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There is a Catholic's book about how one man—Otto von Schindler—saved Jews from the Holocaust, and another Catholic's book about how one man—Pope Pius XII—failed to save Jews from the Holocaust.
A trilogy on the moral life by a "philosopher's philosopher" who started out as a Marxist in Edinburgh and has wound up a Thomist in Nashville, Tennessee.
A book by a convert who became famous as a naturalist but sees herself as a theologian.
Several slim volumes of poetry, each of them dedicated "to the glory of God."
A big book of "all saints," one for each day, including Galileo and Gandhi as well as Baron von Hugel and Jacques Maritain, and a biography of Thomas More organized around the question posed to the nascent saint at his baptism: "Thomas More, what seekest thou?"
Book-length essays by the best liberal political commentator and the best conservative one, each of them a Catholic in his fashion.
A novel in which four Jesuit priests set out in the year 2019 on a mission of exploration to the planet Rakhat.
And half a shelf of books by the most acclaimed poet in the English language, a Catholic of Belfast. When this poet accepted the Nobel Prize, he described himself in Catholic terms, as a man "bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the world." To explain what poetry is, he told the story of St. Kevin, a monk of old, who was kneeling with his arm stretched out when a bird made a nest in the palm of a hand—whereupon he "stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledgeling grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of the natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder."
All this variety suggests that Catholic writing abounds and that Catholic writers are thriving. But in my own experience the Catholic writer feels strongly otherwise.
If you are a Catholic writer, you probably know the feeling yourself. It is as though you are the only person left who takes this stuff seriously—the only writer who cares about religion, and the only Catholic who has any literary taste. You are the last Catholic writer in America, and you are afraid the species is dying out. That is one of the reasons you stick around.
Your independence becomes the linchpin of your faith, which is not held or practiced or prayed for so much as it is fostered imaginatively, through your reading and writing and your running conversation with the dead. You feel uncertain, even ashamed, to define yourself as a Catholic writer, but nobody is fighting you over it, so you persist.
And in fact in many ways you are indistinguishable from any other writer. The laptop computer. The grants. The symposia. But you burn interiorly, like one of the French Jesuits of the seventeenth century, the North American martyrs.
You hear that religion is a "hot" category in the publishing world, yet you identify with those martyrs. In theory, they belonged to the church militant, a worldwide multiform communion headquartered in Rome. In fact, "they" were a priest who was alone in the forest trying to translate the Lord's Prayer into Huron in the hope of making himself understood by one of the natives before the others decided to cut out his heart.
3If the Catholic writer's sense of aloneness is genuine, it seems a remarkable development, since it runs counter to all that we are told we should expect. By most reckonings, there should be a broad and lively Catholic literary culture.
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