Preface: A Good Priest is Hard to Find

Abstract

PrefaceA Good Priest is Hard to Find Ray MacKenzie Priests in Literature, Loss and Gain, Newman, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, L'Ensorcelée, Bewitched, Un prêtre marié, Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with the famous statement, "Happy families are just alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." One implication of that thesis may be that the happy—contented, satisfied with the world—character isn't very useful for fiction, where we demand conflict and struggle to keep things interesting. This all applies well to the literary depiction of religious figures, and especially of priests. There is no shortage of troubled priests in the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Alice McDermott's Father Gabe struggling with his sexuality in Someone (2013) to the deeply uninspired Father Joe in J. F. Powers's Wheat that Springeth Green (1988), we rarely meet a priest in modern fiction who simply, faithfully, and cheerfully goes about his duties. Maybe such a character is like Tolstoy's happy family—not very good material for fiction. We need to go back a generation or two, though, to come to the figure of the profoundly anguished priest hero. The two best-known examples are the unnamed narrator of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest (1937) and the, again, unnamed but so-called "whiskey priest" of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940). [End Page 5] Bernanos's priest is in physical agony, dying of stomach cancer, but his spiritual struggles are equally agonizing: prayer itself becomes a near-impossibility, and the priest's loneliness in a parish that seems to have no use for him only adds to his torment. His parishioners treat him with suspicion, sometimes even hostility. In Greene's novel, we do see a priest acting heroically, continuing to provide the sacraments in an extremely dangerous environment of anti-Catholic persecution—but it is only the extreme political situation that brings out the hero in him, for before the persecution began, he was arrogant and unfeeling, so lax in his faith and so dedicated instead to his alcohol that he violates his vow of celibacy. Different as they are, Bernanos's and Greene's priests are both marked by the times they live in, times when the life of faith is lived on the margins of the culture, when such a life is at best odd and at worst suspect. Until something changes in our own culture, the priests we are likely to see represented in our literature and art are probably going to be similarly troubled individuals. A secularized culture, faith marginalized or mocked, consumerism elevated to the status of supreme good—all this didn't begin with the twentieth century, but it seems to have become more and more obvious, at least to writers and thinkers, sometime around the middle of the nineteenth. A good example of the phenomenon can be found in the sheer bitterness and intensity of Dickens's attack on utilitarian culture, especially in his Hard Times (1854), where education has become a process of dehumanizing, and where the laborer is reduced to the status of a "hand," a word Dickens returns to many times in the tale. That bitterness suggests that people could see that things were changing, that the modern world was no longer looking like a step on the road to utopia, and that urgent change was needed. A few issues back I wrote about Dickens's contemporary Thomas Carlyle,1 who likewise viewed with alarm the direction the culture was moving, and who spoke out in tones reminiscent of Old Testament prophets in his denunciation of the new, mechanistic, dehumanized world that was rapidly pushing out the older one. If, then, people in the mid-nineteenth century were seeing the [End Page 6] deep cultural change that became what we now call modernism, we might think about how priests were depicted then. Among the major writers of the century, a good priest, as O'Connor would have put it, is hard to find—a simply good priest, that is, one not wracked by guilt or doubt or some other...