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Many clerical novels spotlight the challenges of clergy's lives. To wit, James Street's novels The Gauntlet (1945) and The High Calling (1951). Street's hero is a Southern Baptist pastor called London Wingo, who's sympathetic, even if he has absorbed a flabby sort of humanism, and who struggles to balance the needs of his congregation with the needs of his family. Other clerical novels—one thinks here of George Eliot, and Trollope—expose the changing role of the minister in society. Still others, like Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry and Peter De Vries' too-little-read 1958 novel, The Mackerel Plaza, seem born of the author's desire to unmask Christian hypocrisy. But every clerical novel can prompt reflection on what the life of the church can and should be. A parody like De Vries' may rightly be interpreted not as a dismissal of Christianity but rather as a heartfelt expression of distress at expressions of Christianity that have gone totally off the rails.
In one respect, the Mitford novels, though decidedly evangelical, are more reminiscent of the Catholic clerical tradition than the Protestant. It is not too gross an oversimplification to suggest that in novels featuring Catholic priests we more often find portraits of faithful lives well lived. In fiction, Protestant clergy seem given over to other tasks: wrestling with doubt inflamed by scientific criticism, Darwinism, or humanism (as in Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware), or getting mired in hypocrisy and blatant sin (as in John Updike's Month of Sundays). It is in Catholic clerical literature that we find priests who, though flawed, are nonetheless devoted to pastoring, to the cure of souls.
Put differently: I once began to write a novel (I have begun to write about 23 of them) about a widow who had insomnia and read a lot of sermons in the middle of the night. That, at the start, was all I knew about the widow. I shared my idea with a novelist friend, who responded in some alarm, "Well, something has to happen, some plot, other than this woman's spiritual development." In Mitford, not a whole lot happens other than the characters' spiritual development, and in this way—this unashamed willingness to place Christian growth at the center of a novel—Karon recalls not Frederic or Updike or De Vries or Street, but rather some of the great Catholic novelists.
Consider, for example, Georges Bernanos' peerless The Diary of a Country Priest. Like Bernanos, Karon is an unabashed apologist, even evangelist for the Christian faith. Like Bernanos' hero, Father Tim is unafraid of (in Bernanos' phrase) the "red-hot iron" that is the Word of God. Like Bernanos' priest, Father Tim understands that he loves his parishioners best when he suffers with them. Similarly, Father Tim's pious, selfless devotion to the Barlowe boys—abandoned by their alcoholic mother, threatened by their violent father—recalls François Mauriac's Abbé Calou, the priest at the center of A Woman of the Pharisees, who, like Father Tim, is determined to introduce rebellious boys to Jesus Christ. Even Father Tim's struggles with the witchy Edith Mallory, struggles that find an evangelistically satisfying conclusion in Light from Heaven, might well be modeled on Bernanos' priest's struggles with the Countess, or, in Mauriac, Calou's struggles with the titular pharisienne.
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