Spiritual reading is an integral part of the fully formed Catholic life. This includes reading the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, commentaries on faith and prayer, and about the lives of the saints. But what about great works of fiction? Might novels have a unique capacity to illuminate the Catholic experience?
The Catholic Spirit asked six members of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis — a religious sister, a retired professor, a permanent deacon, a Catholic school headmaster, the founder of a Catholic reading group and a priest — to choose a novel that uniquely sheds light on the depth and drama of the Catholic experience and to briefly explain that choice. Each of these women and men has spent years contemplating great novels.
Each novel is available through online booksellers and most of them can be found in local libraries and bookstores.
Contributors’ responses
Dominican Sister Amelia Hueller:
“In This House of Brede” by Rumer Godden
“In This House of Brede” merges important themes from two Catholic writers: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ account of graced human divinization (“Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his”) and Flannery O’Connor’s depiction of human depravity (“Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.”). Godden’s genius lies in her ability to integrate the truth of these two realities throughout the transformation of her indomitable yet fearful protagonist, Ms. Philippa Talbot.
Philippa’s seemingly sudden entrance into Brede Abbey as a nun was, in her words, an “unforgivably slow” work of grace. As we enter into this experience with her, we witness not merely the unfolding of one woman’s particular vocation to the cloister, but the unfolding of every person’s daily vocation to holiness. With Philippa, we see that we, too, “have a long way to go.” We, too, are at once a believer, yet anxious; devoted to Christ, yet focused on self; ready to give all, yet stingy in the particulars. It is naive to dismiss such paradoxes as hypocrisy. Rather, these dichotomies point to the sometimes tortuous playing out of grace and freedom within each human soul.
Both Godden (who converted to Catholicism) and Philippa (who finds her Divine Spouse by facing her fears with him) are inspired by the example of Brede’s wise Mother Prioress, Dame Catherine. Confronted by her human limitations and the formidable demands of grace, Dame Catherine prays to God, “I can’t. So You must.” Throughout her novel, Godden invites us into this same prayer — an invitation to turn from self and toward the One who heals our depravity through the sudden yet slow work of grace.
Sister Amelia, a Dominican Sister of the Congregation of St. Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee, serves at Providence Academy in Plymouth. Sister Amelia said she owes her love of literature to her mother and father, who convinced their children that summer vacation was fun because it afforded extra time for reading. Their bookshelves were always full, and the friends and ideas found in those pages were often occasions of grace throughout her childhood. Her love for reading continued into her young adult years, even prompting her eventual entrance into the Catholic Church at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, and it remains an important part of her life today as a religious sister and educator.
Mary Reichardt:
“Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh
“Brideshead Revisited” illuminates the depth and drama of the Catholic experience in that it is messy, circuitous, and, finally, mysterious. Set during World War II, the novel explores the reminiscences of Lt. Charles Ryder as he recalls his coming of age as an Oxford student and his compelling but confusing involvement with the Catholic Marchmain family.
Raised a lonely child with no religion, Charles’ search for fulfillment in intimate relationships with Sebastian, and later Julia Marchmain, fails. Self-described hedonists like their father, the wayward Lord Marchmain, the siblings strive in differing ways to free themselves from their mother’s stifling piety. But their Arcadian idyll proves transitory. Eventually, God’s inexorable “twitch upon the thread” intervenes.
The perpetual outsider, Charles, meanwhile, is completely adrift as his loves collapse one by one. Dimly at first but with steadily growing awareness, he perceives the supernatural drama at play. In a pivotal moment at the height of his resistance, an image comes to his mind of a trapper warm and sheltered in his winter cabin unaware of the avalanche giving way above him. As his reminiscences cease and we abruptly reenter the stark, desecrated world at war, we find that Charles himself has been led to that greater Love.
What can we make of our past? Can we discern amid its twists and turns a single thread, a coherent story? How is it possible that God is capable of using all things — all things — to draw us to him? I recommend “Brideshead Revisited” because it beautifully evokes what we typically cannot see in our lives, the supreme mystery of God’s power and love at work in the world through the profane as well as the sacred.
Reichardt taught literature and Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas for over three decades. She has published 14 books, including “Exploring Catholic Literature,” “Catholic Women Writers,” “Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature,” and the two volume “Encyclopedia of Catholic Literature.”
Deacon Joe Michalak:
“Sick Heart River” by John Buchan
I call it Catholic.
Diminutive Scottish son of the manse, Oxbridge educated, barrister, author of nearly 100 works (law, history, encomium, biographies, poetry in several languages, tales of the supernatural, novels), expert salmon fisher, mountaineer (on three continents), publisher, director of military intelligence, inspiration to Ian Fleming and Alfred Hitchcock, friend of Indigenous peoples, diplomat, governor general of Canada: John Buchan was all of these. But he is perhaps popularly remembered today as the father of the spy thriller with his 1915 novel, “The Thirty-Nine Steps.” All his characters inhabit a moral universe framed by good and evil, yet none of his heroes are without a mixture of motive, nor are his villains wholly beyond hope. The drama resides in choosing rightly and well. And perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson alone surpasses Buchan’s skill in depicting evocative landscape: Physical place often assumes the role of a character once removed.
“Sick Heart River” — Buchan’s last novel, finished only days before he died —is a melancholic “spiritual testament, wrapped around by a gripping story of survival and self-sacrifice in the far north of Canada” (in the words of his granddaughter, Ursula Buchan). It is a compelling depiction of Augustinian restlessness and conversion: the heart longing for repose in God, though often unaware of its goal. The book’s protagonist, Sir Edward Leithen, a noble man of accomplishment and service (much like Buchan himself), diagnosed with tuberculosis, given a year to live and resolved to die “standing up,” is providentially offered one last task: a trek from London to New York to Quebec to the crushing wilderness of northern Canada in search of a fellow man who himself seeks the mythic Sick Heart River. The story’s three parts —set against an overwhelming landscape — follow an interior movement from British stoicism to childlike receptivity to God’s mercy to, finally, a surprising gift of self in which Leithen discovers himself. The Sick Heart River is replaced by the “river whose rivulets gladden the city of God” (Ps 46:4). It is fitting that 
Buchan, a lifelong Scotts Presbyterian, says Leithen’s last conscious act is participation in Easter morning Mass with the Indigenous people whom he served to the last.
I call that Catholic.
Deacon Michalak, longtime director of The St. Paul Seminary Institute for Diaconate Formation in St. Paul and now the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ director of the Office for Synod Evangelization, is married to Scottish wife Anne. Together they run a hobby used book business and have a large home library of John Buchan books.
Todd Flanders:
“The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene
The best novels inform — and challenge — understandings of sin and grace and the complexity of character and motive. They do so in diverse historical and cultural contexts, illustrating the commonality of the human condition even through such differences.
To me, “The Power and the Glory” has been especially significant. Greene’s title is of course from the liturgical ending of the Our Father, accrediting all power and glory to God. Yet in the novel, set in communist-revolutionary 1930s Mexico, God and his Church have been banned. There is nothing glorious nor powerful about this setting or, it must be said, about any character in the story. What Greene seeks to do, and achieves with pathos and darkly comic brilliance, is show that the Church’s mission can advance even amid inglorious conditions and apparent impotence.
An unnamed cleric, a “whiskey priest,” finds himself the last sacramental minister alive in his region. Accustomed to being feted by parishioners in a Catholic culture, this priest has lived a life of honor, pleasure and comfort, content and complacent while the inhumane and anti-Catholic storm gathered. Now stripped of all, he is a poor and wretched outlaw on the run. Tempted to resign himself to the apparent futility of his vocation, the mark of his priesthood yet gnaws at him.
It’s a horrible world in which he struggles, one of political oppression, atheism, lawlessness, apostasy, venality, carnality and fear. Greene presents, in extreme form, a microcosm of a perennial Catholic situation in aggressively secularist times. When Christ returns, will he find faith on earth? The novel forcefully poses the question.
Its answer is ambiguous but admits of a living hope. The question is always how will we, as unworthy and deeply flawed members of the body of Christ, respond to our own callings amid temptations from other, less glorious powers?
Flanders is headmaster of Providence Academy in Plymouth, and an instructor in The St. Paul Seminary Catechetical Institute in St. Paul. He says, “My love of literature was planted by parents and three great high school English teachers. As a convert to Catholicism 30 years ago, novels played, and continue to play, a role in my intellectual and spiritual development.”
Buzz Kriesel:
“The Man Who Was Thursday” by G. K. Chesterton
In September 2002, the late Thomas Loome and I founded The Misfits, a Catholic men’s reading group at St. Michael in Stillwater. For more than 21 years, the group has met monthly to read and discuss the amazing books of our Catholic literary tradition.
The Misfits have read many authors: from Waugh to Percy, from Godden to Undset. We’ve found one author who spans all literary genres and who speaks directly to the saving grace offered by our Catholic faith. The author is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. We’ve read Chesterton’s fiction and non-fiction, his poetry and his biographies. We’ve found that there is enough of Chesterton to last a lifetime.
When you decide to begin reading Chesterton, start with his second novel, “The Man Who Was Thursday.” You won’t be disappointed. It is considered by many Chesterton scholars as his greatest novel. It is a brilliant detective story that also explores explicitly Catholic themes and symbolism.
The novel tells the story of Gabriel Syme, a poet and undercover detective who infiltrates a group of anarchists in London. Each member of the group is named after a day of the week, and the novel unfolds as a series of bizarre and surreal events. As Syme delves deeper into the mystery, he grapples with themes of morality, free will and the nature of good and evil. The characters in the novel represent different aspects of Catholic faith and theology.
The novel is Chesterton at his best and is highly recommended for any Catholic reader who wants to read a great novel framed and illuminated by our shared Catholic faith.
Kriesel is a retired U.S. Army special forces officer. He lives in what he describes as genteel poverty on a small acreage on the St. Croix River in Wisconsin. He is a parishioner of St. Michael in Stillwater. When not reading, he fishes. He is a founding member of The St. Zeno Fly Anglers of the Church of St. Michael. You can email Kriesel at [email protected] to request a list of the Catholic books and authors The Misfits have read over the past 21 years.
Father James Reidy:
“The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky undertakes a defense of Christian faith in the face of the terrible mystery of evil — the reality of sin and suffering in human life and particularly the suffering of innocents. His answer to the problem is the only answer there is, and it lies in the mystery of freedom, grace and Christian hope in the risen Christ.
Dostoevsky’s novel is the story of three brothers who each deal with the problem of evil in his own way. Ivan attempts to intellectually think through the problem. Dimitri avoids concern with the problem in an aimless and dissipated life. The youngest brother, Alyosha, is the one who comes to terms with the problem through Christian faith.
Three episodes in the novel illustrate how Dostoevsky dramatizes his theme.
In the first, Ivan the intellectual tells a story of a Grand Inquisitor confronting Jesus. Ivan says that the trouble with God’s world is that people make all the wrong choices with their freedom, exploiting one another, and are everywhere miserable as a result. Rather than the world Jesus would establish, characterized by love freely given, the Inquisitor proposes one where citizens surrender their freedom, and the all-powerful state in return takes care of them in a utopia where all are comfortable. But Dostoevsky suggests that the Inquisitor’s plan would turn human society into a dreary “anthill.” By the end of the story, the plan’s proponent, Ivan the intellectual, is insane.
The second episode is the trial of Dimitri for the murder of his father. The father of the brothers is a Satanic figure, and no one mourns his demise. Dimitri, who is innocent of the crime, is nevertheless convicted of it. In his summing up, the defending lawyer tells the jury that even if Dimitri is a parricide he shouldn’t be convicted, given how he was provoked by a thoroughly wicked man. The jurymen, plain peasants with a Christian conscience, will have none of it. No matter how one has suffered under a father, one does not kill him.
Dostoevsky draws a parallel to God the Father. There has always been the temptation to rebel and to reject God the Father in the face of the soul-piercing mystery of evil, but one thing that must never be done is turn away from the heavenly Father.
In the end, it is Alyosha who retrieves and clings to his faith in a heavenly Father to contend with the mystery of evil. It is triumphantly proclaimed in the final episode when the schoolboys Alyosha has befriended shout “Hurrah for Karamazov,” meaning, considering all that Ayosha is teaching them by word and deed: “Hurrah for the risen Christ, for comradeship, life, and joy.” After all the suffering vividly displayed in this book, the fact that it can end with such a hearty affirmation of faith gives it some claim to be considered the greatest novel of them all.
Father Reidy is a retired professor of English from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, who also taught in the Catholic Studies program there. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota.