Can Catholic Writers Help Heal A Wounded Church?
When I was a student in a creative writing program in the mid-1990s, I used to sneak away on Sunday mornings to attend Mass. I didn’t have a car, but a Jewish poet friend was kind enough to drive me to church. I wouldn’t have dared admit to my fellow students that I was Catholic, let alone a practicing one. The vast majority would have considered me somehow intellectually defective and judged my work accordingly.
Just two years ago, when I was working for a National Public Radio affiliate in Illinois, and the Catholic Church was regularly making news, the news director at this station told me he didn’t want me covering too many stories of what he termed “the Catholic persuasion,” as if Catholicism was a minor hobby.
Times are changing. This past week, a group of nearly 500 novelists, poets, memoirists, spirituality writers, essayists and screenwriters — including Alice McDermott, Richard Rodriguez, Patricia Hampl, Ron Hansen, Fanny Howe, Dana Gioia and Paul Schrader — gathered at a conference on the Catholic Imagination sponsored by the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Chicago’s Loyola University. All were quite eloquent on how their faith has informed their creative work.
For a religion that has never been at ease with sexuality and the body, Catholicism has had no difficulty with glorifying the senses. Ritual and the sacramental life of the church all point to something beyond what is seen — to ‘the real behind the real,’ as Bernard of Clairvaux once described it.
For those of us who are writers, Catholic traditions have nourished our understanding of mystery, metaphor and symbol: all essential literary ingredients. Our understanding of suffering, grace and redemption leads us to human drama. Even the obvious flaws of the church — its domineering male hierarchy, its corruption over the centuries, its aversion to change — can fire up the literary imagination.
Paul Mariani — author of seven volumes of poetry and biographies of John Berryman, Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, among others — called mystery “the thing” for writers with a Catholic sensibility. Mystery inhabits our work. And mystery is inexhaustible, Mariani reminded us. (He received the inaugural Flannery O’Connor Lifetime Achievement Award at the conference for his long career in exercising the Catholic imagination).
Asked what it means to be a “Catholic” poet, Fanny Howe, a convert to the faith, said it means “always pushing away from limits.” Lawrence Joseph, a cradle Catholic, called writing poetry “an act of love. Poets deal with language and language is what makes us human.”
Poets Gioia and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell noted how much progress has occurred since the first Catholic Imagination conference took place in 2015 in California. “The state of the Catholic imagination is vigorous and flourishing. More and more of us are willing to self-identify as Catholic writers,” Alaimo O’Donnell said. “We have proven we can be faithful and smart … and good at our art.”
A number of literary journals interested in work with underlying spiritual themes has emerged, among them, “Dappled Things,” “Cresset,” and one of my favorite journals, “Presence,” which is devoted solely to poetry.
To be sure, the current generation of Catholic writers aren’t of the ‘pray, pay and obey’ ilk. We are deeply wounded over the long failure of the Catholic hierarchy to address the clergy abuse scandal. Many spoke of the urgent need for drastic change. Both Rodriguez and McDermott suggested Pope Francis appoint a few women as cardinals (something apparently Canon Law allows, even though it prohibits women from serving as priests), so that women would have a voice and a vote at the conclave to select the next pope.
And yet, and yet … Rodriguez describes himself as a gay man who remains “in love with a church that tells me I don’t know what love is.” The noted essayist said his earliest literary sensibilities evolved as a young boy when he assisted at funeral Masses and burials in his Sacramento Latino-American community.
McDermott, relating the story of a father holding his dying child, reflected on how the language of the faith is what we fall back on when all other words fail.
“They can’t get rid of me,” television writer Dorothy Fortenberry (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) proclaimed when asked why she remains in the church — one she describes as often “like a kind of nutty, tacky theme restaurant or museum you visit on a road trip.”
Fortenberry is on to something. When we walk up to that altar to receive the communion host — whether it be from a priest, a deacon or a lay extraordinary minister of the Eucharist — “We are all exactly the same amount of special,” Fortenberry said.
No, no matter what its sins, the church can’t rid itself of us. We will keep showing up. We will keep agitating for change. We will keep building community as artists and writers. We will make peace with the loneliness that at times comes with being Catholic. As Rodriguez observed, with that loneliness “comes a kind of wisdom.”
Many thanks to Michael Murphy, executive director of the Hank Center at Loyola, and his excellent staff for their hard work in organizing this inspiring conference!
