A couple of years ago, I was looking for a printable version of Hemingway’s story, “The Killers,” originally published in 1927 in Scribner’s. What I found was a reproduction of the original, all the better because it had illustrations.
Adding to the experience was the discovery of the piece that directly followed it. It’s an essay by one Grace Hausmann Sherwood called “A Catholic Laywoman’s View-Point.”
Sherwood, from my brief research, wrote a couple of books – one a volume of poetry, and the other, a history of a religious order.
I’m going to type out the introduction and then just toss up images of the rest of the piece here. It’s a bit scattered – it seems in part to be a general apologetic for the seemingly counter-cultural aspects of Catholicism as well as an explanation for the role of women in Catholicism. I think anyone who’s interested in Catholicism, religious history, social history and women in religion will find it useful.
It’s also a helpful antidote to the caricature of pre-Vatican II Catholicism as a closed, inner-looking system, Sherwood frequently points to analogies and subversive justification for Catholic practices and beliefs in other faiths and in the secular world, and has no problem in saying, for example, that a Catholic woman is bound by beliefs that seem strange and unnecessary to other women, “as good and often much better Christians than herself..”
And of course, most interesting – and depressing for the current moment – of all is that there was actually a time in which it was perfectly normal for a major, national, popular magazine’s pages to lead directly from stories by Ernest Hemingway to an essay by a religiously observant woman explaining her faith.
Note: you can find the Scribner’s issue here. I’ve reproduced the introduction below, and then given you images of the piece if you don’t want to head over to Google Books.
And before you read – just note how little has changed from her description of the “spiritual commentary” landscape – whose voices are heard? the modernist, the fundamentalist, the layman who has just discovered the things of the spirit for the first time and the minister who is about to give them up…..
At a time like this when our foremost magazines carry almost invariably with each issue one article about religion and sometimes more than one: when even the American Mercury, edited by that famous scoffer, Henry Mencken, falls into line with the publication not so long ago of an article with the significant title: “A New God for America,” it seems not improbable to me that the view-point of the Catholic laywoman might interest the general reader.
For among the many voices which have been heard in this modern pulpit of the printed page, among the modernist, the fundamentalist, the layman who has just discovered the things of the spirit for the first time and the minister who is about to give them up because he has lost his faith in them, the man who thinks that Christ’s example is the only religion needed anywhere and the woman who would offer us Buddha as a substitute for Christ, the missionary’s note-book from some outpost of civilization and the gropings after spirituality of the man in the street—among all these the Catholic woman has been silent. What she thinks of her religion, how she feels about its practices as they relate to her and to her children, how full her share in spiritual things can be in a church governed entirely by men, and by men, at that, without wives, has not been told—if I have kept track of the argument and affirmation, the glimpses of mysticism, the discovery of prayer as a personal necessity, the hunger for spiritual insight, the longing for a definite way to enter upon the spiritual life which has surged like a tide through the pages of our better magazines for months or, rather, years.
Charlotte was Both 