Note: For those of you wondering when the rest of the Good Letters team will get a chance to post again, be assured: they’ll be back soon. This little series of mine is giving them a wee break (and me a chance to catch up a little on my post-count).

In the last two posts I’ve sought to explain a curious phenomenon: why a relatively significant portion of the intellectually active portion of the Catholic community in America has failed to engage both the literary culture of their own time and the specifically Catholic authors they should be reading and discussing (and perhaps emulating).

I’ve been calling this community “conservative,” which is perhaps a loaded and ambiguous term, as a few people have noted. I could say “traditionalist” or “orthodox,” but each of these words comes with a full set of matching baggage. At some point you have to just look through the terminology to the gist of the thing.

I’ve also chosen fairly peppery language to throw down this challenge, in part because when I’ve written in calm, nuanced terms, not a blessed soul took any notice. But believe it or not, I’m actually writing this series with a tremor of hope. In particular, I have some hope for a younger generation of Catholics who want to embrace the deepest traditions of the Church’s inheritance but have a sense that the politicized, ideological language of the culture wars is exhausted, hopelessly abstract, and unable to connect to real human experience.

And yet what I’ve called “the myth of decline” retains its grip on many, as does the siren song of staying within the comfortable subculture of the theologically and/or politically like-minded. Of all people, Catholics should understand the dangers of a sectarian existence. James Joyce’s definition of the Catholic Church—“Here comes everybody”—contains deep wisdom. This is why there is a relationship between the upper and lower case versions of the word Catholic.

The myth of decline is essentially a form of self-pity and ultimately of self-importance. Once again, the notion of belonging to some embattled, saving remnant is a profoundly un-Catholic idea. It is also an excuse for intellectual sloth; if the big, bad world out there is tainted and poisoned by whatever is bad about “modernity,” why bother to read the signs of the times, to actually sense what’s going on in the culture at large?

In my last post I suggested that the myth of decline has blinded some to the changing state of the culture and the ways that Catholic writers have changed along with it. I cited Walker Percy as someone who attempted to bridge the starker world of the mid-twentieth century—the generation that felt, along with Flannery O’Connor, the need to “shout” to a newly secularized world—with a new generation that preferred “whispers” of the divine. Percy wrote about affluent Southerners who played golf, not wild-eyed prophets from the backwoods.

Perhaps a helpful way to get at this shift—to follow the trajectory indicated by Percy—would be to compare two novels about saints—or failed saints. I’d like to set Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940) next to the National Book Award-winning novel Charming Billy (1997), by Alice McDermott.

Both are superb, enduring tales. The plot of Greene’s book is well known: set in the anti-clerical totalitarian state of Mexico in the early twentieth century, the protagonist is a “whiskey priest,” a sad, conflicted character who has, among other sinful acts, fathered a child. Despite his many weaknesses, he chooses to serve the poor as a priest, knowing that he will be hunted down and executed for doing so.

The brilliance of Greene’s novel comes from the paradoxical proximity of sanctity and venality. The very earthiness of the whiskey priest leads him not only into temptation but also into deep empathy and compassion for those around him. In a thoroughly Catholic sense, grace mysteriously inheres in nature; the priest, though unworthy, can still bring Christ to others. He goes to his death overcome with a sense of his unworthiness but the reader feels that he just might be a true martyr.

Charming Billy has a completely different setting. It takes place in and around New York City in the Irish Catholic community in the decades after World War II. The novel opens with Billy’s funeral; a terrible alcoholic, Billy has drunk himself into an early grave. He had once fallen in love with a beautiful girl from Ireland, who accepted his marriage proposal, and then left for Ireland. Tragic events ensue, and Billy suffers an irremediably broken heart.

But for all his drinking, Billy is truly charming. As McDermott put it in an interview: “He’s that stereotypical, lovable Irishman, drinks too much, talks too much, puts his arm around you at 3 AM, when everybody else has gone home and with tears in his eyes tells you how much he loves you.” He’s always writing people little loving notes on cocktail napkins, showing kindness to all, but a kind of doom follows him inexorably to his end.

In McDermott’s story there is little explicit discussion of faith, despite the Irish Catholic milieu. And yet Billy’s love is itself a kind of faith. And while it is shattered, it is something he desperately clings to. Only once in the novel does Billy broach the subject of religion, and it is in a moving passage in which he thinks out loud about the passion of Christ.

Like the whiskey priest, Billy is an alcoholic, but he doesn’t face martyrdom before a firing squad. What the Basque Catholic philosopher Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life” suffuses his existence. For all his weakness and brokenness, Billy is a believer. McDermott has said that Charming Billy is “ultimately…a novel about faith.”

The faith here isn’t a shout, nor is it set against a big, existential canvas. It is whispered through the very mundane, middle class life of modern America. And it is Catholic to the core.

Next time: in the last post in the series, I’ll share a list of contemporary Catholic writers worth reading…and celebrating.

Read part four here.