It’s been well over a decade now since people began to murmur about a renaissance of Catholic literature. A great deal of progress has been made in that time, from the establishment of journals and publishing houses (Dappled Things remains a trailblazer; we’re a good bit more than a decade old), to the emergence of too many talented novelists and poets to list. As Joseph Pearce recently pointed out in The Imaginative Conservative, the piece of the puzzle that’s still missing is the patrons. The great writing is out there. It’s the audience that is proving elusive.
But as the movement of Catholic literature has grown, it faces another problem, which is that so many people had the same idea around the same time—to foster the growth of Catholic literature—that the various groups working toward this goal often do not know the others exist. Sometimes, they even unknowingly step on each others’ toes. For example, on September 19-21 of this year, you can attend the Catholic Imagination Conference at Loyola University in Chicago, or, on September 20-22, you can join the Catholic Writers Guild Online Conference… but you can’t do both. A little cross-pollination between the groups might result in better planning and a healthier literary culture.
This is only one example of a frustrating trend I’ve been observing for years now. From Facebook groups and blogs to conferences and guilds, the Catholic writers are getting together, but only in niche groups that often seem to operate in vacuums. You can find the high-end literary folks in one place, the sci-fi aficionados in another, the poets here, the devotional writers there, the YA writers here, the people who struggle with faith but still identify as Catholic over there… Many groups are inclusive, in the sense that they welcome all sorts of different voices, but there’s still such a multiplicity that no one can keep up with them all.
All of this is good. The more, the merrier, and it’s always been true that birds of a feather flock together. Writers need support from other writers who understand their voices and perspectives. Also, the more outlets there are for finding some kind of entrée into Catholic literature, the more people will come in. Multiplicity is beautiful. But it can also be divisive.
One solution is to rally the troops around a central organization. The Catholic Writers Guild already exists. It’s small and imperfect, but the groundwork for a real professional guild is there, and the more people who join (and volunteer!), the better able it will be to serve. But beyond that, I see a real need for all of us to reach out—to leave our comfort zones, forget our preconceived notions of what a Catholic Literary Renaissance ought to look like, and explore what it really is. Those from traditional publishing backgrounds need to read self-published books, and vice versa. The academics need to talk the less scholarly among us, and the less scholarly need to appreciate and understand the work of academics. Those who are hosting conferences need to include voices that don’t sound like Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, and those whose work is less traditional need to appreciate and understand tradition.
I’m aware that this proposal is vague. That’s partly because I don’t have anything more concrete to offer right now, and partly because my aim is to foster a much longer conversation. Please, join in. Use the comments box below, or bring this question out to whichever groups you belong to and propose it there. We are all the Body of Christ. Some may be called as teachers, others as apostles, others as poets, others to write children’s books, or literary criticism, or fantasy, or memoirs. But we are all one body, and without the least of our parts, we will falter. Let’s find each other in charity and work together in Christ.
Thanks for quickly putting together some coherent thoughts on a frustration shared by many, including myself. Catholicism naturally embraces all of the diversity present in Catholic arts and artists. I think what we’re lacking is the cohesive force that unites that diversity. In the faith, belief and worship unite. In the arts, beyond belief and worship, we are like toddlers – acting alongside one another, but rarely WITH one another.
I’d love for the Catholic Writers Guild, of which I’ve been a member for probably 6-7 years now, to be THE place for Catholic writers to gather. The ease and speed of modern communication should facilitate such coordination, but it often seems that instead, it’s created a multiplicity of voices, many residing in their own echo chambers.
Thanks, Carolyn. You hit the nail on the head: outside of worship, it’s hard to find the unifying force.
Well said! Unity in the diversity has always been a good principle to follow, especially now that the Catholic Church is going through difficult times, it is the moment to show the multifaceted, rich, but at the same time unified face of our faith. Nothing evolves without change, even if that change is painful. Catholic writing should not be the exception, should be the example of the beauty that comes from diversity of genres.
Thanks, Desiree. You’re absolutely right that the difficult times make it even more important to be able to come together.
Unless it’s a hurricane, right Karen?
That’s just a topic that should be left untouched (damn you, Walker).
Why did you turn off comments on that post?
You clearly missed his point.
To take the position that suffering should be avoided at all costs leads to the kind of life Percy warned against. To act as if Katrina was a divine whoops also neglects that through profound suffering meaning can be found. And your protestations aside: pain and despair break many out of the ‘everydayness’ they find themselves in.
Or should only mild pains be used for that? The stubbing of one’s toe?
On this website, comments are automatically turned off on all posts after a certain period of time to help prevent spam. Suffering is not to be avoided “at all costs,” nor was Katrina a divine whoops. What I object to in Percy’s portrayal is that he romanticizes suffering.
When I began serving as President of the Catholic Writers Guild, I took time to watch it work and found, after a year, what I thought were the root problems. These were organizational problems — the kinds of growing pains that any non-profit experiences as it increases in size. Now three years in, I’ve come to a different conclusion. Deeper in, beneath administrative issues and financial issues, there’s an ontological question that needs to be answered, a question of identity.
The Guild needs to answer this question, as well as each writer and the Catholic literary world as a whole. It obtains in circles both larger and smaller than ours. The question is the very fundamental, and very Catholic question: who am I?
When there are arguments abounding online about what makes someone “Catholic”, it is unsurprising that there are also debates over what makes someone a “Catholic writer”. At first glance, it appears that any answer that pleases one half offends the other.
I have, within days of each other, received letters from people leaving the Guild both because we are too isolated and too worldly, because we are too visibly Catholic and not visibly Catholic enough. The two letters, from disappointed former members, were nearly exact opposites in everything but tone. We have a serious problem of identity.
Thank you for taking the time to comment, Joe. The two letters you mentioned — first, what a depressing day that must have been, and second, yes, what a difficult task the Catholic literary community faces in creating its identity when there are such extremes of opinion. Of course, it’s neither feasible nor necessary to please everyone. But I do think the sort of niche, echo-chamber behaviors we sometimes see among the various types of writers are a symptom of holding too tightly to an identity that is far too narrow. The Church is big enough to hold every culture, language, genre, or category we can dream up. As we ponder the question of who we are, it is imperative that we allow God to lead us outside of what is safe and familiar. If we cling too tightly to our own ideas about What Catholic Literature Should Be, we will never allow the Creator to surprise us with something better.
A good strong top-of-my-head reply to “Who am I?” might be St. Teresa’s “I am a daughter [or son] of the Church.”
God love you for saying it so well. I wish I had a more useful response than, “I know, right?!” but after all, the very first step in fixing a problem is agreeing that there is one. All I can say is, Charity and Humility seem to be the keys to approaching a piece of writing from a fellow Catholic. Mr. Wetterling sums it right up: to some, you’ll always seem too pious, and to others, not enough. Offering the benefit of the doubt to a fellow Catholic writer ought to be a well-oiled reflex.
Honestly, if we can’t at least agree to approach each other, and each other’s work, with charity, then we’re already doomed to fail. Thanks, J.B.
Karen, after I read your very good post, I wanted to think about it before I commented, or proffered some solution. Well, I haven’t come up with a solution, and wonder, given the varied writers in the Guild, if we even need one. I view the Catholic Writers Guild as a sort of home base–a home of differing viewpoints, with a common base of belief in Catholicism. From that Catholicism comes–as you stated–a surrendering to let God personally lead us, and to acknowledge His presence as we write every word, whatever our style or genre of writing may be. As a literary fiction writer, my Catholic belief isn’t something I simply state; it’s something I show, with all its complications, which includes the complications of evil. Needless to say, I would not portray evil in a gratuitous way, but it is a weighty force in our world. Not to confront it in my novels is, to me, a mistake. But my goals are not the same as, for example a writer of children’s books, and may not be the same as other adult fiction writers, yet we all drink from the same spiritual stream. So, going back to the idea of a home base, we might think of ourselves as a family united under a common spiritual purpose–a family that encourages its many different personalities, and is charitable toward each and every one. And honestly, I think that’s what the Guild is now.
I agree with you, Kaye. The Guild has its issues (what organization doesn’t?) but it seems to be the best organizational rallying point we have. But there is a great deal going on outside the Guild, among people who either don’t know about it or don’t want to join. I think we need to reach out to each other in any way we can find, across genres and literary philosophies, wherever the opportunity presents. As you said, our real rallying point is not the Guild but the Faith, and we’re all still learning what it means to house so many different voices under that umbrella.
It seems to me that there is and always has been a fundamental divide in Catholic literature that hinges on the words of the Our Father: Lead us not into temptation. There are those for whom a Catholic literature must be true to this dictum – must contain nothing that tempts or bruises a quietly pious sensibility – and those for whom the task literature is to look the human condition squarely in the face and reckon with it in all it’s joy, pathos, and horror, and Catholic literature is simply literature that does so based on the Catholic view of the nature and history of man. Literature of the second kind is unlikely to obey the dictum on which the first is based. Literature of the first kind is unlikely to possess the frankness essential to the second. I’m not sure how a raprochment is possible.
In the meantime, where does on find the conferences where people *do* sound like O’Connor and Greene?
Indeed! That dichotomy underlies my (rather self-serving) injunction to Charity in reading the works of other Catholic authors. I myself have been accused of showing Evil a bit too clearly. I think ultimately the line of what is “too much” is unknowable to mortals, but some of it comes down to whether the author’s intent is to glorify God or the Other Guy. And, of course, we can’t truly know the author’s intent. Even the author may not fully understand his own intent. But yeah, it is kind of hard to address evil without disclosing the fact that evil exists. Tolkien said every story is ultimately about the Fall.
Mark, I think the rapprochement begins with the understanding that diverse audiences require diverse fiction. Those who are easily tempted by an honest portrayal of sin are well advised to stay in the shallows, while those whose souls hunger and thirst for honesty need to be able to find it. If it means anything to anyone, I will take the first step across the divide: I write horror, and I like warm fuzzy books with happy endings. The rapprochement begins by stripping ourselves of false dichotomies and cherishing each other’s gifts in all their multifaceted splendor.
To your other question, try the Catholic Imagination conference. I’ve not been to one, but they do load their program with a lot of O’Connor!
I’m certainly all for stripping ourselves of false dichotomies. But what of the true dichotomies? What are we to make, for instance, of Graham Greene’s parallel tellings in The Power and the Glory: one a pious hagiography, one a realistic modern novel treatment. I don’t take Greene to be saying that these are both equally valid ways to tell the story. I take it that Greene is criticizing the hagiography and saying, no, the real nature of sanctity is this: that is is not in the unstained courage of the perfect knight of Christ, but in the sinner who, in the depths of his degradation, cannot quite turn away. How do we deal with the fact that one Catholic writer may legitimately criticise the style and purpose of another Catholic writer?
The Power and the Glory was, at one point, condemned by the Holy Office, and then defended by Evelyn Waugh and Paul VI who said, “Mr. Greene, some aspects of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.”. (I cribbed the quote from Wikipedia.) But that “sure to offend some Catholics” is central to the problem. It is not simply a matter or celebrating a diversity of gifts, but of tolerating those who offend us and with whom we actively disagree. Of course, this is the state of things in the Church as a whole most of the time. But the Church binds this diversity together with stronger bonds than any literary society could possibly muster.
I’m not suggesting that the project is in vain. I share the goal and applaud the intent. I just think we cannot underestimate the difficulty of the the task. I don’t think we will ever stop Catholic writers disagreeing with each other or taking offense at each other. We need them to unite despite continuing to disagree and take offence. That is no small thing, though it is a very catholic thing.
On the other hand, the Church is a master of affirming incompatible unities: Man and God, physical and spiritual, three and one, bread and body, wine and blood, sinner and saint. It should be able to allow, then, that a writer may be both fully Catholic and fully literary.
Mark, I think you’ve said it better than I could. Writers (and their readers) will never stop disagreeing, but this is nothing new either to literature or to Catholicism. Nor would it be a happy state of affairs if we all simply accepted that literature was worthy just because a Catholic wrote it. We need criticism and debate. But at the same time, what unites us must be stronger than what divides us, and that is our bond in Christ.
Thanks Karen for initiating an excellent conversation. I always think of the Catholic Writers Guild as an incubator for Catholic authors. The difficult reality we deal with is that the authors who actually publish and sell books with a Catholic sensibility are most often creating volumes focused on varying degrees of spiritual self-help. Those are the Catholic books that Catholics actually buy. Over and over, we see Catholic publishers take a risk to publish a wonderful novel and their customers don’t buy it. It really is not that Catholic publishers aren’t supportive of Catholic culture, literature and imagination, but it is reckless for them as financial stewards to invest money in books that don’t sell. Committed Catholic novelists are driven to the periphery…self publishing, or scrubbing their work of Catholic references to satisfy a Christian publisher, or giving up on faith-focused content just to create a good story they can sell.
Perhaps this will encourage someone…
This reality is what drives me, baby step by baby step, to build Virtue Works Media…to create a mechanism in which we provide the information about great literature and media that naturally includes authentic Catholic characters and situations in the story…and also provides the MOTIVATION to want to consume it. Marketing is at the root of the problem, and seeing that, I work to do my part to help.
Cathy, you’ve essentially identified the same problem Joseph Pearce dealt with in his article, but you, my friend, are taking active steps to correct it. God bless you for your work and may He make it fruitful!