The Catholic novel: fact or fiction?

Is there such a thing as the Catholic novel?" Tricky question. My qualifications for addressing it boil down to two: I'm a practicing novelist--although that's not how I make my living (I'm a political and corporate speechwriter); and I'm a practicing Catholic, though the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith might require a retraction or qualification of certain opinions before it would license me, formally, to use that label.

When examined more closely, however, those two qualifications, thin to begin with, become even less substantial. I don't spend much time thinking about being a novelist, Catholic or otherwise. I did, in the beginning, when I wanted to find out what it took to be one. I read two books on the subject. The first was by an Englishman whose name I've forgotten. It was titled, I think, On Becoming a Novelist. In the opening chapter, the author posited that it was unwise for aspiring novelists to be encumbered by a spouse, children, or a full-time job. Since I was happily encumbered with all three, I didn't bother reading the rest of the book.

The second book was by John Gardner, a novelist (Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues) whose work I admire and respect. The essay was called On Moral Fiction (1978). Gardner left me so confused about the substance of moral fiction and how it was written that I thought maybe I should try my hand at "immoral fiction"--as a pre-Vatican II educated Irish Catholic I was sure it would mainly consist of elaborate descriptions of raunchy sex. For that same reason, I was fearful I wouldn't be any good at it.

The end result of consulting these books was that I concentrated on writing speeches, making a living, being a father and husband, and reading fiction rather than attempting to write it. Eventually, I became a novelist the same way I became a Catholic, not through study, reflection, and pondering on what it meant, but through a moment's grace, a subliminal calling, a sudden turn (a conversion?) that left me utterly convinced of something that up until that moment I'd held ever so tenuously.

I had what I think is among the most ordinary religious conversions in the history of the Catholic Church. (Some might argue it wasn't a conversion at all, but a reversion.) I was born into a devout Irish American family. My college-educated parents were extremely loyal to the faith and attentive to its practice, while skeptical about the hierarchy to a remarkable degree (given the fact that this was during the fifties). I attended Catholic schools in the Bronx from kindergarten through college--Saint Raymond's Grammar School, Manhattan Prep, Manhattan College--to the last stages of study for a Ph.D. at Fordham.

In 1967, with conscious intent and a sense of self-liberation, I stopped going to Mass and decided that Catholicism was a rapidly disintegrating relic of a vanished stage of European civilization and, before long, would be a curiosity in a category with Zorastrianism. I was no more attracted to any other faith than Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist, who upbraided a friend for supposing that his abandonment of Catholicism implied an embrace of Protestantism. "`I said that I had lost my faith,' Stephen said, `but not that I had lost my self-respect.'"

My decision to be a Catholic Christian began with a re-appreciation of religious experience. This was spurred by weekly attendance at an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Kansas City while I spent a year there as a vista volunteer teaching adult education. Several years later, historical studies gave me a fuller appreciation of the complexity and richness of Catholic culture and thought. I was content at this point to think of myself as a "cultural Catholic," interested in the influence and integral role of Catholicism on Western culture but uninvolved in its practice as a living faith. Then, in a New York moment--I'm not kidding, I was waiting impatiently for a long-overdue bus--something happened.

I was looking up at the windows of the apartment building across the way. I was thinking about all the different lives being lived behind them, each convinced of its own significance, each caught up in tragedies and joys that were of no consequence to the universe, that were laughable in their sheer smallness and would be quickly obliterated by death and swallowed in the immense, amoral indifference of the cosmos.

In the time it took to turn and step onto the bus, I was convinced otherwise. No lights parting clouds or angelic voices. No sudden grasp of a logical argument I hadn't understood. No De profundis in the style of Gerald Manley Hopkins, "I did say yes / O at lightning and lashed rod." Just this, felt for the first time "in the deep heart's core": the certainty that Jesus isn't a prophet, a moral teacher, a saint, history's greatest holy man, but the living Christ, present in every moment of time, equally, always, and as real as the cold sensation in my hand of the metal handrail, the coins and tokens clanging at that moment into the fare box, the wide, brown, handsome face of the bus driver.