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Priests, Prose, And Preachment
"Fictional Fathers have been a very marketable item recently.... What is it that people find so compelling about a priest's struggle with himself or with the institution he is dedicated to serve?.... Perhaps we can say, 'there's a priest inside every one of us.'"
RALPH O' BRIEN is a handsome young Irishman who has realized the dream of his youth: he has been ordained a Roman Catholic priest. Along the way, he has overcome the usual doubts and fears that bedevil a seminarian, even managing to survive a flirtatious summer fling with an attractive young woman. But very early on in his priesthood Ralph finds that the youthful ideals which he believed would flower fully in his ministry are withering from exposure to hypocritical priests, a callous bishop, and a laity cowering in fear of these clerical tyrants. His ordination comes at a time when the Catholic Church is struggling with the question of adaptation to the modern world. Change is in the wind, and Ralph takes heart from his reading of theologians and philosophers who seem eager to breathe new life into an institutional church that has grown stagnant. But he learns the hard way that the old regime is still very much in control.
Once ordained, Ralph is able to put aside his questions and doubts about theological issues by immersing himself deeply in parish life, working especially hard to give the laity an opportunity to make decisions on matters that affect their lives. His pastor and his bishop, however, view his activities as a threat to the status quo. The pastor repeatedly suggests that Ralph stop trying to stir up the people and begin to "fall in line" like a good young cleric. The bishop pointedly reminds Ralph of his promise of obedience.
These two men finally get the chance to put the squeeze on Ralph. A papal decree has been issued, and an encyclical is soon to follow. The
James E. Johnston teaches in both the Religious Studies and English Departments at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio. He is completing his doctorate in Religion and Literature at the University of Virginia. While this article was being set for printing, Mr. Johnston wrote: "If the piece is to be published next year, who knows, by then Greeley may have another novel on the best seller list!" As indeed is the case. His fourth novel, Lord of the Dance, also includes a priest. Clearly, we are not yet at the end of a long fictional, clerical tradition. Horton Davies wrote a whole book in 1959 on A Mirror of the Ministry in Modern Novels, and in more recent years we can add Peter De Vries and John Updike. Now that women are being ordained in many Protestant bodies, who knows, maybe a new thread will soon be woven into the conventional pattern.
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bishop and pastor agree to use these papal proclamations as a test of orthodoxy, a means of getting young Father O'Brien back under their ecclesiastical thumbs. Ralph, unable to betray his conscience, publicly refuses to assent to the Vatican decrees. The bishop suspends him, and soon after Ralph resigns his ministry to take up a new life.
I
Sound like the plot of an Andrew Greeley novel? Perhaps it has the true-to-life ring of one of those poignant clerical case histories from the late sixties when many priests experienced a crisis of faith over the Catholic Church's inability to come to grips with modernity, a failure most painfully evidenced in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. Actually, Ralph's story is fictional, even though based on historical events. The papal pronouncements that cause his downfall predate Humanae Vitae by sixty-one years.
Ralph is the protagonist of Gerald O'Donovan's 1914 novel, Father Ralph, a tale that deals with the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church. The decrees, of course, are Lamentabile Sane and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (the seventy-fifth anniversary of which, just two years ago, went gloriously uncelebrated). But the theological issues that led to Father O'Brien's downfall are remarkably similar to those that are crucial to the formation of a renewed, post-conciliar Catholic Church in our own day.
Fictional Fathers have been a very marketable item recently, thanks largely to the television portrayal of another "Father Ralph" (Ralph de Bricassart, a central figure in Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds), and to Andrew M. Greeley's recent ventures into best seller territory. Hot on the heels of The Cardinal Sins and Thy Brother's Wife came Greeley's third best seller, Ascent into Hell, a novel that recounts the life of another troubled priest.
In Greeley's third novel, Father Hugh Donlon leaves the active ministry, marries a nun, and becomes a powerful dealer on the Chicago Board of Trade. The book details his descent into a personal hell of greed, selfishness, revenge, and lust. Yet the reader is made to see that Hugh, even during his plunge toward damnation, is being "hounded" by a gracious God who extends to him the love and forgiveness he so desperately needs. In the end, he is faced with the wrenching decision of returning to the active ministry or giving himself over to the woman whose love holds forth the promise of his personal salvation.
Having recently read the long-out-of-print Father Ralph in connection with an academic project, I thought it might be interesting to compare its clerical protagonist with one of more recent vintage to see if all this really represents a case of plus ça change and to raise a question or two about priests as authors and fictional characters.
What is it that people find so compelling about a priest's struggle with himself or with the institution he is dedicated to serve? Is it possible for
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the priest as author to resist the temptation to use his novel as a fictional soapbox, a pulpit from which to preach to a vast congregation?
II
Gerald (Jeremiah) O'Donovan (1871-1942) was a priest who left the active ministry and went to London where be became a successful businessman and novelist. Father Ralph is a largely autobiographical account of a priest whose "modernist" leanings lead to conflict with his pastor and bishop. O'Donovan paints a vivid picture of Ralph's childhood (dominated by an overly pious and scrupulous mother), his years in seminary, and his effort as a young parish priest to put into practice his idealistic vision of what the church should be.
The author carefully probes Ralph's psychological state, hinting that the decision for ordination may have been unduly influenced by family pressures. Ralph's mother dedicates him to the priesthood literally from the womb, and she procures for him a nursemaid whose devotion to pious practices would make a Carmelite envious. Ralph, naturally enough, gets a fairly thorough brainwashing, despite the influence of his free-thinking father. The seminary reinforces much of Ralph's early training, but his independent reading of certain philosophers and theologians raises questions in his mind.
Ralph begins to see a gap between the church of his ideals and as it actually exists. True to the modernist spirit, he believes that the problem can be resolved by not "mistaking the husk for the kernel." The Church is able to proclaim the true message of Christ in spite of such encumbrances as papal infallibility, an outmoded Curia, and hypocritical pastors and bishops.
Ralph's kernel-and-husk version of the Catholic Church is fine on the theoretical level, but things begin to get thorny when his vision of renewal clashes with some time-honored prerogatives cherished by his pastor, Father Molloy, and the vested interests in the town. What follows for Ralph is a lesson in "clerical hardball." The harsh realities of church politics and dictatorial episcopal power sweep away Ralph's sandcastle world of a church dedicated to the simple tenets of the Gospel of Christ. Ordered by the bishop to publicly declare his adherence to the decree Lamentabile Sane, Ralph chooses to remain silent. He is immediately suspended. His only recourse, if he is to follow the dictates of his conscience, is to give up the active ministry.
The novel ends with Ralph sailing away from Ireland to a new life in London. Though one dream has faded, Ralph's thoughts are hopeful, even triumphant. His last words are, "I have found myself at last."
There are several characteristics that make this early novel something more than a curiosity piece from a bygone ecclesiastical era. A reader today is likely to be startled by the similarity between the issues raised in the book and some of the pressing questions that Catholicism has faced in the years following Vatican II. Shared responsibility between clergy
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and laity, optional celibacy, academic freedom in Catholic institutions, the Church's obligation to promote social justice, ecclesiastical laws regarding marriage, the election of bishops, papal infallibility, clerical dress, democratic structures in the Church, and the question of "due process"-all of these issues are touched on in the course of O'Donovan's novel.
I was myself struck by the author's unflinching courage in addressing these concerns, especially in view of the repressive atmosphere that prevailed in those years immediately following the papal condemnation of Modernism. (As far as I can determine, O'Donovan never achieved the dubious distinction of being listed in the Index librorum prohibitorum, as did another "modernist" novelist, Antonio Fugazzaro).
Perhaps O'Donovan was able to be so bold because he felt that the Church could do no worse to him than it had already done. Despite the explicit (and often harsh) criticism of church structures and hypocrisy in high places, the prevailing tone of the novel is hopeful rather than bitter. O'Donovan seems to have been convinced that no matter how rotten the "husk" was, the "kernel" could still be preserved in a healthy state.
III
There is something else surprising about this novel: it is very well written. I say "surprising" because authors caught up in a movement or defending a cause have produced some notoriously poor fiction. One need only consider a 1911 American counterpart of O'Donovan's novel: The Priest: A Tale of Modernism in New England, by William L. Sullivan. The interaction of the characters in this novel amounts to little more than a prolonged, melodramatic exchange of sermonic material. O'Donovan manages throughout most of his novel to avoid this kind of blatant didacticism. Only on rare occasions does the reader get the impression that Ralph is the mouthpiece for a modernist ideology. For the most part, O'Donovan allows Ralph's insights and experiences to speak for themselves, eschewing any parenthetical address to the reader for the purpose of conveying some kind of "message." His strengths as a novelist are his ability to explore complex psychological motivations, his convincing portrayal of characters, and his fine car for dialogue.
The lesser figures in the book constitute a marvelously variegated gallery of characters, most of whom seem to have been drawn from O'Donovan's years in the seminary and the active ministry. Indeed, O'Donovan excels in the quick sketch: the inattentive confessor, the seminarian who succeeds academically through sheer memorization, the Mother Superior who entered the convent for the "wrong reasons" but nonetheless persevered in her difficult vocation, the crotchety pastor whose motto is "Anything for a quiet life." All of these people spring vividly to life under O'Donovan's deft touch. In their dialogue, be captures perfectly the rhythms and images of Irish colloquial speech.
Like recent novels about priests, Father Ralph deals with a loss of innocence, but with a significant difference. O'Donovan is more interested in the shattering of Ralph's intellectual innocence than he is in the
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sexual side of things. I suppose if he were writing today, O'Donovan would be forced to develop more fully the relationship between Ralph and Eva Dillon, the young woman who provides what little "romantic interest" there is in this novel. Indeed, if the Literary Guild were to offer this novel as a selection today it would probably have to append the warning: "Some readers may be disappointed by the lack of explicit sex." But O'Donovan was operating under some considerable constraints. He knew, as did others involved in the struggle over "modernism," that one of the easiest ways to discredit priests involved in the "movement" was to suggest an involvement with women, implying that the real issue was being hidden behind an intellectual smokescreen. But Ralph's crisis really is intellectual, much to the surprise of his friend and childhood pastor, Father Duff.
On hearing that Ralph has been suspended, Duff exclaims, "Did anyone ever hear the like... to suspend a man for nothing? If it was drink now, or women, there'd be some meaning in it! But theology!" We might paraphrase the last part of the old priest's remark and apply it to current novels about priests. Readers may be interested in a priest's problems with drink or women... but theology? That's hardly the stuff of best sellers.
O'Donovan appears to have been unconcerned about establishing that priests are "really human," a point that seems rather more important to current practitioners in this genre. Apparently some kind of "docetism" regarding the humanity of clerics has crept in since the early days of this century. Not to worry. Andrew Greeley proves with a vengeance that even though priests have "one foot in this world and one in the next," they take their pants off one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. Indeed, in his novels they do it surprisingly often.
IV
The protagonist of Greeley's Ascent into Hell has much in common with Ralph O'Brien. Hugh Donlon, too, is "programmed for the priesthood" from the start because of a parental Promise. Like Ralph, Hugh is a good seminarian who perseveres to Ordination despite occasional doubts about his vocation. After ordination, Hugh's priestly ideals receive a similar dash of cold water in the form of it despotic pastor. At this point, however, Hugh and Ralph part company.
Greeley becomes our Virgil, guiding us through the various levels of his protagonist's personal inferno. Hugh begins by indulging his lust for the wife of one of his parishioners. He then cooperates with some members of the parish in the somewhat treacherous (but perhaps justifiable) undoing of the pastor. Next he tumbles into bed with Sister Elizabeth, a member of the parish staff, who subsequently gets "in the family way." Liz's pregnancy forces Hugh to leave the active ministry, marry her, and take up a new career as a commodities trader on the Chicago Board of Trade.
Now things really begin to get nasty. The decline of Hugh's marriage
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is proportional to his rise as a commodities trader. He engages in a vicious, vengeful battle with another trader (the same man he cuckolded earlier), ruthlessly plotting his demise and not resting content until he has ruined the fellow's fortune and destroyed his morale. (He achieves the latter by carrying on simultaneous affairs with the man's wife and daughter.) As the story progresses, Hugh loses touch with his family, his friends, his church, and ultimately with himself. The nadir of his dramatic declension is a stint in a Federal Correctional Institution for playing fast and loose with the Futures Trading Act.
Brought so low that he seems to lack the wherewithal to utter even a De Profundis, Hugh is granted salvation in the form of a woman, a Beatrice to aid him in his ascent out of the pit. Maria, the love of his youth, manages to save Hugh legally, personally, morally, and theologically.
This remarkable plot represents a kind of hodgepodge of St. John, Dante, Freud, and Sidney Sheldon. It is the same kind of formula that Greeley found so successful in his earlier novels. Readers of this kind of fiction seem to have an insatiable appetite for family intrigue, sex, and revenge, and Greeley dutifully serves up good measures of all three. Lest I seem to be indulging in Grundyism, I would hasten to agree with Greeley's own contention that the sexual content in his novels is hardly "steamy" or offensive. More often, it resembles the amusingly harmless eroticism of those ubiquitous drugstore "romances" that specialize in a type of sexual metonymy (for example, Greeley's description of Sean Cronin with "his robe pulled tight around his long, hard body"). In his treatment of emotionally or sexually charged moments, Greeley displays a disconcerting penchant for the hackneyed expression (the phrase "time stood still" appears in all his novels). By the time readers get through Greeley's third novel, even the sexual situations exhibit a weary repetitiveness. We encounter topless women on exotic beaches, men sexually involved with married women and their teenage daughters, copulating couples caught (or very nearly caught) in flagrante delicto. Measured by contemporary standards, the sexual gymnastics portrayed in these tales seem fairly tame, as Greeley himself asserts; but the fact that one of the participants is often a priest gives them added piquancy.
I suppose Greeley would say about all his priest protagonists what he said about Ralph de Bricassart of The Thorn Birds: lust is not the "deadliest" of sins that might afflict a priest. It's just that so many people (perhaps Catholics in particular) have been brought up to view sexual sins as especially grievous. We might grant Greeley his point about the need to change this somewhat warped moral perspective, but it can hardly be denied that lust in a fictional character is a felix culpa when it comes to selling books. Why else would Greeley let the Literary Guild warn readers about "explicit sex" in these novels when he has argued that they are really rather tame?
This is not to say that the sexual content is gratuitous, put there merely to grab the typical reader of best-selling fiction. Like so many
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other elements in these novels, it has a didactic purpose. It shows that celibate priests are not drab, black-suited eunuchs; they have feelings, desires, fantasies-just like the rest of us. If they did not, celibacy would be no challenge, no true sign of the kingdom that transcends our earthly life. End of sermon.
V
The didactic impulse obtrudes in other ways. Greeley has striven more mightily than anyone since Graham Greene to depict a character impervious to the working of God's grace. Hugh, in his postlapsarian state, makes Pinkie Brown look like a choirboy. The "whiskey priest" pales in comparison to this moral monster created by Greeley. This portrayal, of course, is necessary for Greeley to achieve the "grace-full" surprise of his ending, but one gets the feeling that the doctrine of First Grace gets the upper hand to such an extent that the characterization becomes flawed. Hugh ceases to be a character in a novel and becomes an allegorical type: depraved humanity, hopeless sinner.
Yet there is something passing strange about this flawed priest. Even as his personal life is going to hell in a handcart, he is able to minister to those around him. In fact, the reader is given the impression that Hugh, in or out of the active ministry, is the only sensible, compassionate priest in the Chicago archdiocese-perhaps even the country (he does a bit of jet-setting ministry to a couple on the west coast). This ex-priest can't communicate with his troubled wife, yet people are constantly coming to him for advice and absolution. Although Greeley does not explain this in a personal note (as is his wont), the message here probably has something to do with the concept of the minister as "wounded healer."
The notion of the priest as an all too fragile earthen vessel is a poignant theme, but in this case Greeley stretches the ex opere operato dictum to the breaking point. It seems somewhat incongruous that this person who has deliberately distanced himself from his former ecclesiastical associations is nonetheless able to quote specific items from the Code of Canon Law and seems to have memorized the important decrees of all the major councils. Even more incongruous is the fact that no one in the novel seems to notice Hugh's moral bankruptcy. His archbishop, Cardinal ("just-call-me-Sean") Cronin (whom the reader may remember from an earlier Greeley novel) asks Hugh to get his marriage annulled and get back into the active ministry-no questions asked. Highly unlikely. But Greeley probably feels that what he loses in verisimilitude, he gains back in the nice analogy to the free, "no-strings-attached" gift of God's gracious forgiveness and acceptance.
The same problems with characterization occur with other figures in the novel. Sister Elizabeth represents a "trendy" nun, a species that Greeley lampoons with evident relish. But Greeley's portrayal is so heavy-handed that Liz becomes simply unbelievable. Here is an example of her post-coital conversation: "But, Hugh, these weekends of love can't go on forever. We both have responsibilities. We've committed
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ourselves to making the world a better place, bringing peace and justice to the oppressed, lifting the burdens of the poor, making the church relevant again to the people of God." If all lovers talked like that, Greeley wouldn't have to worry a bit about the negative effects of Humanae Vitae.
Too often in Ascent into Hell the novelist disappears to be replaced by the pastoral theologian, the ecclesiastical critic, or the observant sociologist. I have been reading Greeley since the sixties when my parish priest lent me a copy of Uncertain Trumpet. Like so many other readers of his books and syndicated columns, I feel as if I know his views on almost everything. (The joke that made the rounds when Greeley's first novel was published went something like this: "He's published all his thoughts, now he's starting on his fantasies.")
Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for me to read one of his novels without being distracted by that background noise of grinding axes. All the favorite targets get worked over again. My problem here is not ideological; for what it's worth, I agree with Greeley more often than not. But that's not the point. As a reader of fiction, I do not want to be continually interrupted by a familiar voice from outside the novel. Yet as I read all three of these novels I frequently found myself shaking my head and saying, "There's good old Andy again."
VI
One of the more persistent messages conveyed by Greeley's fiction is that the church needs to acknowledge what might be called the "feminine" attributes of the deity. In his first three novels, one or another of the characters is touched by a "Presence" that is invariably female. This dea ex machina usually serves the purpose of getting the afflicted character back on the right spiritual track, the same role played by most of the women in these stories. They serve as moral and spiritual touchstones for the men (usually priests), who never seem to be able to get it into their heads that God is loving, nourishing, and forgiving -something that women know instinctively. It almost seems that women function only as life preservers for these significant men, salvaging them so that they might continue their important work in the church. But Greeley is careful to give them meaningful careers to pursue (senator, bank executive, author, painter) when they are not engaging in their avocation of rescuing imperiled presbyters. Again, one can scarcely deny that this perspective is a refreshing one, a necessary corrective for the church whose outlook on spiritual matters has been excessively male-dominated. One can, however, wish that this perspective might flow from the fiction itself and be integrated more carefully into the fabric of the tale.
Greeley and O'Donovan both tell a good story. One would not expect anything less from two Irishmen who so obviously possess the gift of gab. Both of these novelists deal with a subject that seems to be perpetually fascinating: the struggle of an all too human priest to live up to promises
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that make him a sign of a transcendent reality. It is a vocation that seems to have a built-in dramatic tension; in fact, Greeley likes to argue that it is part of a priest's vocation to be "fascinating," since he represents a surprising, mysterious God. But this subject matter has its pitfalls too, chief among which is the almost irresistible urge to wax homiletic.
Of the two novelists, Greeley succumbs much more frequently to this temptation. He is so intent on conveying the message that he fails to trust his own ability to tell a tale. Ascent into Hell, like Greeley's earlier efforts, contains a personal note of explanation, lest anyone (especially Catholic critics) miss the symbols that tie the story together. This version of the heresy of paraphrase is particularly annoying in view of the fact that Greeley wants his work to be viewed as a "Parable of Grace." Surely he knows that a good parable, like a good joke, loses its punch if it has to be "explained" after it's been told. (The scriptural proof of this is the tacked-on, allegorizing "interpretation" of the Parable of the Seed.) But Greeley insists on spelling out in detail the doctrinal basis of his story in "A Personal Afterword," as if the reader needed to be hit over the head one last time.
If a preacher can tell a good story, so much the better; the message will be conveyed more forcefully. But storytellers should not be preachers. Perhaps Greeley could take his cue from that masterful spinner of parables who seemed to trust the power of his story enough to simply say, "Let those who have ears hear."
VII
Earlier in this article, two questions were raised about priests as authors and fictional characters. One question pertained to the passion for explanation that seems to characterize these novels; the other asked why these clerical protagonists are so compelling to readers of fiction. It strikes me that the first question is partially explained by the fact that these novels often represent the author's apologia pro vita sua (especially when the author is a priest). The novels of both O'Donovan and Greeley seem to be quasi-autobiographical attempts to justify or explain certain aspects of priestly ministry or the life of the church. Greeley takes this a step further in his personal notes by explaining more explicitly what he has already expressed in none-too-subtle fashion in the novel. What if people should miss the point or, even worse, get the wrong idea? It is, alas, exceedingly difficult to shun the sermonic tone when the subject matter strikes so close to home. I find that O'Donovan has been more successful than Greeley in this regard.
The other question deals with the perennial fascination of clerical characters. There is something about these people-Hawthorne's Dimmesdale, Zola's Father Mouret, Greene's "whiskey priest," and the characters of O'Donovan, McCullough, and Greeley-that strikes a responsive chord in the reader. Perhaps it is because the passions that afflict us all-lust, greed, envy, and excessive ambition-seem wrought
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to a higher and more dramatic pitch when portrayed in the lives of people who have made a public commitment to preach and live the Word of God. Their catastrophe, their fall from grace, is more startling and more poignant because they are viewed (unfairly?) as occupying a higher moral ground ("Lilies that fester..."). Our response to such characters may be voyeuristic ("how do priests and ministers deal with temptation?"), censorious ("serves them right, the self-righteous prigs"), or sympathetic ("they are grappling with the same demons all of us wrestle with"), but it is rarely non-committal.
These stories do have a peculiar attraction. Maybe we identify instinctively with these spiritual heroes with feet of clay because they represent a disturbing and paradoxical reality that can never truly be "explained," a reality with which all of us are familiar: the bittersweet conjunction of noble aspiration and human frailty. In this sense, perhaps we can say, "there's a priest inside everyone of us."