Dogma and Beauty

Shortly after Robert Lowell’s conversion to Catholicism in1941, he announced to his horrified wife, Jean Stafford, a lapsed Catholic,that he was instituting a new household regimen. Lowell’s biographer IanHamilton described it as “Mass in the morning, benediction in the evening, tworosaries a day. Reading matter was vetted for its ‘seriousness’—‘no newspapers,no novels except Dostoevsky, Proust, James and Tolstoy.’”

Lowell, unlike many Catholic writers nowadays, did not fretover a lack of literary coreligionists—the ­giants of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth century apparently sufficed for him. Today, though, many argue forthe value of contemporaneous voices of faith.

In this magazine, the novelist ­Randy Boyagoda has called onCatholics to “continue to have faith in fiction” and to stop relying on the oldstandard bearers such as Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. The poet DanaGioia has urged Catholic writers to “renovate and reoccupy” their tradition,which, he argues, has fallen into disrepair. Both worry over a failure to findworthwhile contemporary novels written by what Boyagoda calls “religiouslyminded literary professionals.”

Nicholas Ripatrazone does not share his peers’ concern. TheFine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature was written before­Boyagoda’s and Gioia’s essays appeared, but it reads like a distinctive Non! to their assertions. He surveys Catholic literature from the end of VaticanII to the present and finds dynamic writers with “personal visions of faithfueled by idiosyncratic passion rather than orthodoxy.” These post­conciliarworks, in his view, are “particularly ripe for pastoral application andpersonal reflection.”

The Fine Delight takes a closer look at a number oflesser-known contemporary Catholic writers, including Paul Lisicky, Joe Bonomo,and Kaya Oakes. But the bulk of the book is devoted to three names that aremore familiar: novelist Ron ­Hansen, the late short-story writer Andre Dubus,and poet Paul ­Mariani.

Ripatrazone’s strength lies in a close textual analysis ofsignificant works. In the chapter “A Literary Sacrament,” he illustratesDubus’s talent for peeling back the fabric of ordinary life to reveal theworkings of grace and mercy. His close ­investigations into Mariani’s poetryreveal a similar ability to “sacramentalize the mundane.”

In his introduction, Ripatrazone mentions “Where Have Allthe Catholic Writers Gone?,” an essay I wrote in 2011 for the literary website The Millions, where I offered as a possible explanation for the shortage ofcontemporary writers of faith the postconciliar fadeout of the traditionalLatin Mass. I wondered if the ­wider use of the traditional Latin Mass afterPope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum might one dayinspire a new generation of Anglo-­American Catholic writers of the caliber ofWaugh, Greene, and Percy.

Ripatrazone wrote The Fine Delight in part as aresponse to my article, he says, but he is less concerned with highlighting theartistry of contemporary Catholic writers than with proving that theirintention is to critique the preconciliar Catholic Church as epitomized by theTridentine Mass and the use of Latin.

Convinced that the traditional Latin Mass was the primereason for lay passivity, confusion, and clerical authoritarianism, hisargument is perhaps more theological than literary. “The paradox of Latin Massis the paradox of sustained misunderstanding,” he writes. And later: “Thelanguage of Latin Mass was only understood by the top-heavy minority of clergy,and those steeped in religious education, rather than the lay ­majority.”

Ripatrazone devotes considerable attention to Ron Hansen’s1991 novel Mariette in Ecstasy, which he sees as “a postconciliar methodto regain lay participation in the mechanisms of the Church.” This themereturns. In a description of the writer Andre Dubus, we are told, “Therelationship between Dubus and his father, then, feels comfortably preconciliar:he is shy with the older man, but their silence goes deeper.” Later Ripatrazoneasks, “Would The End [by Salvatore Scibona] ever appear on a parishreading list? It should. Yet the path toward necessary pastoral literarydiversity is a long one.”

I can’t remember ever witnessing a personal relationship I’ddescribe as either “preconciliar” or “postconciliar,” nor can I imagine what aparish reading list marked by “necessary pastoral literary diversity” wouldlook like. (I, for one, would stick with Robert Lowell’s reading regimen.)

Ripatrazone writes of Dubus that his “postconciliarsentiment does not reject the machinations of the Church in sustaining andsharing the Holy Spirit, but it does decenter that institution, finding thelove of God as capable in the hands of the laity as in the religious.”Throughout the book, “laity involvement” means a desire for less episcopalauthority, a diminution of the sacramental priesthood, and a conviction thatthe special place accorded to Latin in the liturgy and in the universal Churchis a threat to “the Spirit of Vatican II.”

Ripatrazone draws a dichotomy also between dogma and thefaithful’s aesthetic experience of Catholicism. Anthony Carelli’s Carnations,a book of poetry, “reads as written by a Catholic formed by the language andritual of faith more than the office of the Church.” Paul Mariani’s poem “SolarIce,” which centers on a Mass, has a “preconciliar” feel, as a “cleardemarcation of place and hierarchy exists between the priest, who is titled theequivalent of God rather than his profession, and the lay congregation.”

Ripatrazone also insists that Catholic postconciliarliterature can and should serve “pastoral” purposes. Kaya Oakes’ memoir RadicalReinvention , for example, “is a pastorally instructive testament toauthentic religious reconsideration.”

Oakes teaches, among other things, that “you can be Catholicand believe in better access to birth control” and that the Church is “awful atunderstanding what it means to be a woman, or to be gay.” What pastoral valuedo Oakes’ opinions actually have? For one thing, are they true? Can you reallybe in communion with the Catholic Church and support artificial contraception?And is it fair to say the Church is “awful” at understanding the condition ofwomen or persons with same-sex attraction?

I share Ripatrazone’s admiration for the work of Hansen,Dubus, and Mariani, but it’s difficult to think of enlisting their books forexplicating doctrine and liturgy in order to further “the care of souls.” Callme unimaginative, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church could aid thepastoral duties of a lay catechist far more than could tough-guy programfiction from Andre Dubus.

In the ongoing discussion of Catholic literature today, thebasic question is whether Catholic writers actually need the Church, andnot just any church, but the full-on, countercultural Catholic Church with itsmagisterial teachings intact. In his “Letter to Artists,” John Paul II admittedthat the notion that art needs the Church today “may seem like a provocation”but expressed hope for continuing the “mutual spiritual enrichment” Christianartists and the Church have enjoyed for centuries.

Yet almost five decades after Vatican II, many Catholicwriters, as ­Ripatrazone documents, want a Church far different from the one wecurrently have. It does not diminish the achievements of these writers to notethat embracing orthodoxy is psychically different from living (andwriting) as a lapsed or cafeteria ­Catholic.

One can’t help but wonder if the return of a sacramental,and especially a liturgical, rigor in the Church might ease both the real andthe perceived opposition between what the Church teaches and how thefaithful—and that includes fiction writers—receive and live out those teachingsin marriage, at work, and ultimately in the creation of literature.

RobertFay is a writer living in California.