned him to “the newest white elephant” of the order [p. 25], a ramshackle property in rural Minnesota destined to become a retreat center. To be sure, there is a personal twist of the knife in this assignment—it was delivered by letter, not in person, and Urban, for all his ministerial gifts, was placed under the command of a local superior, Father Wilfrid, a living, breathing proof that Catholic institutional life was not immune to The Peter Principle. The Conversion of the White Elephant, which is the setting for most to the narrative, is a testimony to the many talents and mysteries of Father Urban, who begins his exile as essentially an aging day laborer mishandling tools on tasks that a local skilled professional could have dispatched at a minimum of time and cost. Wilfred never advanced to that next administrative maxim, that “time is money,” nor to the idea that Urban and the other priest-handymen might be more profitable to the project if they were released for weekend work in nearby parishes offering Masses, hearing confessions, and talking up the retreat project. Urban’s mood during this period ranges from sardonic to philosophical. It took every ounce of self-control to eat the steady diet of fish from a backwater pond on the property [“a fisherman’s paradise” according to Father Clem’s pamphlets] or to endure the cold in his room, given Wilfred’s refusal to heat that wing of the building. [“But you refuse to wear long underwear, Father Urban!”] For a time, there is a battle of wits between Urban and his superior, until Urban subtly plants the seed in Wilfred’s mind that if the Clementine priests [namely Urban] cannot circulate in the diocese, the Jesuits will soon usurp the apostolic landscape, or at least this chilly quadrant of Minnesota. And so it happened that Urban became a local diocesan player and, at the request of the bishop, served as a substitute pastor for a growing parish while doing what he did best, selling the community on the Clementine retreat venture while at the same time angling for a promising sinecure as permanent pastor of a growing parish. He is successful in the former, but not so much in the latter. [“For a traveling retreat master, you seem to enjoy parish work a great deal,” said the bishop without smiling in the presence of one of his own men.] The retreat house enjoys numerical success in terms of retreatants, but financial wizard that he is, Urban realizes that the retreat house will not sustain itself with its steady stream of blue-collar Catholic men. As he explains to Wilfred, the retreat center needs more affluent Catholic businessmen, the type who like to pray…and play golf. Urban has been scheming with his primary high roller benefactor to purchase a large tract of land adjacent to the retreat center, and this respectable course is finished in time for the late spring. The golfing venture is highly successful and, not surprisingly, attracted a sizeable number of local clergy including the bishop himself, whose gaze across the Clementine compound inspired thoughts of a diocesan seminary. Meanwhile, the Clementines themselves, seeing the transformation of the White Elephant, and looking for a leader in the mold of the newly elected John XXIII, turned to Urban to lead them into the next decade. By the time Urban received word of his election, he was dead—not quite physically, as that would have been too kind. Matters having come to a head—literally and figuratively—during a round of golf with the bishop, the man of the world gradually withdrew from it into a cloud of pain, fatigue, illness, and confusion. Without the old Urban, the Clementines of the Midwest watched their property and their relevance, such as it was, dissolve under the crushing weight of a modern Church and a modern America. Not even the five competent Clementines understood the true nature of this paradigm shift, and they blamed Urban, bitterly, for what was befalling them. * * * * * * I was going to attempt an analysis of what precisely the author was trying to achieve here, but I came across an excellent essay on “Morte d’Urban” by Kevin Spinale in America from 2014 which, along with some thoughtful reader posts, summarizes better than I could the complexities of this novel and its meaning for the Church and the priesthood. I recommend the America essay, but I particularly recommend this book. |
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