Four American Catholics and their Chronicler

Extract

When Dorothy Day decided to write a history of the Catholic Worker movement she drew for inspiration from the writings she knew and loved intimately: the novels of Charles Dickens; the radical reportage of activists like Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli), George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London), and Danilo Dolci (Report from Palermo). She also loved Ignazio Silone's antifascist novel Bread and Wine. Towering over all of these writers, however, were the Russians and more particularly the late Leo Tolstoy of Resurrection and the profound, fictive world of Fydor Dostoevski whose “fool for Christ” (Prince Myshkin of The Idiot) and the saintly Aloysha of the Brothers Karamazov were iconic. Day was a follower of the Gospel but her human horizon was nourished by her life long love for literature.

Who knows the mystery of God's attracting grace but if the old scholastics had it right in their axiom that grace builds on nature one would have to say that the four persons whom Paul Elie chronicles in his recent brilliant work on the American Catholic Church in the middle of the twentieth century were attracted to a vigorous life in Catholicism on nature as made concrete in literature. What all four had in common was a profound love of literature and, more to the point, the fact that there was a common thread in their devotion to The Brothers Karamazov and other seminal works of literature. In fact, one can play a little mind game while reading this capacious study: what were they all reading as their adult lives matured?

The four persons at the heart of Elie's book were writers but of a decidedly different stripe. Flannery O'Connor, whose life was cut short by a debilitating case of lupus, wrote slowly and with an exactitude that demands an equally slow patient reading even when the stories are clear but the meaning allusive.