Catholic Identity in Literature

Background

The North American experience of Catholicism is tempered by the fact that English-speaking North America’s major spiritual impulses were Northern European, Protestant, and anti-Catholic. By the time of the emergence of distinct American immigrant identities in the late nineteenth century, Roman Catholicism in North America had almost ceased to be regarded as a mainstream faith. Literature focusing on Catholicism tended to be as marginalized as the North American Catholics. Many works that treat Catholicism, then, also treat ethnicity and culture, including that of the immigrant. For example, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (1935), set in Depression-era Chicago, and Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah (1956), detailing the rise and fall of an Irish Catholic Boston politician, are typical Roman Catholic ethnicity fictions, nearly a genre in their own right.

Often, an author whose works might be regarded as Catholic is categorized differently. For example, early twentieth century author Willa Cather, who utilizes Catholic themes and settings in works such as Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931), is more likely to be found categorized as a frontier novelist, because of her locales, or as a woman author.

Ernest Hemingway was a convert to Roman Catholicism for the sake of an early marriage, and many of his novels and stories are set in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. Hemingway may, if one wishes, be categorized as belonging to a survey of Catholicism in literature, but he seldom is. Jake Barnes, the protagonist of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), openly professes his Roman Catholicism and clearly suggests that his faith informs his response to the world and others, even if he is not necessarily a churchgoer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was Roman Catholic by birth, hardly touches upon religious matters of any sort in his fictions. His novels, such as The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), however, address topics of considerable moral weight. The playwright Eugene O’Neill makes no secret of his Irish Catholic background in the autobiographical work Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). The mother’s Catholicism in the play is an aspect of her crippled spirituality. Ironically, the most Catholic of American authors, in the sense that he espouses a Catholic point of view in works of spiritual theme, is not always regarded as either American or Catholic. T. S. Eliot, an American who became a British citizen and a Catholic, beginning with Ash Wednesday (1930) and concluding with Four Quartets (1943), explores on an intensely personal level the universal qualities of spiritual yearning.

The Twentieth Century

Two events in the 1960s brought changes in the general public’s perception of the Catholic identity. First, Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy’s successful campaign for the presidency in 1960 finally defused a long-standing tradition of anti-Catholicism in American life. Second, beginning in 1962, the Second Vatican Council initiated reforms in the Catholic church. These reforms had great influence on social and cultural aspects of the Catholic identity. The Church sought to make its teachings more in tune with the moral crises and social realities of the postindustrial, materialist cultures that dominated the twentieth century. These reforms resulted in alterations in the stereotype of Catholics as archaic, dogmatic individuals. One may cite J. F. Powers’s Morte d’Urban (1962) as a turning point in North American Catholic literature. In its gentle, realistic satire of a Roman Catholic priest, the novel presents Catholic life in America as mainstream, not as part of ethnic literature only. Father Urban Roche, the main character, also helps defeat stereotypes of Catholics simply by not partaking of them. In the novels of Andrew Greeley, a Roman Catholic priest who writes about Roman Catholic priests, the issues of conflict between faith and worldliness take on, as they do in Powers’s work, a wide cultural appeal. Greeley’s novels, such as The Cardinal Sins (1981) and The Brother’s Wife (1982) have been best-sellers.

Challenges to Faith

The general breakdown of religious faith seems to be a hallmark of twentieth century literature. In works such as Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins (1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) and Brian Moore’s Catholics (1972), a time is envisioned in which the sacramental nature of the Church has been forgotten.

Other writers, concerned with the secularism of the twentieth century, have made Catholicism a symbol for religious faith in general. In Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story,” the protagonist’s Catholicism becomes a metaphor for all faith. On the other hand, the sendup of Roman Catholicism in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) stands as a satire of religious fraud in general. His characters often fail to find religious experience, even when it is right before their eyes. Faith in Christ, rather than Catholicism specifically, is often the concern in the works of Flannery O’Connor. A reader of her two novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), if unfamiliar with O’Connor’s Catholic background, may imagine them an outgrowth of a Southern evangelical and Fundamentalist experience. Southern Fundamentalist culture shaped O’Connor’s identity and her vision, but her works may be read from the perspective of her Roman Catholic beliefs in the sacramental presence of God. O’Connor’s fictions are, ultimately, nothing but Catholic.

Implications for Identity

It is not very likely that Roman Catholicism will benefit much from emphasis on fostering a respect for multiculturalism in American society, since Catholicism has become perceived as Eurocentric and patriarchal. Catholicism is, perhaps, representative of the cultural status quo, which is undergoing challenge and revision. The acceptance of cultural pluralism and inclusionary studies, however, should lead the extensive body of literature defining American Catholic identity to be recognized for its contributions to the American identity.

Bibliography

Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. U of California P, 1994.

Friedman, Melvin J., ed. The Vision Obscured: Perceptions of Some Twentieth Century Catholic Novelists. Fordham UP, 1970.

Gandolfo, Anita. Testing the Faith: The New Catholic Fiction in America. Greenwood Press, 1992.

Gioia, Dana. "The Catholic Writer Today" First Things, Dec. 2013, www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/the-catholic-writer-today. Accessed 23 Aug. 2019.

Hren, Joshua. "Can Catholic Literature Build on Its Rich Heritage?" America Magazine, 23 Oct. 2018, www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2018/10/23/can-catholic-literature-build-its-rich-heritage. Accessed 23 Aug. 2019.

Kellogg, Jean. The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period of Convergence. Loyola UP, 1970.

Messbarger, Paul R. Fiction with a Parochial Purpose: Social Use of American Catholic Literature, 1884–1900. Boston UP, 1971.

Ryan, James Emmett. Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in Literary Culture, 1844–1931. U of Wisconsin P, 2013.