As I mentioned, I read three Brian Moore novels last week. I want to spend a bit of time on Catholics.
As most of you probably know, Catholics is Moore’s novel published in 1972, so just a few years after the end of the Council, set in an indeterminate future – after a Vatican IV, as a matter of fact – in which a youngish with-it priest is sent to shut down, once and for all, the last traditional Mass still being said – by a group of monks whose monastery is on an island of the coast of Ireland. It was one of the first – if not the first – made-for-television movies, starring Trevor Howard and Martin Sheen.
I edited a version of it published in the Loyola Classics series years ago, but you can get other editions – and you can even read it free online via archive.org. It’s very short – really a novella.
Readers tend to focus, naturally enough, on the liturgy and church politics and Moore’s seemingly prescient take on the ecclesiastical scene, and I’ll get to that in a moment, for it’s quite interesting.
But first, let’s talk about faith. For faith and the loss of it is Moore’s interest, one that pops up in most of his novels in one form or another. After I read those three novels last week, I though a bit about that, and compared him to other Catholic and Catholic-ish novelists who also focused on faith struggles – which is most of them, because, you know – fiction requires drama and tension, and what greater drama or deeper tension is there?
I decided, though, that there’s a difference between Moore’s take and what we find, say, in Greene. It seems to me that Greeneland presupposes that the object of faith actually exists, and our protagonists are always doing battle with Him – where our sympathies lie is up to us, but it does seem that Greene’s faith-tormented characters don’t actually doubt what’s ultimately real and true – they reject and they fight it (like Greene himself) and then at some point are put in a position in which they have to make a choice about it.
Moore’s strugglers are different. They are trying to believe, or more often, just not believing at all even though they are assumed to be – in something that is probably not true anyway. It is like we are watching mental patients trying to be healed or sad hypocrites plodding along, too cowardly to live out the truth.
So it is with Catholics. The plot twist (stop reading if you don’t want to know) is that the abbot of the monastery that is holding on the traditional ways has, unbeknownst to anyone, completely lost his faith. It happened at Lourdes, when he saw all the great suffering coming with great faith, hoping for healing, and leaving, apparently just the same as when they arrived.
Nonetheless, he has kept on, holding it together in the monastery and, when put on the spot, defending his monks’ holding on to the old ways – for a while.
So there’s that.
But what I wanted to highlight for you were a couple of conversations from Catholics about faith and authority. I thought they were quite applicable to the present moment. Eerily so.
I think what I’m going to do is just share the pertinent pages. The themes that struck me are, in the first passage, the irony (Moore likes irony, but who doesn’t?) of the liberal priest representing the liberal church being a heresy-hunter, with implicit being the question – if everything is okay, how can anything, including this Mass – be forbidden? Why is this not okay if everything else is? Not to speak of the irony – against implicit – of earnestly talking about “unity.”
(If you click “open image in a new tab” – a larger version will pop up.)
Secondly is the question of authority and obedience. Kinsella is the young enforcer priest, he’s met resistance and strong arguments, but he goes to bed, confident, nonetheless, because he’s come from Rome and so he’s got authority and obedience on his side. The last refuge, even when none of the arguments make sense – even for the most self-proclaimed open-minded among us. The issue is urgent because there’s an apparent dialogue opening with the Buddhists that the continued existence of this Mass complicates. So in the name of openness, authority will be asserted.
Like I said: prescient.