Cathlick Lit

Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in Literary Culture, 1844–1931?
by james emmett ryan
wisconsin, 258 pages, $29.95

American Catholics were writing prolifically throughout the nineteenth century, publishing novels, essays, book reviews, and devotional literature. Yet while authors such as Emerson, Melville, and Dickinson were defining the American literary canon, Catholics of this era produced no literature of significant artistic merit or lasting cultural influence.

Why? James Emmett Ryan, associate professor of English at Auburn University, takes up this apparent incongruity in Faithful Passages, his sociological study of Catholic print culture in the mid-nineteenth century. The literary shortcomings of Catholics in this era, he suggests, were due to an often combative and excessively didactic posture, which obscured human and artistic engagement with religious questions. “Religious function,” Ryan suggests, following Marcel Gauchet’s analysis in The Disenchantment of the World, needed to leave behind its role as a heavy-handed instrument of conversion and be “metabolized,” or drawn into an “aesthetic repertoire” infused with “Catholic ways of knowing and habits of being,” before Catholic authors could have a serious impact on American literature.

Orestes Brownson and Fr. Isaac Hecker, for example, both saw the potential of Catholic literature as a tool for combating anti-Catholic prejudice and educating the rapidly growing population of American Catholics. They imagined enormous possibilities for evangelization in the burgeoning printing industry, calling for a Catholic literature that would provide an education in the doctrines of Catholicism while instilling moral values, hoping to counter the influence of the wildly popular sentimental novels and scurrilous romances of the era.

While neither Brownson nor Hecker was successful in reaching a large audience, the novels of Jedidiah Huntington and Anna Hanson Dorsey, and the devotional writings of Cardinal James Gibbons, did become somewhat popular, even on par with the sentimental-didactic fiction of their Protestant contemporaries. Ryan points out that all three of these authors can attribute their relative success in part to their willingness to integrate into their fiction the literary themes and conventions to which readers of such fiction were accustomed. Huntington’s attention to the female emotional experience, for example, and his use of romance made his Catholic themes and stories engaging and accessible to a broad audience.

Turning finally to a consideration of the novels and short stories of Kate Chopin and Willa Cather, he suggests that their religious views, like those of many other American authors of the early twentieth century, were of secondary importance to their willingness to engage personally, artistically, and critically with the American Catholic experience. Such authors allowed the traditions of Catholicism to inflect and color their lives and work, though they did not consider themselves subject to evangelical aims or purposes. Ryan’s claims are intriguing, and his analysis is exacting, but his methodology cannot account for orthodoxy itself as a potentially positive, rather than negative or simply neutral, factor in an artist’s work. However, the relationship between theology and aesthetics is a complex one, with a long history that, as Ryan explains at the outset, is beyond the purview of his book.

Rose Tomassi is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center ?in Manhattan. Originally published in the December 2014 issue of First Things.