Bad Catholic Reading

The Bad Catholic discusses Rumer Godden's 1979 novel Five For Sorrow, Ten For Joy at The Eclectic Reader.

Rumer Godden (1907 - 1998)

Bad Catholic Reading

The Bad Catholic discusses Ralph McInerny's 1983 novel Connolly's Life at The Eclectic Reader.

BRIGHTON ROCK

In trying to catch up on my reading, I just finished Graham Greene’s classic Brighton Rock first published in 1938. The Heart of the Matter left me unsettled, but I really don’t know what I think about this book.

The title refers to hard candy sold at the beach in the town of Brighton in England. Brighton Rock is the story of a teenage gangster named Pinkie Brown, his hapless girlfriend Rose, and a busybody named Ida Arnold. Sound like a bizarre plot? Well, Brighton Rock is a bizarre book.

The plot of Brighton Rock is readily available elsewhere on the internet so I won’t bother everyone with it here. What I want to focus on are the much heralded theological aspects of the novel. Brighton Rock is considered to be one of Greene’s “Catholic Novels,” the others of which are The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Power and the Glory. Although Greene habitually throws in some reference to the Church or Catholicism in his thrillers and “entertainments,” like the daughter who goes to Catholic school and says her rosary in Our Man in Havana.

Greene has said that when he started writing Brighton Rock he intended it to be a conventional thriller or detective story, hence the exciting opening chapter which describes a chase and a murder. The novel’s famous opening line sets the stage for what follows:

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”

Hale is indeed murdered. At Hale’s sparsely attended funeral, the Anglican priest mouths the platitudes of modern religion of the “I’m OK, You’re OK, God’s OK” type:

‘Our belief in heaven,’ the clergyman went on, ‘is not qualified by our disbelief in the old medieval hell. We believe,’ he said, glancing swiftly along the smooth polished slipway towards the New Art doors through which the coffin would be launched into the flames, ‘we believe that this our brother is already at one with the One.’ He stamped his words like little pats of butter with his personal mark. ‘He has attained unity. We do not know what that One is with whom (or with which) he is now at one. We do not retain the old medieval beliefs in glassy seas and golden crowns. Truth is beauty and there is more beauty for us, a truth-loving generation, in the certainty that our brother is at this moment re-absorbed in the universal spirit.’

It astounds me that Greene was already able to poke fun at New Age babble like this in the late 1930's. This kind of stuff sounds good but has no real content. This is not a religion that a person will give his life for.

Ida Arnold, who was a woman that Hale picked up in an attempt to avoid being killed, becomes obsessed with finding Hale’s killer and bringing him to justice. Ida represents the modern person. She has no religious beliefs to speak of, she just believes in “right and wrong.” However, Ida finds no fault in anything which brings her pleasure. Ida sees nothing wrong with casual sex, for instance. “It’s natural” she says, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

“She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers.”

So while “the good guys” in this novel are not religious, “the bad guys” are very religious. Hale’s killer Pinkie was reared as a Roman Catholic, sings parts of the Mass to himself, and believes in all of the doctrines of the Church. Outside of the fact that Pinkie is also an evil psychopathic killer, he’s not a bad bloke.

Pinkie believes in Hell and knows that when he dies in a state of mortal sin that he will certainly go to it. In the back of his mind, Pinkie hopes that he’ll be able to make a confession and be granted absolution before his death. If Pinkie dies and goes to Hell in the meantime, well, as they said in The Godfather, it ain’t personal, it’s just business.

Pinkie kills Hale for being involved with the murder of the gang leader Kite. Then he kills a member of the gang named Spicer so that Spicer can’t talk. Pinkie seduces the hapless Rose, a 16 year old waitress in a greasy spoon who can give incriminating testimony against Pinkie, and convinces her to marry him.

Rose is also a Roman Catholic. Before their civil marriage ceremony, Rose goes off to confession but then realizes that marrying Pinkie in a civil ceremony outside the Church is a mortal sin so it doesn’t make any difference anyway. Rose and Pinkie are very moral in a bizarre kind of way. Rose knows that Pinkie is a murderer, but makes a conscious decision to go to Hell with him.

Although neither Pinkie or Rose believe that their civil marriage is valid in the eyes of God, they refrain from sex until they are married. In fact, Pinkie has a revulsion of the entire idea of sexual intimacy from listening to his parents make love through the thin walls of a poor tenement apartment. Pinkie says that listening to his parents in their bedroom disgusted him so much that he swore he would become a priest. However, when the time comes on the wedding night, Pinkie overcomes his disgust and does his duty.

Since Rose is convinced that she is going to Hell by living in sin with Pinkie anyway, she is ready to commit the ultimate mortal sin by taking her own life when Pinkie asks her to. Rose winds up throwing the gun she is supposed to kill herself with away and Pinkie accidentally splatters acid all over his face (in grim preview of where his soul is headed) before he plunges over a cliff and dies to avoid capture by the police.

If any of the above makes sense to you, then you may be either (1) a deranged lunatic, (2) a Graham Greene fan, (3) a Catholic, or (4) all of the above.

Greene seemed to be obsessed with mortal sin and damnation. This led George Orwell to famously opine that Greene apparently viewed Hell as an exclusive high class nightclub open only to Catholics.

I can’t really say that I enjoyed reading Brighton Rock, but it certainly provided much food for thought. Graham Greene was a one of a kind author. It may just be that Brighton Rock is a great work of literature.



Pinkie & Rose in a film version of Brighton Rock



Graham Greene

Flannery O'Connor As Catholic Novelist

A very interesting article about Flannery O'Connor as a Catholic novelist.

Some Catholic Writers

I have an addiction. I admit it. I am a bibliophile. I love books. I love to buy them, feel them, stack them, hoard them, and occasionally read them.

For my holiday reading, I just finished a book about other books. Of course, one danger of reading books about books is that it makes one want to go out and acquire more books.

The book is SOME CATHOLIC WRITERS by Notre Dame's Professor RALPH MCINERNY. McInerny is himself a Catholic Writer being the author of many novels as well as scholarly works. Professor McInerny is perhaps best known for the FATHER DOWLING series of mystery novels.

In SOME CATHOLIC WRITERS, Professor McInerny profiles 35 writers all of which were at least nominally Catholic, fallen away Catholic, or in the case of one non-Catholic, had what McInerny considers a Catholic sensibility.

All the usual suspects are here: FLANNERY O'CONNOR, WALKER PERCY, G.K. CHESTERTON, HILLAIRE BELLOC, ROBERT HUGH BENSON, GEORGES BERNANOS, ETIENNE GILSON, GRAHAM GREENE, JACQUES & RAISSA MARITAIN, THOMAS MERTON, J.F. POWERS, EVELYN WAUGH and others. There are also some surprises. Professor McInerny has included JAMES JOYCE, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD and ANTHONY BURGESS among his Catholic writers. Although Joyce and Burgess, the author of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, were fallen away Catholics who had renounced their faith, McInerny says that their Catholic upbringing informed their writing and haunted their lives. Professor McInerny also thinks that a Catholic sensibility informs the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Also surprising is the inclusion of a non-Catholic, WILLA CATHER. McInerny believes that Cather's novels DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP and SHADOWS ON THE ROCK are two of the best American "Catholic novels." Professor McInerny also debunks the post-modern revisionist view of Cather as a lesbian. In the same vein, Professor McInerny criticizes the view of KATE CHOPIN's controversial novel THE AWAKENING as a proto radical feminist tract. THE AWAKENING ruined CHOPIN'S career as a novelist when it was published in the late 19th century because of its frank descriptions of female sexuality. McInerny says that CHOPIN was an orthodox Catholic and that her novel is really about the effects of the sin of adultery.

SOME CATHOLIC WRITERS packs a tremendous amount of information into only 154 short pages. This is a great read for anyone looking for insight into Catholic literature and Catholic culture.

The Priest

I just finished reading THE PRIEST by Ralph McInerny. Although this novel is 37 years old (being published in 1973) and is set 41 years ago (in 1968), the book was new to me and I enjoyed it immensely.

Ralph McInerny was for many years the professor of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Over the years, he has also written many novels the most famous of which are the Father Dowling mysteries. Early in his career as a novelist, McInerny set out to write "serious" fiction. THE PRIEST is one of his efforts at a "serious" novel. This book was also a best seller when it was first published in the early seventies.

THE PRIEST is set in 1968 in the fictional diocese of Fort Elbow, Ohio. The priest of the title is Father Frank Ascue, an up and coming young priest and scholar who, after being the best and brightest at the local seminary, has just completed his Doctorate of Sacred Theology in Rome. Father Ascue returns to Fort Elbow expecting to be appointed to the seminary faculty. Instead he is assigned by the Bishop to be the second assistant at an inner city parish. THE PRIEST is full of plots and subplots. McInerny writes from multiple points of view and introduces us to many characters all of whom have some connection with Father Ascue.

The novel concerns the crises and turmoil in the church and in American society at large in the late 1960s. As George Orwell famously said of Graham Greene, "there is a tendency for people to go to bed together almost at sight and with no apparent pleasure to either party." Sex is uppermost in everyone's mind, as it seems that it still is in real life. A large subplot involves Father Frank's sister Charlotte, who is organizing protests against Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church's traditional stand against birth control. Despite the teachings of the Church, which everyone expects to be changed, Charlotte has started using the pill. Now Charlotte and her husband, Howard, can make love every night without worrying about pregnancy. Sex has been totally divorced from reproduction. Remember the old saying "familarity breeds contempt." Howard becomes bored with Charlotte and begins having an affair with a young client who is not much older than Charlotte and Howard's 19 year old daughter.

Clerical celibacy is very much an issue in this book. A hippie priest, Phil Bullard, seduces and then marries a nun, Sister Eloise. All this after Father Phil has already had an affair with another woman and asked to be laicized. Father Phil is depicted as the crusading liberal who blocks the entrance to the draft board, a la Daniel Berrigan. Phil and Eloise are married by another radical left wing priest who teaches at the seminary and after being suspended from the priesthood, hooks up with the flaming homosexual philosophy professor from the local college. In the meantime, Father Frank's niece, Barbara, has gotten herself pregnant by a seminarian from the local seminary who is struggling with his vocation. Frank and Charlotte decide that the best thing to do is to procure their daughter an abortion. When Father Frank fails to oppose his sister and brother in law's plans to abort their grandchild, Frank has a crisis of faith.

There are other subplots. There is an entire subplot involving the auxilary Bishop of the Diocese who is a political opportunist and will be a radical liberal when it gets him power and will become a total conformist when that advances his career.

In other words, THE PRIEST, although it is about serious issues, is a giant soap opera. I had great fun reading it. This book has been out of print for years, however, a search on the internet looks like copies are readily available.