The Diary of a Country Priest [1936]

It has been a while since a review of a Catholic work of fiction appeared in a Café post. I have had Georges Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest [1936] in my queue for a while but given its vintage and French setting, I put off reading the original till last month, in English of course. [Actually, I read it twice.] Throughout my adult life I have seen references to this work in Catholic publications, but in prepping for this post I realized how widely acclaimed both the book and the movie it inspired in 1951 served as inspirations for the literary and particularly the film establishment: Francois Truffaut, Igmar Bergman and Martin Scorcese, among others. The late reviewer Roger Ebert judged the movie version as one of the two greatest Catholic movies of all time. [The other was “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”]
 
The author, Georges Bernanos [1888-1948], weathered a brief stay in a seminary and later served with his French compatriots in World War I and, like many a writer before and since, worked some years in business as an insurance adjustor before finding himself in a position in which to write. Bernanos was a lifelong Catholic—two of his novels are built around fictitious priests--but his biographers record that Bernanos was a thoughtful man of strong opinion. It seems that he viewed his country with disdain as growing weaker in multiple senses of the word. It does help to remember that France had endured massive suffering during “The War to End All Wars” and, like many nations, suffered through the Depression. Bernanos’ judgment of his society did not overlook the Catholic Church.
 
The Diary of a Country Priest does not reflect the previous centuries’ longstanding regard of France as “The Daughter of the Church.” The book is set in a small town, Ambricourt, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, or think they do. Parish priests were regarded as caretakers for sacramental emergencies—last rites and funerals, for examples. Catholics were leaving the French Church in the 1930’s and probably before; the sole Catholic Church in Ambricourt had one attendee at its daily morning Mass. It is a curious thing that the tragic hero of this work, the Cure or pastor, is not mentioned by name in the work except as “the Cure.”
 
We meet “The Cure” as a young priest assigned to his first parish. One wonders how he passed the seminary votation for ordination. He was not a well man to begin with; his health, in fact, is a major motif of the novel. He dines on toast and wine, the only foods he can seem to hold down. He suffers from anxious rumination about his moral soul and the state of his parish, which seem to justify for him his direct confrontations with parishioners on their sins and lifestyle in a manner we might not embrace today.
 
All the same, he is more of an evangelizer than one might think. Upon arrival to his parish, he discovers that there were no programs for the youth. He is thrilled to have the opportunity to teach catechism to the minor children, but the teenagers—particularly the boys—are disruptive and disrespectful. The Cure did not have enough confidence to challenge them, and the program dissolved. He also attempted to establish a sports program for the youth, but that too failed, from local opposition. One can deduce that the town wanted only the “necessary” contact with their Cure. But even the “necessary” contact wasn’t always enough—his primary care physician commits suicide.
 
There are two characters pivotal to the book. The first is Mme la Comtesse [Madame Contesse], the pinnacle of high society in Ambricourt. The Cure, too inexperienced to tread cautiously, bulls ahead with a strong admonition of Madame Contesse’s religious outlook, which misses the mark by many kilometers. His ill-advised interventions prove to be disastrous to her and her family while bringing scrutiny to the priest from his bishop.
 
The other character worthy of note is an older colleague of the young priest, the Cure de Torcy. An apparently successful pastor taking those gentle steps into retirement years, Torcy—who came from money—has carved a niche for himself which includes a hearty table and a bankers’ hours schedule of pastoring. Our cure is unable to conceal his true disdain for Torcy’s approach to parochial ministry, which gives the latter the opportunity for lengthy diatribes against the younger priest’s overwork, scant diet, naivete, and spiritual dilemmas. And yet the two men meet, often, it seems, at the younger man’s initiative. Torcy explains to him that “a true priest is never loved, get that into your head.” Some of this sarcastic advice must have penetrated, for our young curate demonstrates a measure of growing wisdom as he faces his own physical deterioration.
 
HOW DO WE INTERPRET THIS BOOK?
 
If you Google reactions of this work among Catholics, you find readers moved and inspired. Catholic readers seem to admire the dedication of the priest who, despite his frail physical, mental, and pastoral shortcomings, endures long enough to open the doors to divine consolation. I expanded to AI, which begins thus: “Catholic reviewers tend to read The Diary of a Country Priest as a work of spiritual theology and sanctity, while secular reviewers usually approach it as a psychological, existential, or stylistic achievement. The contrast is striking: Catholics emphasize grace, suffering, and vocation; secular critics emphasize alienation, modernity, and literary craft.” Bernanos brought together religious and secular readers who approached the book from clearly different vantage points, and if sales are any indication, the trend continues to this day.
 
The secular reaction, so to speak, is intriguing. The Diary of a Country Priest was written in 1936, concurrent with the rise of a philosophy called “Existentialism.” Existentialists were [and are] the opposite of universalists. In the existentialist world, we live by a force of dignified courage in the face of an abstract/absurd world. One could hardly be faulted for embracing such a philosophy in the utter breakdown of European society during an era of two World Wars and the Holocaust, tragedies that organized religion—notably Catholicism—had no answers or energies to address. Interestingly, although the name Jean Paul Sartre is most often associated with existentialism, one of its premier original thinkers and writers was the Catholic convert, Gabriel Marcel. Marcel, who died in 1973, had considerable intellectual and artistic influence upon the young Karol Józef Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II. We forget, too, that many of the bishops who attended Vatican II [1962-1965] were coming of age in the era of The Diary of a Country Priest and would face as clerics the indescribable chaos of World War, in the very countries where the battles raged.
 
How much the existential environment of France affected Georges Bernanos is, of course, hard to say precisely. The Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a biography of Bernanos in which he describes the author as “a deeply prayerful, practicing sacramental Catholic whose profound love for the Church made everything he created or wrote an ‘ecclesial existence that has been given form: existence derived not merely from an abstract, individual faith but from the faith of the Church.’ That said, Bernanos’ characters seem to address the existential question with considerable ambiguity in his novel—the Cure fighting day and night to save souls whether they wanted salvation or not, and Torcy, having cashed in his clerical chips, raging at his young cleric to save himself for the long fight. Perhaps the staying power of this novel is the eternal question of why are we here in the first place?
 
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Georges Bernanos was a prolific author and playwright. Amazon markets a number of his works and plays in French and English. I have ordered Georges Bernanos: A Study of the Man and the Writer [1973] by Robert Speaight, but there are other titles available for those so inclined.