I recently reread one of my mother’s books—Mr. Blue, by Myles Connolly, which was first published in 1928. It is a tale of a latter day St. Francis, Mr. Blue, who introduces the narrator to the joy of the Divine. Mr. Blue lives on rooftops and flies kites. On this reading, I found him fey, visionary, and occasionally annoying.

The novel (my copy was a 1962 reprint; there is a new version out from Loyola Classics) limns a religious defiance of totalitarianism. This was visceral to anyone grew up Catholic at that time. We, the Church Militant, were at war with communism. Dark forces sought to enslave not only the Church, but America, with which She was allied. Against the poetry, the lightness of Blue, is juxtaposed a darkness, which confronted “God’s spies.” Near the book’s conclusion, Blue relates a vision of the last Christian, a secret priest, White. He lives in grey slavery under a future world government. The climax of the episode is White’s Eucharistic celebration atop a ruined skyscraper. This calls forth Christ’s return.

This latter, muscular version of the priesthood informed much of my reading and movie going as a child. Many of the Catholic novels I read were written by priests. They were often apocalyptic or embodied related themes, depicting priestly defiance of the organization man’s conformity. Their heroes were men who had Christ’s radical courage and artistry. They were “junkie priests,” priests who worked with gangs and on the waterfront.

Both my uncles were priests; they fitted neither stereotype. But, they were kings to us. I do not say this pejoratively. They reflected Christ’s “do not touch Me,” to the Magdalene, upon His return. One of the few writers I have ever read who conveys this milieu of spiritual aristocracy is Mary Gordon. “It is almost impossible to convey to anyone under fifty the glamour attached to priests when my mother was young,” she notes in one of her books.

Father Joe was pastor of a prosperous parish in East Providence, where he and his curates had suites in the modern, beige-bricked rectory. My uncle smoked cigars and left his newspapers on the floor for Margaret, the housekeeper, to pick up. Father Ed was stationed in New Hampshire, usually alone. He loved Nixon and driving to The West; “Don’t Fence Me In” was his theme song.

In those triumphant days, American Catholicism was the “religion…of the Imperial City,” as David Plante says in his wonderful 2005 memoir, American Ghosts. The Catholicism of Rome was implicit in the motto of the Catholic boys’ school that the author attended in Providence, LaSalle Academy, from which my uncles also graduated. “Pro Deo Pro Patria,” the inscription still reads over the front door. Religion allied with empire.

But “poets and kings are but the clerks of time,” as Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote. My uncles were also ordinary men. Father Joe, dying of pancreatic cancer, whispered to me, “do you think so?” when I told him that I thought he would go to heaven. Father Ed, the last of my older relatives, passed away last year. He had been disabled for a long time, the result of a botched operation. My uncle said that his last days, in the care of elderly nuns, were his happiest. I remember now all that solitude in the cold farmhouse rectories of New Hampshire.

There is much interest in the monastic life today. That is for the good. The lines for Into Great Silence stretched out the doors when that gorgeous film was shown in New York last year. But I wonder about the current dearth of literature about priests in the world. In my view, the last marvelous novel about the American priesthood was Edwin O’Connor’s 1961 The Edge of Sadness (also available through Loyola). The sexual abuse scandal was an unveiling of horrific sin. But there is more to the biographies of priests than that, just as there is more to lives of parishioners than the Mitford novels. I’d love to hear suggestions of good contemporary writing about priests.

At my local supermarket, the four aging priests of St. Michael’s Parish (made up of six churches) shop for eggs and detergent like everyone else. All around them lie their flock: people who work for the State in Augusta or for the high school; the guys who run the A1 diner, our one tourist attraction. And the poor, for the poor are always with us—the heavy, hard single moms, the old people who turn off the heat at night to save oil. All their lives at once ordinary and extraordinary. Stories waiting to be told.