How does a wooden puppet become a real boy? How does one tame a wild boy full of spirit? When does a boy become a man?  What is the art of educating the young to become refined and civilized?  Pinocchio shows that the wooden puppet—stubborn, slothful, and  thankless–deserves the honor of boyhood when he acquires not only certain virtues like honesty, obedience, docility, and industriousness but also the virtues of the heart—a grateful heart, a kind heart, a caring heart, a devoted heart, and a charitable heart. These old-world Christian ideals Geppetto struggles to instill in the puppet—the boy who never studies, constantly breaks his promises, is always running away, ignoring good advice, and constantly begging for food.  Pinocchio cannot gain the status of real boy unless he learns self-control, appreciates the goodness of Geppetto and the love of the fairy mother, and honors the timeless truths of proverbial wisdom that Geppetto strives to teach him.

These traditional sayings recur throughout the book: “disobedient children never do any good in this world”; lazy boys who never study become donkeys; beware of evil companions; “only the aged and crippled have a right to beg”; “remember that every man, rich or poor, must find something to do in this world”; and “hunger is the best cook.” The wooden son impervious to his father’s wisdom acts insolent to Geppetto; an idle Pinocchio makes excuses to avoid study and prefers to beg for food rather than work for his bread; the self-indulgent boy is easily tempted by idle amusements and evil companions that divert him from school and cheat him of his money; and the fastidious boy famished for food refuses to eat pears unless peeled. These are the traits of the wooden, obtuse puppet that changes into the real boy once he learns the invaluable lessons that Geppetto’s traditional wisdom offers youth.

The first lesson instructs the puppet in the law of moral consequences; a law that Pinocchio assumes does not exist or does not apply to him. Defying the proverbial truths, Pinocchio learns their lessons from the pain of experience rather than from respect for authority.  Hanging on a nail on a tree, caught in an animal trap, confined to a doghouse, stuck in mud, and locked in jail, Pinocchio confesses, “How many dreadful things have happened to me! And I deserved them, for I am obstinate as a mule.” Later rather than sooner Pinocchio eventually comprehends the law of consequences that leads him to the truths of the moral life. Disobeying authority and defying rules to do as he wishes and to enjoy complete freedom, Pinocchio—always running away from home—soon finds himself with a collar in a doghouse where he acknowledges another hard truth he has been evading: “If I had been willing to study and to work, if I stayed home with my poor father—I would not be here now in this lonely place, working as a watchdog for a peasant.” Pinocchio must recognize the eternal law of cause of effect that governs the moral life as well as the physical world.

Another lesson that wisdom offers youth is a sense of appreciation for the true value of precious things. Geppetto sells his only winter coat to purchase Pinocchio the primer he needs for school, but the puppet then sells this costly book to go to the puppet show while “Geppetto stayed at home shivering in his shirt sleeves.” When Fire-eater the Showman learns of Gepetto’s poverty and sacrifice for his son, he offers five gold coins for Pinocchio as a gift to his father—money that Pinocchio entrusts to the Fox and Cat who tempt him to bury it in the Field of Miracles where he is told it will multiply—Pinocchio ignoring the Cricket’s warning: “Go back home, and carry the four gold pieces you have left to your poor father, who is weeping and longing for you.” Pinocchio neither appreciates the food on the table when he refuses to eat the  pears nor the value of an education which he abandons to travel to Playland that lures him with the promise of no schools, no books, no masters, and a week with six Saturdays and one Sunday. When boys do not appreciate their fathers and mothers and the blessings of food, education, and love, they turn to doltish, brutish donkeys that have lost all refinement and sensitivity. Without the ability to tell the difference between a father and mother’s loving advice and the foolish counsel of idle companions, Pinocchio’s hard woodenness remains adamant.

However, Pinocchio finally becomes a real boy when he appreciates the patience and forgiveness of his father and mother that melt his heart. He eventually values the gift of their timeless wisdom that he sees proven by his wayward life. After nearly losing his father who is searching the seas for his lost son, Pinocchio finds Geppetto in the stomach of the shark and leads him out of the mouth, the young boy carrying the old man who cannot swim on his back: “You can come on my back, and I’ll carry you safely to the shore”— a gesture reminiscent of pious Aeneas with the weight of his father Anchises on his back as they flee from the burning of Troy. The boy who refused to study or to work engages in manual labor and weaves baskets to provide a cup of milk to this father. The puppet who put pleasure above duty and sold or lost precious gifts for idle amusements resolves, “I’ve worked until now for my father; from now on, I’ll work five hours longer every day for my kind mother.” Like pious Aeneas devoted to his aging father and like the Homeric heroes who find their lives incomplete until they repay their parents for their loving care, Pinocchio acknowledges his indebtedness and demonstrates his sense of appreciation by acquiring a good heart—the greatest lesson Geppetto and the Fairy instill in their puppet-boy. As the Fairy congratulates Pinocchio when the puppet becomes the real boy, “In return for your good heart, I forgive you all your past misdeeds. Children who love their parents, and help them when they are sick and poor, are worthy of praise and love . . . .”

The civilizing education of the home and  devotion of a loving father and mother that pass on the wisdom and moral ideals of  the ages change wooden puppets into grateful boys, grateful boys into generous men, and generous men into noble heroes with sacrificing hearts.

“The Traditional Mass is not a spectator sport.”

The statement rings out like a shot in the quiet, muggy, non-descript church. Oscillating fans buzz from various strategic locations. Incense wafts up from the thurible tucked away to the right of the altar. The congregants sit quietly, attentive. The women’s heads are covered, and everyone is dressed modestly. Nobody throws holy water at the rather oddly-garbed priest standing at the pulpit. Nobody gets up and indignantly walks out. It’s only my third time at the Priory of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but I already know that as far as Traditional Latin Mass enclaves go, this place is different.

Don Daniel Augustine Oppenheimer has made the statement confidently, peering intently over his small, frameless glasses at the small group of assembled faithful before him. His tonsure is an anachronism that brings to mind the monks of old. His habit is distinctly Augustinian, although I initially mistake it for Dominican, because how many of us ever see a religious in a habit anymore? (Up close, you can see the wear and tear on the fabric, the quiet but telltale signs of true vows of poverty.) His comfortable-looking cork and leather sandals are, I surmise, probably worn in the cold months of the year as well as the warm.  His face is kind, his manner of speaking academic. Referencing his desire for the faithful to participate in the Offertory chant and instructing them how to do so, he is making a case that I’ve never heard in eight years attending the traditional Latin liturgy of the Roman Rite.

“Historically, liturgically,” he says, “the people have participated in the Mass. When they stopped participating, the old Mass went away. And by then, it was in such a state that nobody missed it.”

The Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem - Don Oppenheimer’s fledgling clerical institute of consecrated life – were established in 2002 by then-Bishop Raymond Burke in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. What ensued was a nine year search by the Canons for a permanent home. When I discovered them, the CRNJs had recently been received by Bishop Michael Bransfield of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, WV. They began offering the sacred liturgy at the former St. James’ parish in Charles Town, WV, on Palm Sunday, 2011. One trip to the monastery cemented it as the most edifying place of worship I’ve yet discovered. By the time I was hearing Dom Daniel’s thoughts about the proper role of the faithful in the traditional liturgy, I was hooked. This – this – was what I had been looking for all these years.

The Canons exemplify what a sustainable traditional movement should look like. Although the order is tiny – only one priest and two seminarians – when you’re around them, you can’t help feeling like something big and important is happening.

“We celebrate the traditional liturgy with great joy.” This statement, another part of Dom Daniel’s sermon, helps me put my finger on what is so different. Never known for our collective charisma or charm, those who self-identify as “Traditionalist” can often be about as much fun as a leaky bottle of lemon juice at a paper cut party. This is ironic when you consider that we believe the traditional Catholic experience is a “pearl of great price.” We should, therefore (if there’s any sense in the world) be a pretty happy, personable lot. And to be fair, I’d say that a good many of us are. Nevertheless, it only takes one bad egg to spoil the batch, and we’ve got dozens. Consequently, our bad reputation persists.

This is why seeing this kind of Christian joy in action in a monastic community that opens its doors to public worship is something else entirely. For starters, the monks – Dom Daniel, Frater John, Frater Alban – are so noticeably kind. At the conclusion of Mass, they mingle with the faithful, whom they take the time to get to know by name. They sell produce, and fresh baked breads, employing monastic industry to support their work. And if you forgot your wallet? No worries. They’ll probably spot you a loaf. They remember not only who you are, but what is going on in your life, and when they say they’re praying for your intentions, you get the feeling that they mean that they’re doing so with great specificity.

What this does is create a sense of community – something that I have found to be lacking in many traditional parishes I’ve attended or visited. Often times, the Traditional Latin Mass is attended by people from every far corner of the geographic area, creating a loose federation of individuals that know each other by face or even by name, but have little in the way of a sense of real common bond. It’s a lovely thing to have coffee and donuts in a Church basement as a means of socializing with your fellow parishioners, but it’s a different thing entirely when a priest and his confrères make you feel as though you’re a part of something more cohesive and organic.

This communal aspect is almost familial, and is rooted first and foremost in the liturgical experience. The CRNJs believe in a participatio actuosa that is neither the frenetic, hand-holding around the altar experience of many post-Vatican II parishes, nor the austere, entirely interior participation of those more inclined to chapels of the Society of St. Pius X. It is a human, natural, anthropological form of worship, where one is engaged but not coddled, involved but never given the sense that it’s all about them.

The chants — which are beautiful, in a simple, country monastery kind of way—are sung antiphonally, meaning that the schola and the faithful alternate voices. The faithful are encouraged to join the altar boys in making the responses to the priest, since the reason the altar boys make those responses at all in the first place is to act as representatives of the faithful. These aspects of liturgical participation may not seem groundbreaking to anyone who has been raised on the Novus Ordo Missae, and will not even come as a surprise to those Eastern Rite Catholics nourished on the ancient liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, but to the average traditional Catholic, they are (seeming) innovations that border on scandalous.

Except that they are not innovations at all.

“The low Mass is not normative.” Dom Daniel explains to me. “It was never intended to be used this way. This liturgy we celebrate is designed for parish life.” And the liturgy he celebrates, by the way, isn’t quick – easily running 90 to 120 minutes every Sunday. Every Mass with the Canons is a High Mass, unless there are not enough members of the community physically present to assist in all the Mass parts.

If that sounds long to you, I suppose it is. But when there, one enters a sort of “sacred time” — an almost transcendental experience that feels as though it’s more of an eternal moment than a passage of minutes or hours. I would much rather spend two hours at a liturgy with the Canons than thirty minutes at a poorly said, silent-as-a-tomb low Mass. There’s no other way to explain my preference than to say that in the former, I encounter God; in the latter, I keep looking at my watch.

Dom Daniel likes to remind visitors to the Priory that they do things “by the book.” They are rubrically scrupulous to the 1962 Missal, even if that might cause shudders to anyone who carries around a tattered copy of Pope St. Pius V’s Quo Primum in their back pocket. Among devotees of the Gregorian Rite, there’s some controversy in the notion that the faithful should ever open their mouths, whether in prayer or in song, within the context of a Sunday liturgy.

Theologically, historically, you can brawl this one out to your heart’s content. I’ve seen evidence for both arguments. But common sense tells me that the “be seen and not heard” approach to liturgical participation is madness, invented by people who want Catholics to fall in line, not ask questions, and wear their complete docility on their sleeves. This is the kind of Catholicism that caused many of the faithful to abandon the Church in the mid-twentieth-century. Those fabled ruler-wielding nuns cracking the knuckles of anyone who dared think for themselves or struggled with a doctrine drove Catholics away from the Faith and into the arms of secular rationalism. I should know. My father was one of them. Luckily, he came back. Many didn’t.

People are people, and by their very nature they need to be a part of something to care about it. They need to find themselves invested. We worship God in community because no man in the Christian life is an island. We pray together because none of us were meant to go it alone. Finding a liturgy that is reverent is hard enough. Finding a liturgy that is reverent but also inclusive in a healthy, orthodox way is even more difficult. The Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem model this as part of a comprehensive approach to traditional Catholic spirituality. If the Traditional Latin Mass and sacraments are to not only be sustainable, but continue to grow, it’s the kind of model that more will have to follow.

The outrage over Dan’s Savage’s profanity laced lecture at a conference for high school journalism students has focused on his frontal attack on the Bible. This has diverted attention from Savage’s objective: promoting his “It gets better,” campaign, the purpose of which is to encourage confused and troubled teenagers to ‘come out’ and experiment with homosexuality.

Christians may be upset, but this hardly bothers Savage who is achieving his objective. His anti-Bible rants appeal to his target audience. He undermines the students’ faith, validates their rebellion against parents, and encourages sexual promiscuity. The raucous applause from the students, who didn’t walk out, shows that Savage’s remarks had the desired effect. Unfortunately, defending the scriptural prescriptions against homosexuality will only reinforce Savage’s message that Christians are anti-sex and that being gay or pro-gay is cool.

For decades, the gay activists and their allies have been engaged in a systematic campaign to get their propaganda into schools. First, they used parents’ fear of teen pregnancy to push for comprehensive sex education, which turned out to be pro-gay education. Then they used the AIDS epidemic to push pro-gay ‘safe-sex’ education. Now they are using bullying to launch a frontal attack on religion and push a pro-gay agenda. Dan Savage’s rant has only made explicit what has been implicit in pro-gay education from the beginning, namely that it is stridently anti-Christian.

Pro-gay education is based on fabrications and lies. For example, in spite of claims that persons with same-sex attraction (SSA) are ‘born that way’ and can’t change, there is no scientific evidence that to back up these assertions,[1] and plenty of evidence that SSA is rooted in early negative experiences[2] and that change is possible.[3] Many teenagers who think they might be “gay” discover later they aren’t.[4]

While Savage tells vulnerable teens experiencing SSA that “It gets better,” there is substantial, uncontroverted evidence that it doesn’t, and it could get a lot worse. Encouraging adolescent males to engage in sex with other men is a prescription for disaster. Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the gay community. Since 1981, 300,000 MSM have died of AIDS, and 6,000 are expected to die this year and every year for the foreseeable future. According to the CDC, in 2008, 17,940 MSM were diagnosed with HIV infections, an increase of 17% from 2005. MSM accounted for 53% of all new infections. MSM are 44 to 86 times more likely to be diagnosed HIV positive than men who don’t.[5] In addition 65 percent of all new cases of syphilis were found in MSM, although MSM make up less than 2% of the population. MSM are more likely to contract cancer, particularly Human Papilloma Virus caused anal and oral cancer; more likely to contract antibiotic resistant gonorrhea[6], and a host of other exotic sexually transmitted diseases.

Gay positive ‘safe sex’ education has failed. Adolescent MSM may promise themselves to always use a condom, but study after study reveals that very few MSM keep that promise.[7] They suffer from ‘condom fatigue.’ They have sex when they are drunk or high. In the heat of passion they lie about their HIV status. They don’t get tested when they know they are at risk.  The younger a man is when he begins to have sex with men the greater the risk he will become infected.[8]

The AIDS epidemic didn’t randomly strike the gay community. There was an epidemic of STDs among MSM before AIDS appeared. And those dealing with the pre-AIDS STD epidemic among MSM that the introduction of a new lethal pathogen would be disastrous. Tragically, they were right. What is worse, after the AIDS epidemic started, gay activists successfully sabotaged standard public health measures for control of STDS. They were more interested in preserving their sexual revolution, than saving lives. The history of the disaster was laid out by Randy Shilts (who died of the AIDS) in his book And the Band Played On.

And disease is not the only risk, boys who enter the gay scene are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, particularly crystal meth,[9] more likely to engage in prostitution or be victims of domestic violence.

The geeky, awkward adolescent, who thinks that coming out as gay will provide instant acceptance, will quickly discover that among gay men physical beauty is highly prized. In the sex crazed world of circuit parties and anonymous hook ups that characterizes gay life, the unattractive — even the just average — face repeated rejection.

And even the beautiful ones grow old. Consider the story of Bob Bergeron a handsome gay New Yorktherapist, who according to his friends had it all. He had just finished a book designed to provide positive advice to older gay men, The Right Side of Forty: The Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife and Beyond.  However, in January of this year a friend found him with a plastic bay over his head. He had been dead several days. His suicide note was written on the title page of his book. An arrow pointed to the name of the book, followed by the words: “It’s a lie based on bad information.” Unfortunately Bergson’s suicide is not an aberration. Gay and bisexual men are three times more likely to attempt suicide.[10]

Given the health consequences alone, pro-gay education presents an unacceptable risk –  a risk far greater than the problems it pretends to address – and its advocates – like Dan Savage – shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred yards of school. A pro-smoking or pro-pedophilia advocate would pose less danger.

I am following up a recent blogpost about China’s demographic decline.  This piece from the Economist shows that the inexorable rise of the Dragon will be hindered by its demographic Achilles heel.  According to the UN medium variant population projection, China’s population will dip to below 1.3 billion in 2050 (assuming that its very low fertility rate starts to recover).  However, if its fertility rate remains at about 1.5-1.6 children per women then China will have less than 1 billion people in 2060.  Thus, China can no longer be considered the factory of the world – its workforce will actually start to shrink in absolute terms after 2013.  If China wants to continue to supply its hungry factories with hands then it will need to look offshore for workers. Who knows what problems large scale immigration will bring to China, it is, after all, a country that does not have a history of integrating migrants in large numbers in recent times.

Here are some other demographic numbers where China is set to outperform the USA.  Apart from surpassing the USA in terms of manufactured output, car sales and energy use (and perhaps by 2017 in terms of economic size at purchasing-power parity) China will also by 2050 be much more advanced in terms of its median age. Half of China’s population will be below and half above the age of 49 in 2050, compared with the USA’s 40 years.  By 2050, the share of the population the over-65 age bracket in China will have grown 17.4 percentage points from 2010, whereas the same group in the USA will only have grown 8.1%.

In short, China is not having enough babies and its remaining population is getting old.  And with a growing number of Chinese elderly who cannot rely on their family for support, rest homes are in hot demand (according to this article, also from the Economist).  What is interesting is the role that NGOs, and particularly religious organisations, are taking on to provide these rest homes.  In Hangzhou, a city 180kms south west of Shanghai, 20% of the 33,000 beds for the elderly are provided by NGOs.  Because of the demand that the ageing population is creating for rest homes, the Chinese Government is starting to look for help – even from religious organisations that it is traditionally wary of.  Although it only applies to officially approved religious organisations, in late February the government issued a document that seemed to encourage religious groups to do charity work.

Is this a recognition that the one child policy is creating a problem that the Chinese Government can’t deal with? Who would have thought that ripping babies to shreds in their mother’s wombs while the mother is held unwilling on the operating table would turn out to have such bad consequences?

The sooner that China wakes up to its demographic malaise and rescinds this unjust one child policy the better.  We must continue to bang the drum – the future generations are not a disease to be immunised against, surgically removed and generally avoided at all costs! I hope that I live to see the day when Chen Guangcheng is mentioned around the world in the same breath as Wilberforce, Clarkson or Harriet Beecher Stowe?

This article was originally published on MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons Licence.

In 2005 I spent three months in Rome. In some ways I have never left. Perhaps it sounds like a commonplace to say that I “left part of myself” in the Eternal City. But the fact is, I did. I returned to Rome once more, in the spring of 2007, when I proposed to my now-wife in Assisi, and I have not been back since. And yet, to this day there is hardly a week that goes by when I do not dream about Rome, and often these dreams recur far more frequently than that.

There is very little to tell about these dreams: usually I am alone, or with another person or group of friends, wandering through the cobblestone streets and alleyways of the city. It is not so much the events, but rather the mood of these dreams that so disturbs my sleep, and then my waking hours, so that I often feel the influence of their haunting beauty long after I have awoken.

Very often, in the curious manner of dreams, “Rome” looks nothing at all like the real Rome, and yet when I awake I am absolutely certain that I was dreaming about the Eternal City. This makes sense because Rome has become so much more to me than a city, even a very beautiful one: it has become an archetype, a symbol, an abstraction of beauty, both man-made and divine.  And whenever I encounter such beauty in my dreams, whether it bears any resemblance at all to anything actually in Rome, it is categorized simply as “Rome.”

Our sleeping subconscious minds are far more skilled creators than our waking selves, and if I could show you the churches and basilicas and cafes and boulevards and parks and vistas that my imagination has cooked up in the small hours of the morning, you should see why I feel as if I am haunted by the Eternal City. And yet, for all of their ethereal beauty, I doubt that anything my sleeping imagination has concocted comes anywhere close to what the real Rome has to offer.

Though I must have walked through the giant bronze doors of St. Peter’s Basilica four dozen times in real life – more perhaps – every time was like the first: which is to say, every time I felt an almost irresistible urge to drop my knees. I wonder if it is ever possible to become insensible to that moment when you step into the nave of the basilica and catch sight of its vaulted ceilings, the immensity and height and beauty of which never fail to catch you off guard, and feel that strange, buoyant sensation, as if the weight of the heavens has been resting on your head, and has suddenly lifted? The only other place where I remember feeling that sensation to a similar degree was the Pantheon, with its massive dome so cleverly concealed that you don’t even know it is there until you are directly under it, and the first glimpse of which literally made me feel as if I was about to lift a full three inches off the floor. In both of these buildings is found an architecture of such purity and elegance, that is at once light and airy, and solemn and manly. And this is but the tiniest fraction of what Rome has to offer.

Having grown up in a suburb of Toronto, with its Soviet-style apartment blocks, strip malls, and cookie-cutter homes, Rome came as a shock to me: I did not know, at least with the full weight of experience, that men could create such beautiful things. But even more unexpected and earth shattering was the revelation that the creation of exquisite beauty was not only the province of masters and geniuses. For while Michelangelo and Raphael may have carved statues and painted pictures of seemingly divine craftsmanship, these works of genius are inevitably displayed in buildings with painstakingly assembled marble floors, gilt ceilings, polished pillars, intricate chandeliers and carved facades that are sometimes wrought with hundreds upon hundreds of stone gargoyles and saints. And who assembled, carved, chiseled, and cast all of these magnificent things? Not geniuses, but rather common artisans: thousands upon thousands of common stone masons, blacksmiths, painters and carpenters whose names will remain obscure until Doomsday.

Like any other sightseer who has wandered through the museums and churches of Rome, it was not long before the uncomfortable question began insinuating itself: Why do men no longer create such things? Why, with all of our education, wealth and technology, far beyond the wildest imaginings of the medieval popes and peasants who financed and built the churches and palaces of Rome, can we not build, or paint, or carve what our medieval and renaissance forebears built and painted and carved? What have we lost?

This essay is not about that question, or its answer. I take it as a given that we have lost something, and I believe I have a pretty good idea what it is. Rather, the first point I wish to make is that we have not lost it completely. Much of the beauty of the past is preserved for our enjoyment. And sadder, perhaps, than the fact that such beauty is no longer being created on a wide scale, is that many of us have chosen rather to gorge ourselves on the grossest provender of the ersatz “pop” culture in which we are immersed, than to dine upon the far more substantial and nourishing fare of true culture. That is the first point I wish to make.

But I do not wish to sound like a curmudgeon. And so my second point is this: that the spark in the human soul that created Rome has not been extinguished, not entirely, and that it is up to each of us to fan that spark into life until it burns anew in a living flame. For if we only ever enjoy the achievements of the past, we run the risk of becoming mere elitist antiquarians – dusty scholars of a dead tradition, snobbishly excoriating the failures of the present while doing nothing to remedy them: hoarding beauty, and ignoring that it, like goodness, is self-diffusive, and demands to be multiplied and shared. We all know such people, and they tend to be full of anger, for implicit in their cultivation, in their knowledge and their discerning taste, is an elegy for beauty, Whom they believe is dead, even if well-embalmed: but Beauty is not dead, because, for all the protestations of a syphilitic German philosopher otherwise, God is not dead.

For those who are disgusted with what now passes for culture, there is a middle way, and it is this: to allow authentic beauty to soak into our minds like a rainfall on a fertile field, and then to carefully tend that field until it brings forth new life, fresh life. In other words, we must be like those nameless artisans of old, who, though they were not geniuses, though they had not the greatness of a Raphael, or a Brunelleschi, nevertheless were able to contribute their small piece to works of architecture that centuries later still take our breath away, because of the simple fact that they had drunk in true culture so deeply that, even if they could not have put it into words, it seeped effortlessly from their pores.

I said earlier that I would not discuss the question of what our culture has lost, but I find that I cannot finish this essay without doing so. The answer, of course, is simple: we have lost God. And without God all we have left to do is to give vent to the barrenness of our own souls bereft of the Divine Spark: hence, modern art, modern architecture…modern life.

This, then, is the first duty of those who wish to restore authentic culture: to rediscover God. Once do that and our lives will, even without our consciously willing it, express this new knowledge. Maybe not in artistic achievements (though for some it inevitably will, and we should support such artists wherever we find them), but in the very fabric of our lives: the way we live, the way we love, the work we do, the homes we build, the books we read, the songs we sing, the games we play, the families we raise. And in all of these humble ways, we will be as those medieval artisans, laying our stone, chiseling our gargoyle, painting on our gold leaf, contributing our small, anonymous piece to what John Senior eagerly looked forward to and called “the restoration of Christian culture.”

In this way maybe one day we may yet create a new Rome.

For centuries the public square and the street have been the spatial media of public culture. But just how important is traditional public space—urban space—to a genuinely public culture? In an age of increasingly sophisticated electronic communications, does civil society require the physical and spatial arrangements of the traditional city? I don’t know the answers to these questions. But to me the abandonment of traditional urban form seems symptomatic of a decline in public culture. Public space and civic buildings once received a high degree of aesthetic and financial attention, of a sort that indicated their cultural importance. That attention increasingly seems directed elsewhere.

I was struck by one small expression of this recently, in two separate conversations. One was with an acquaintance who had recently spent an evening with friends out in some middle-class suburb of New York, a family consisting of two parents and one child (who the parents had decided would be an only child), and a large house with three bathrooms. This struck my conversation partner as odd. What are they doing out there with all those bathrooms? The other conversation was with an architect friend in Chicago who mentioned to me that she had left her old job in the private sector for her current job in county government because she was “tired of doing $100,000 bathrooms for clients in the north-shore suburbs.”

Both comments touched a nerve, because I had recently (and frustratingly) finished third in a little local competition to design a vacation house—and noticed that the first- and second-place winners had both included three full bathrooms in their designs for a house of less than 1,800 square feet. Silly me; I had only thought to include one and a half baths! Feeling all of a sudden out of touch with America, I began researching the real estate advertisements of my local papers. There I discovered how apparently important bathrooms and bedrooms have become to the definition of the good life in the suburbs.

The growth and proliferation of the automobile suburb is due largely to post–World War II federal transportation and housing programs that clearly appeal to some deeply ingrained American tendencies and desires; but suburbs are actually a nineteenth-century invention. Proximate creations of the passenger railroads, pre-Depression suburbs always had at least a few architect-designed, quasi-palatial dwellings for their wealthiest residents. In the arriviste postwar suburbs of today the democratization of luxury proceeds, but this time promoted less by architects than by professional builders in the speculative housing market. One manifestation of this appears to be the increasing prominence of master bedroom “suites” and the increasing number and size of bathrooms found in houses targeted at the middle and upper-middle classes.

Evidence for this trend is certainly ample in the “home guide” section of any American newspaper. In a 1997 edition of the Chicago Tribune I found a typical feature article about a thirteen “custom home” development at the outer edges of suburban Chicago where the different three- and four-bedroom residences ranged from 2,800 to 3,800 square feet—comparatively small by current standards. All thirteen houses featured master suites segregated from secondary bedrooms. One advertised a suite with a walk-in closet that “looks like it could accommodate the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” and two-person showers sans doors (“bigger than some cars”). Each house had multiple bathrooms; several had four, and one had six.

We can hope (though should not presume) that most of these houses are well built. It seems noteworthy however that none of them are either architect-designed or (from the photographic evidence) aesthetically distinguished. Moreover, if the prominence of their bedroom suites and bathrooms is not necessarily typical of most new housing construction, neither is it particularly unusual or confined to automobile suburbs. In the same paper there were numerous advertisements for new “luxury townhomes” in older Chicago railroad suburbs, many featuring two bedrooms and two and a half baths. Increasingly, the market assumption appears to be that every bedroom in new residential construction requires its own bath. This was common in luxury residential construction for most of the twentieth century, but appears now to have trickled down to suburban middle-class housing as well.

What, if anything, should one make of this? At one level, I think the appropriate answer is “not much.” Within the requirements of justice, people with money are and should be free to spend it pretty much however they want, and I have zero interest in or passion for denigrating the virtues of private home-ownership, personal hygiene, and modern plumbing. At another level, however, a residential ideal of one bathroom per bedroom can have the insidious effect of becoming the standard by which housing comes to be deemed acceptable. And as this ratio becomes normative, embodied in building codes and other institutional regulations, it makes it that much more difficult to create affordable housing for that sizable sector of society unable to buy in affluent suburbs.

But there are cultural issues here as well. Architecture high and low expresses and embodies, intentionally or not, cultural ideals and aspirations; and in light of the residential building industry trends featured in the Tribune, it may be worth reflecting upon what some of these are. Journalist Karen Tensa, reviewing Bathrooms: Inspiring Ideas and Practical Solutions for Creating a Beautiful Bathroom (Clarkson Potter, 1996), expresses the view that today’s opulent bathrooms and bedrooms represent a rejection by Americans of our “puritanical roots.” This is plausible enough, as far as it goes; but the implications of this rejection may be larger than she realizes, and not entirely benign.

Bigger and more luxurious bedrooms and bathrooms seem to me just one physical manifestation of that shrinkage of the public realm happening reciprocally and in tandem with America’s true growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self. Like the decline of the street and square as active public spaces—and the demise of the alley, the ubiquity of the driveway, the transformation of the garage door into the front door, the demise of uninterrupted curbs on residential blocks, the relocation of domestic life to yards and family rooms at the rear of the house, and the creation of complex suburban roofs apparently intended to simulate small villages—the growing number and importance of domestic bathrooms and bedroom suites indicates yet another way we materialize in our built environment our culture’s turn from the civic to the private.

This turn to the private would have dismayed but not surprised Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, Tocqueville recognized individualism as a peculiarly democratic proclivity. His 1840 characterization of individualism (“a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to . . . draw apart with his family and friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself”) goes far toward describing a social reality that has taken physical form in the American suburb.

But I have one more contemporary bathroom story; and though it is not a story of suburban bathrooms, it too is a tale about architecture, public culture and democratic ideals. The central campus of the University of Virginia is considered by many the most beautiful spatial and architectural ensemble in the United States. Designed by Thomas Jefferson as a model “academical village,” the university’s purpose was to help create and promote an educated citizenry, which Jefferson thought necessary for the success of an emerging American democracy. For an Enlightenment luminary such as Jefferson, reason rather than church or crown was to be the authoritative principle of America, and this dictated among other things that a library rather than a church or chapel would occupy the premier position at his university. The library (the Rotunda) therefore sits atop the highest point on the original campus. A secularized version of the Pantheon in Rome, the Rotunda terminates the north axis of a large green space—The Lawn—that itself is flanked on its east and west sides by a series of ten residential pavilions interspersed between some fifty-six cell-like rooms connected in front by Doric colonnades. The pavilions were designed originally for double duty as both faculty residences and classrooms, and the cell-like rooms were built to house the student population.

Today Virginia’s student body numbers approximately seventeen thousand and the full-time faculty some twenty-four hundred; the university’s physical facilities have grown accordingly. The Rotunda is no longer the university library but remains, with The Lawn and the rest of Jefferson’s original design, the symbolic center of campus life. Likewise, the pavilions are no longer used as classrooms, but are instead residences occupied by various deans and administrators as well as select faculty members. The student rooms, however, continue to be occupied by an elite group of senior undergraduates, chosen on the basis of outstanding academic and extracurricular performance at the university. This is regarded as a singular honor, and student residence “on The Lawn” is highly coveted in spite of several inconveniences—including the fact that student rooms are equipped with neither toilets nor showers (which are located in outbuildings behind the student quarters).

At Virginia, therefore, elite students voluntarily forfeit—even if only for an academic year—personal comforts available in every other university residence facility for the honor of living on The Lawn and the pleasure of its building and spatial arrangements—a little vestige of ascetic culture right here in the good old U.S.A. I might as well also point out that the design of this premier architectural icon, this intended microcosm of a fledgling democratic culture, is strikingly hierarchical. Jefferson physically and spatially subordinates the student rooms to the faculty pavilions, and both to the majesty of the Rotunda and The Lawn (the latter being the equivalent of the university’s public square); and this hierarchical arrangement of buildings and spaces together embody and express the shared purposes of the academic community.

Both Jefferson and Tocqueville believed that democratic liberty depends upon culturally encouraged habits of individual self-restraint and concern for the common good. But Tocqueville recognized that the conflicting democratic ideals of freedom and equality tend themselves to undermine the self-restraint necessary for democracy to work by creating a restless and dynamic social milieu that fosters envy, individualism, and that unlimited desire for material pleasures that has become contemporary consumerism—a large cultural habit that finds one small expression in the proliferation of the “post-puritan” domestic bathroom and one large expression in the decline of civic architecture, the street, and the public square. And although both Jefferson and Tocqueville were articulate advocates of democracy as the form of government best suited for a just society of free human beings, Tocqueville the French Catholic aristocrat had a decidedly stronger sense of original sin and the corruption of human nature than did Jefferson the Deist Virginia gentleman—and hence also a stronger sense of the fragility of democratic government, the corrosive agents to which it is vulnerable, and the kinds of character virtues necessary to sustain it.

Our dominant moral imperative today is expressive rather than renunciatory, and we pay an aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural price for this. That the rising status of the suburban bedroom and bathroom coincides with the decline of the public realm and the nadir of civic architecture is not, I think, by chance. The irony of Mr. Jefferson’s University is that the young democratic culture it celebrated in such enduringly transcendent beauty may have become, in its loss of individual self-restraint, a democratic culture almost wholly incapable of producing transcendent civic architecture.

This excerpt is from
Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred
by Philip Bess (ISI Books, 2006)

Many people I talk to are worried that it seems to them that the ‘wrong’ sort of people are having all the babies – those who are not in stable relationships or who are, rightly or wrongly, perceived to have lower morals and to be less educated.  Concerns are voiced especially among my parents’ age group (in their 50′s) who generally had their babies earlier.

This is largely because more educated young people often feel that having a baby will interrupt their hard earned career paths, or they simply settle down later after finishing university, establishing a career, travelling, buying a house, finding a similarly educated partner willing to marry them!, setting themselves up well financially, etc. and then find that they can only have one or two children (often using some sort or fertility treatment) or that they can’t have them at all.

However, this phenomenon is not actually all that new according to a recent study.  Childlessness among college-educated women actually peaked in the 1990’s, when about 30 percent had no children, according to a new analysis of U.S. data (although I assume less women overall actually went to university then).  Now for the first time a recent study has found that a greater number of highly educated women in their late 30’s and 40’s in the United States are deciding to have children, something that Newswise describes as ‘a dramatic turnaround from recent history’ in an interesting article based on a new study by Ohio University (reported here in the Journal of Population Economics).  In fact, fertility increased at almost all ages since the late 1990s or 2000 across all groups of women studied.

Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor of economics at Ohio State University comments in the article that:

“One of the major economic stories of the second half of the 20th century was that highly educated women were working more and having fewer children. It is too early to definitively say that trend is over, but there is no doubt we have seen fertility rise among older, highly educated women.”

It is not clear from this research whether women are actually leaving their jobs to have children or are employing childcare, but it is clear that they are increasingly opting to have a family – and that’s surely positive for the future of our society.

It is interesting that the findings on women’s fertility were very different depending on education level – giving some weight to my mother’s friend’s concerns. However, Qingyan Shang, an assistant professor at the State University of New York and the first author of the study, reports that the numbers of children are not actually all that different: “For the less educated women, it is more a story about the timing of their fertility. They are having their children earlier now than they used to, but they are not having any more children overall,” he said.

The study notes that, with the data available, there is no completely accurate way to calculate how many older women are using fertility treatments to achieve this higher fertility – and of course fertility treatment often results in twins and triplets so more babies.  In their analysis, the researchers found that multiple birth rates began increasing around 1990 – especially among highly educated older women, who would probably be most likely to be using fertility treatments. Among college-graduate women in their early 40s, the multiple birth rate more than tripled from 1990 to 2006.

However, the researchers insist that the use of fertility treatments is not the only cause of the new trend so perhaps some of it really is women going back to good old fashioned families.  Dare we be so quaint!

A Game of Thrones was first a fantasy novel by American writer George R.R. Martin, published in 1996 as the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire. Five of a projected seven titles have appeared, the last being Dances with Dragons in 2011. It was last year as well that Game of Thrones became an HBO television series based on the books. The second season, which began on April 1, continues to follow the feuds of the seven or so great houses of Westeros, hostilities that are distracting them from greater, supernatural threats emerging in the north and east.

The drama includes hundreds of speaking characters, plotlines that twist and fray, and a point of view that varies from chapter to chapter. Only in a handful of literary precursors, Chinese classics and Old Norse–Icelandic family sagas among them, can one find casts of characters whose popularity matched their ponderousness.

Even though Martin’s fantasy epic has fewer people, his postmodern narrative countervails, generating dimensions of perspective and relativism whose complexity has clearly absorbed audiences.

For A Song of Ice and Fire, complexity is both a hallmark and a buzzword. In an interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship daily interview program Q recently, Martin endorsed the description of HBO’s Game of Thrones as “The Sopranoes in Middle-earth,” and that his intention with A Song of Ice and Fire is “to take epic fantasy, which I love, and combine it with some of the gritty realism and ambiguous morality of, I think, the best historical fiction, with layers of complexity, and real human characters, sexuality, violence, all of that good stuff.”

The obvious implication is that fantasy lacks such depth and complexity, which much of it might. The launching pad for the discussion, however, was a specific brand of fantasy—that of J.R.R. Tolkien, a writer whom the Q fill-in host, Brent Bambury, suggested that Martin might indeed outstrip. Bambury repeated the claim of Time magazine, that Martin is the American Tolkien. But made it even more provocative: “Many feel it’s an accurate comparison. Others say no, it’s not accurate, because he [Martin]’s better.” Though Martin went on to spend a good deal of time recalling his reading of The Lord of the Rings as a young man, maintaining that “the books had a profound effect on me,” he did not demur.

Juxtaposition with Tolkien is unavoidable with fantasy. With a genre that all but reckons history based on the publication of the three Lord of the Rings books from 1954-55, even authors whose works predate those of Tolkien—William Morris, E.R. Eddison, and Robert E. Howard, for example—are compared to him. The shadow of the Oxford professor stretches from horizon to horizon; trying to present a brand of fantasy outside his standard is like trying to conceive of an undiscovered color, much to the frustration of some. British novelist China Miéville, for example, once called Tolkien “a wen on the arse of fantasy literature.”

With Martin’s Game of Thrones, however, the tone of the comparison has become much more confident than usual, due perhaps to the television adaptation and its wide audience.

For many fans, Game of Thrones is more appealing than The Lord of the Rings because it is more realistic. What this means in posthumanist modern-speak is that its moral shades are gray. Principles wither in the face of politics. Great men are secretly weak, small men are secretly great, and every face is, to borrow a line from poet Ted Hughes, “slightly filthy with erotic mystery”.

When asked why this ambiguity and complexity are important to his moral universe, Martin answered, “I think it’s real. […] If you read the biographies of great men […], you will see they’re all gray.” Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth, with their clear dichotomy of good and evil, are increasingly considered to be at best Christian fantasy; at worst, the very sort of stock fantasy to which they are kernel and root.

More realistic, really?

The idea that one fantasy fiction can be deemed more realistic—essentially, more non-fictional—than the other, deserves contemplation. With science fiction, at least, we have the categories of hard and soft, depending on the sort of technology at the heart of the story. Consider, for example, elements in Martin’s Game of Thrones which Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings lacks. A Game of Thrones begins with a slaughter, followed by a beheading scene. The Lord of the Rings begins with plans for a birthday party, followed by the birthday party itself. Beheading, in fact, constitutes the single most gruesome detail of Tolkien’s many scenes of war, when the forces of Sauron use a catapult to throw the heads of Gondorian soldiers over the walls of Minas Tirith. In A Game of Thrones, atrocity is unflinching; even dead children are shown in all their red ruin.

And then there is the other matter of the flesh. The only sexual innuendo to speak of in The Lord of the Rings lies in Gandalf’s accusation—easily missed—that the Rohirrim turncoat Gríma Wormtongue wished to have the maiden Éowyn for himself. That’s it.

Meanwhile, sexuality in A Game of Thrones is so graphic and unsettling, that it is difficult to give examples without breaching decorum. The television series — far is even spicier than the novels — seems to be competing with Starz Entertainment’s Spartacus series, essentially portraying hardcore pornography using softcore acting protocols.

In one scene of Game of Thrones, the bride of an arranged marriage recruits the help of—and practices on—a female prostitute in an endeavor to convince her barbarian husband to actually face her during their frequent (and largely unwanted) intercourse. The girl, Daenerys Targaryen, is played in the television series by a 24-year-old actress. We know from the novel, however, that she is supposed to be thirteen years old.

A poetic comparison furnishes another commentary on the claim of realism: in Game of Thrones, British actor Sean Bean’s noble character Eddard Stark dies in an effort to save himself by lying publicly. Despite violating his honor to preserve the image of the incestuous ruling family, he is executed by them. In The Lord of the Rings films, Sean Bean’s noble character Boromir dies in an effort to redeem himself after having tried to steal the One Ring to save his people.

Finally, there’s the fact that The Lord of the Rings has a conclusion. A Song of Ice and Fire, as yet, does not, and if series like J.J. Abrams’s Lost have taught viewers anything, it is that their expectations for a continuing story can be gauged and manipulated by writers and producers as shrewdly as by political campaigners. An open ending may be more like reality, but there’s no such thing as a book without an end. Even Michael Ende’s Neverending Story had to contradict itself eventually.

There can be no doubt that Martin and Tolkien provide different experiences. The more modern publication delves much deeper into the personal psychology of its characters, while the other provides much more historical depth. To claim, however, that one imaginary world is more realistic than the other is to beg a standard that simply cannot assert itself. As Northrop Frye considered in his Anatomy of Criticism, as inhabitants of the real world, everything we imagine ourselves to understand—whether fiction or nonfiction—must have some basis in our own experience. Something entirely apart from that experience would be incomprehensible to us—untranslatable, as it were.

In deciding matters of realism, then, we must ask ourselves how deeply our experience goes with the criteria we invoke, and from there decide whether our decision is valid. Some may realize, for example, that they have attended more birthday parties than beheadings in their lifetime.

With Game of Thrones, as with a great many current television programs and films whose realism is measured by their grittiness, the spotlights are constantly on the shadows. It should come as no surprise that cockroaches scatter. To claim, however, that their matters of murder, deceit, rape, and worse somehow impart greater credibility to a fantasy world than do their existing moral counterparts—this makes Game of Thrones not just theater, but a thermometer.

This article was originally published on MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons Licence.

Zombie voodoo pirates. Time-traveling Mossad agents. Djinn in the Cold War. The dark fantasy novels of Catholic author Tim Powers can seem like pure high-concept, and his newest book—a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, a.k.a. What If the Romantic Poets Were Sort of Vampires?–has the same instant audience appeal. Christina Rossetti fights vampires! A hard-luck ex-prostitute who’s too stoic for her own good might finally find happiness with an animal-loving loner! Tough women, sensitive men, London by gaslight, sinister rituals, and even Boadicea back from the dead: Hide Me Among the Graves seems custom-designed for a cold, rainy weekend curled up under a comforter with the cats. 

And yet this thrilling, compassionate book is much more than its concept. Powers excels at a fantasy of salvage: a human-scale, kitchen-sink drama in which characters take what seem like small steps into darkness, only to find themselves in far over their heads. The way out requires terrible physical and emotional sacrifice. The great, heroic actions in these novels are often acts of renunciation, earning no glory. 

Hide Me Among the Graves begins with one of these little, enormous complicities. A teenage Christina Rossetti takes a tiny statue from her father. Although his words have made her suspect that there’s something wrong about the statue, something out of line with the Christian faith of her sister Maria, she holds on to it. Following a superstition which she hopes will allow her to dream of her future bridegroom, she rubs her own blood on the statue and falls asleep with it under her pillow. 

That night she thinks that she’s been revisited by an old nightmare, the figure she called “Mouth Boy” because his sharklike maw seems to take up his entire face. But Christina sees that the nightmare figure looks strangely like her brother, and seems to be in some kind of need, so Christina—not realizing she’s in a vampire tale!–invites her dream visitor into her home and, eventually, her bed. She knew she was doing something we might call “sketchy” today, something a bit morally off-center; she didn’t realize that she had reawakened one of an ancient race of jealous, powerful vampiric creatures, the Nephilim of the Bible, and that her nighttime visitor would seek to kill everyone she loved and eventually involve her in a plot to destroy London. 

The rest of the book involves the quest to thwart the Nephilim plan of destruction. But the quest is complicated, in part because not everyone fighting the vampires really wants to see them defeated. Powers is terrific at capturing the nostalgia for sin, the longing for it, and it touches and warps many of the characters in this novel. Some characters go through moments of despair, others are tempted by the possibility of being a great poet. Others simply long for the intensity of the Nephilim’s all-encompassing, devouring love, “the dark elation of being severed from human concerns.” Only one character—a young girl who was taken and used by the Nephilim awakened by Christina, then left to wander the streets with other cast-off and damaged children—manages to turn her awful childhood into a source of ferocious, steadfast resolve. The other characters, with their more divided hearts, view her with a kind of uneasy awe. 

Powers can evoke real shivers: When Christina, early on in her association with the vampires, begins to draw a rabbit on her sketchpad, the picture “began to go wrong under her darting pencil—the hind legs and back seemed broken now, and the creature’s face began to take on a human-like expression that somehow expressed both scorn and pleading—and when she heard her brother Gabriel gasp at the sight of it, she crumpled the paper.” 

There’s also a recurring theme, as seen in the title of The Stress of Her Regard, of the fear of being looked at, the fear of being found out, being the focus of an otherworldly attention. A creature, essentially an unborn child transformed into a vampire, gets the especially frightening description: “In fact, if it hadn’t been for the lively attention in his eyes, she would have believed he was dead.” When one character considers “the special mutual awareness between redeemer and redeemed,” even this salvific awareness seems to throb a little, painful, in a novel about the inflamed attention of the Nephilim. 

There are some moments of humor: “How could she still be in love with a man who was dead,” Gabriel Rossetti wonders about his laudanum-dazed, vampire-ridden wife, “and who furthermore could no longer form a coherent sentence?” There’s a nice sense of the exasperation felt by people who have to deal with immensely powerful beings who simply don’t think like humans: “Ghosts are such imbeciles,” one of them notes. This is a novel full of codes, tricks, and home remedies—for ghosts and vampires. 

But this is, overall, a sad and scary book. It’s a book in which adults almost casually use children as instruments for the fulfillment of their own destructive desires. It’s a book in which even seeing the terrible cruelty of the Nephilim isn’t enough to make the human characters turn entirely against them. The Nephilim use lust, pride, envy against their victims, but also pity, as when they impersonate family members or appear as cold and needy children. Powers makes the eldritch bond between human and vampire totally believable: You can feel the longing yourself, the sweet pain, the ache where an old sin was only mostly healed. 

So curl up under your comforter. But whatever you do, don’t open any windows.

Hide Me Among the Graves

]]> http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/tim-powerss-fantasy-of-salvage/feed 4 http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/on-being-a-catholic-writer http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/on-being-a-catholic-writer#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 08:11:36 +0000 Ralph McInerny http://www.crisismagazine.com/?p=8235

Many Catholic writers have balked at being called that. They were Catholic and they wrote, all right, but they didn’t want to be read as if the point of their fiction was a religious message. As if you could earn an indulgence by reading them. And maybe they didn’t like the prospective company. There used to be Catholic book publishers who published Catholic fiction. Some of it was pretty good — I still remember books by a Jesuit named Finn, Tom Playfair, Percy Wynn: I’ve looked for copies of those books but without any luck. Some of that Catholic fiction was pretty bad, of course, largely because it was trying to be so good. You just knew there was a lesson to be learned, like the point of a homily. Priests in those stories were usually unbelievable, almost as unbelievable as the lay people.

A few years ago, I went through a list of the recipients of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal and was struck by the number of novelists, most of them women, who had been honored. I looked up some of their novels and read them. One woman who wrote under the pseudonym of Christian Read had a predilection for plots in which Protestants were bested in argument and eventually came into the Church. (She herself was a convert.) Other women wrote movingly of the plight of single Irish girls in the New World. Maurice Francis Egan, who ended up as American ambassador to Denmark, wrote some pretty good novels. Kate Chopin never won the Laetare Medal but she was a powerful Catholic writer at the turn of the century. Not everyone knows that Knute Rockne wrote a novel called The Four Winners: The Hands, The Feet, The Head and the Ball, a boys’ book set at DuLac Academy. When I first came upon it, I was disposed to laugh — until I noticed that it was dedicated to one Arnold McInerny who had fallen in the First World War.

Such items suggest that there was a tradition of Catholic writing that is ignored in standard accounts of American literature. Is this because it was inferior? Much of it wasn’t. It was simply not aimed at the WASP audience. It was sort of like the Negro Baseball League.

I don’t mean that Catholic fiction is a genre, sort of like westerns and mysteries, and that the Catholic writer simply works within certain conventions. The more you think about it, the less plausible that is. Historians would probably explain the marginal place of Catholic fiction by noting the immigrant status of Catholics and the fact that they were generally far down on the social scale. If you live in a more or less hostile cultural environment, the explanation would run, you will produce your own culture.

I don’t know what American Catholic first wrote simply for whom it might concern, to be read as one might read anyone else off the shelf. F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly not the first, but in this, as in other matters, he provides a cautionary tale. Most biographers of Fitzgerald — and their number increases annually — show little interest in his Catholicism. I have a theory that he was shamed out of it by people like Edmund Wilson, who patronized Fitzgerald while secretly envying him. In a letter from St. Paul where he had gone to write This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote Wilson that he “tells his chrystalline beads no more,” a sad little remark that seems to invite congratulations from Wilson.

Fitzgerald is a complicated case, but it can be said, I think, that he came to see his faith as an impediment to his literary ambitions. His short story, “Absolution,” intended as the beginning of The Great Gatsby, reads like an outsider’s view of the terrors of the confessional and the perils of the celibate life. But Catholicism never lost its hold on Fitzgerald’s imagination. Beneath the romantic longing and the effort to find gold behind the glitter, Fitzgerald’s fiction takes place under the watchful godlike eye of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. It is good to know that Fitzgerald now lies in consecrated ground.

But it is the apostate Catholic writer James Joyce who looms large. The end of the Portrait makes clear that Joyce saw his art as a substitute for religion — it was either/or. Joyce took no cheap shots at the faith he abandoned, however, something one notices after the spate of novels written by disgruntled Catholics telling the world how awful it was, all that sexual repression and sense of sin, the hypocritical clergy and religious. The note of special pleading is dominant.

It is a good thing for an aspiring writer, and everyone else, to realize that Western literature, our entire culture as a matter of fact, is inconceivable apart from the faith of those who produced it. This overwhelmingly obvious fact is an antidote against the not always implicit assumption that religious belief is an impediment in the arts. It would be easier to argue, historically, that in large part Christian faith has been a condition of existence for the arts.

“But enough about me,” the typical writer might say. “What did you think of my last book?” I have been uncharacteristically keeping myself out of the discussion thus far, but now I want to make a personal appearance.

The thought of becoming a writer came to me in stages. First, as a kid, when I spent a lot of time in the Roosevelt Branch Library on 28th Avenue in South Minneapolis. At thirteen, I went off to Nazareth Hall, the minor seminary of the Archdiocese of St. Paul, and this opened up a whole new world to me. In my first year, an upperclassman named Waldo Hermes handed me Maisie Ward’s life of Chesterton, saying he thought I might like it. The book was almost as big as I was, and I was flattered by the thought that I moved in the same mental universe as young men who needed to shave.

Chesterton did it for me. I wanted to do the sort of thing he did. At the back of study hall there were a few reference works, among them a huge green volume, Twentieth Century Authors by Kunitz & Haycraft. I spent hours with it, reading about writers, looking at the little postage-stamp-size photographs of them, noting how old they were when their first book was published. How I longed to be among their number. When I joined the Marine Corps at the age of seventeen, I thought I was embarking on my career as a writer. College? Not on your life. I would confront life in the raw and write memorably about it. The main thing I did in the Marines was to read through the section on American fiction in the El Toro library. And I kept a notebook in which I issued promises and predictions to myself.

When I got out, I went back to the seminary, and writing was done on the edge of other things, as it usually is. I wrote poems and a verse play and began a novel. But I was more interested in being a writer than in writing, so to say. When Chesterton was in art school, he noticed that there were more artists than people who painted and drew. Dilettantes. I was one.

For years I entertained the velleity of being a writer. Months would go by during which I wrote nothing at all. I published a couple poems — scholarly writing is not writing in the sense we are talking of here — I completed two alleged novels as well as some stories, but I really wasn’t serious about writing. It was necessity, as they say, that became the mother of invention.

I was now a professor of philosophy, married, the father of a growing family, and we bought a house to keep them in, more house than I could afford. I borrowed money in order to take on the mortgage. I faced the prospect of five years of two payments a month on the house. What to do? I remembered a writers’ magazine I had bought in the train station in Los Angeles in 1946. Its advertisements and articles were devoted to the proposition that there was money to be made writing. I was in need of money. Therefore I could write.

Write seriously. I made a resolution to write every day for a year and if at the end of that time I had not sold anything I would take up bank robbing or maybe sell one of the kids. Every night at ten o’clock, after the kids had been put to bed, and Connie and I had some time together, I went down to the basement where I had put my typewriter on a work bench, and, standing, would write until two o’clock. Since I wanted to make money, I aimed my stories at the slick magazines. I was about to serve my apprenticeship as a writer.

Not many weeks passed before it dawned on me that I hadn’t the least idea what I was doing. Well, maybe the least idea. But the transition from consumer of fiction to producer is a wrenching one. It is necessary to become quite analytical about what it is in the stories one enjoys that engages one’s interest and holds it. What is it that makes a story linger in the imagination after we have finished it? There are techniques to be learned. The difference between a serious writer and a dilettante lies in their contrasting attitudes toward technique. The dilettante writes to amuse himself, an easy task, but the serious writer seeks to interest a reader. Over my typewriter I pinned the legend: No one owes you a reading. It has to be earned. The old-fashioned way — with plot.

Under the tutelage of my first editor, Sandra Earl at Redbook, I learned to turn hitherto shapeless narratives into stories. Later I saw that I was learning the hard way what I had read about in Aristotle’s Poetics. And I was constrained by the demands of commercial fiction. There was no room for tangential flights of fancy. “Why the second paragraph on page 9?” an editor might query. “It is so wonderfully well written,” would not serve as an answer. It had to play a role in the story. I learned economy and I learned to concentrate on what the reader’s likely response would be so that I could guide it by what I wrote. If you devote a paragraph to the view from the back bedroom window in a short story, that better be significant for the way things come out.

The thing about technique is that it can be taught and learned. This is true of any of the arts. You can take a course in watercolors, you can take piccolo lessons, you can take a writing course. The emphasis will be on technique, how to do it. What the course cannot give you is vision or a voice. You can mimic the masters for a while, you might do plausible imitations of them — art imitating art rather than nature — and come to realize that is all you can do.

This is why technique is looked down upon. This is why, fatally, it is thought to be unimportant. The fact that it is not sufficient does not make it unnecessary. Even E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, laments that he must tell a story in order to amuse the masses when he would rather just write. Thank God for the masses if they made Forster write the novels he did. A contempt for the masses goes hand in hand with the rejection of technique as the means of engaging the reader.

It is with something more than technique that the question of the Catholic writer arises. Stories are about people doing things, pursuing goals, meeting difficulties, overcoming or being overcome, succeeding or failing. The men and women in stories face problems we all face, and this can interest us in the account of how they fare. Now this is true of commercial short stories as well. Why is it that having made some money, gotten out of debt, and learned how to write, I would not have wanted to just go on writing for those markets? It had to do with the range of issues, the treatment of them, the constraints I mentioned above. Some of the stories I wrote for the magazines were as good as any I have done. “The First Farewell,” my debut in Redbook, is all right; and the novella I wrote for the same magazine, A Season of Endings, inspired a bit by Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, is better than I remembered. But basically what I wrote were domestic stories — the first recital, going off to camp, the visiting grandma: dramas but not pressed to any great depths. And love stories, the most persistent theme of fiction.

My first novel, Jolly Rogerson, was published by Doubleday in 1967, my second, A Narrow Time, in 1969. What I had learned on the magazines enabled me to write these, and in doing so I realized I was liberated from a kind of generic set of standards of success and failure. Slick magazine fiction does not go to the most fundamental questions involved in human action. It sails the sea of received opinion. In my first novels I was able to write out of my own deepest beliefs about what it all means. In those novels, I realized I had a voice and a mass of material and that I wanted to go on doing this as long as I lived.

My characters were Catholic. They saw what they were doing through the lens of their faith; success and failure finally was a matter of grace or sin. Catholic fiction in this sense is not a matter of lore or the settings but of the nature of the eye through which the action is seen. J. F. Powers is an exquisite writer about Catholic things, and Flannery O’Connor, equally good, mentions things Catholic in only one of her short stories — but the sensibility of all her fiction is Catholic.

When Dante dedicated the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, he said that the literal meaning of the Divine Comedy is the way in which human beings by their own free acts earn eternal punishment or reward. That is the vision of human action that makes fiction Catholic. It is not a matter of having priests and nuns on the set, not a matter of explicit reference to Catholic things, but rather the Dantesque vision. There are priests and nuns in stories that lack this vision; this vision is present where there is nothing peculiarly Catholic in view.

My next two novels, The Priest (1973) and Gate of Heaven (1975), were about Catholic things as well as being Catholic in the fundamental sense. The first asked, in effect, what it was like for a young priest in the postconciliar Church, and the second asked what it was like for old priests who saw the structures of a lifetime crumble around them. The Priest was a best seller; Gate of Heaven has its discriminating fans.

It was this writing about priests that led to the suggestion that I try my hand at a mystery series involving a clerical sleuth. Somewhat reluctantly, I responded, little suspecting that Father Dowling would turn out to be my most popular character. Mysteries are matters of life and death, of crime and punishment, but sin and forgiveness are also in play, and it is the latter that explain Roger Dowling’s interest in murder and mayhem. The television series, based loosely on these stories, ran for three years in prime time and continues to be shown both here and abroad. Some years ago, a priest from Japan told me he had watched the series in Tokyo. I forbore asking him if he liked my characters in Japanese.

There are other mystery series and other novels, some in my own name, others under pseudonyms. I am having, thank God, the exuberantly pullulating writing career I thought of when reading Chesterton. It was, of course, the Father Brown stories that gave me pause when I was asked to invent a clerical sleuth. But I am reconciled to being less than Chesterton. And there are many things in the wings.

Just as natural law is included in Christian revelation, so there is a natural moral vision of human action operating in fiction that is not Catholic in the sense mentioned above. Alas, we live in a time when natural morality is thought to be religious, doubtless because the Church seems the major champion and defender of the natural law. The recognition that adultery and deviance and killing people is wrong is often thought to be the quirky outlook of Christians. But of course great pagan literature also proceeds from this recognition.

Embarrassment about the notion of the Catholic writer is like embarrassment at the notion of Catholic universities. The faith is seen as an embarrassment and an impediment. Both attitudes founder on the same fact. Universities were born ex corde ecclesiae, out of the heart of the Church, and so was our literature. Being a Catholic writer is not a falling away from an ideal; it is the way to fulfill the ideal completely — to see human acts in terms of the ultimate stakes of life.

And to engage and amuse the reader in doing so.

This article originally appeared in the December 1995 issue of Crisis Magazine.