Reading good fiction is one of the best ways to encounter truth.
Jesus himself knew this well and used parables whenever he preached to the crowds.
Below are five authors who were proudly and profoundly Catholic, though they did not always write explicitly about Catholicism. Rather, they speak about the deepest human questions: relationships, redemption, failure, and sin. None of them is a canonized saint, but all of them attempted to communicate truth, revive meaning, and reveal the hope of redemption to a sinful world.
Walker Percy
“One of the tasks of the saint is to renew language, to sing a new song. The novelist, no saint, has a humbler task. He must use every ounce of skill, cunning, humor, even irony, to deliver religion from the merely edifying.” – Walker Percy
A contemporary of Flannery O’Connor and convert to Catholicism, Walker Alexander Percy was born in the Bible Belt of America in 1916. Orphaned at a young age, Percy lived with his aunt and uncle who surrounded him with culture and gave him the opportunity to expand his horizons. Though he went to medical school and wanted to become a doctor, he fell ill with tuberculosis partway through his residency. Percy turned to writing, and his hobby became his job.
He wrote for 30 years, and much of his work centered around reviving the true meanings of words. In our modern world, Percy argues, words can lose their meaning. He wanted to retake the true meanings of things. When asked, “Why are you Catholic?” he parried: “What else is there?”
Many of his popular books such as The Moviegoer, and Love in the Ruins, contain Catholic characters, imagery, and an effort to revive the true meaning behind symbols. Comic, post-apocalyptic, modern, and at times explicit, Walker Percy provides a Southern Gothic Catholic view of the world which encourages his readers to search for a deeper meaning.
Evelyn Waugh
“You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being.” – Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born in London in 1903. Educated in the traditional British way and eventually a student at Oxford, he wrote stories from the time he was a young boy. His first novel was Decline and Fall, which set the stage for an increasingly successful career in satiric fiction. His years fighting in World War II and a failing marriage inspired his next few books – cementing his reputation as an ultra-modern author.
After his divorce, Waugh converted to the Catholic faith, shocking his fans worldwide. In his explanation of his conversion, Waugh does not describe an emotional event or being captivated by anything in particular. Rather, for him it was a choice between the chaos of the world and Christianity. Like Percy, he too seemed to say: “What else is there?”
After his conversion, Waugh wrote perhaps his most famous work, Brideshead Revisited. Now a staple in the canon of British literature, Brideshead Revisited is a tale of redemption and hope among a generation in which Christianity seems to be dying.
Flannery O’Connor
“If it [the Eucharist] is just a symbol, to hell with it.” – Flannery O’Connor
Another author from the Bible Belt, Flannery O’Connor was raised Catholic in Georgia. Born in 1925, the young Flannery worked hard to become a writer. After a successful beginning and achieving her Masters in Fine Arts, she was struck with lupus, the disease that killed her father and would ultimately kill her.
She lived at Andalusia, the family farm in Georgia, for the rest of her life, writing stories, and letters, reading the Summa Theologica, and looking after her 44 peacocks. Soft-spoken and shy in person, O’Connor was nevertheless pure steel in her writing.
Some of her most famous works include, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Wise Blood, and “Revelation.” O’Connor’s startling, violent, Southern-Gothic literature was meant to shout the truth to a deafened world. Her characters – brutal, grotesque, ridiculous, and petty – are a reflection of the sinners we know and are. She did not write only for Catholics, but for everyone, revealing humanity’s need for the grace that is perpetually offered and so often refused.
G.K. Chesterton
“The difficulty of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.” – G.K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in 1874 in London, England. He never attended college, instead going to art school. In 1900 he was asked to contribute some articles to an art magazine, and began one of the greatest and most prolific careers in English history.
Witty, perspective and accessible, Chesterton’s writing covers a range of topics from politics, history, economics and even cheese! He was a large man, standing at 6’4” and weighing around 300 pounds. Scatterbrained, lovable, with a high-pitched voice, Chesterton seemed like a character from one of his novels.
The author of A Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy, Manalive, The Everlasting Man, and the Father Brown collections, Chesterton is also a convert to the faith. Like the other famous authors who converted, he inevitably had to publish “Why I am Catholic” to explain the move which always seems radical to non-Catholics. He explains why Catholicism is, again, the only way: it is “the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal to the Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger” – J.R.R. Tolkien
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” is probably one of the most iconic lines in modern English literature.
J.R.R. Tolkien was born in England in 1892, and his mother raised both him and his brother Catholic against her own parents’ will. Tolkien’s mother died when he was 13, and the brothers went to live with a Catholic priest. Father Francis Morgan was like a father to Tolkien, though the two did disagree at times. Tolkien attended and later taught at Oxford. He fought in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, survived, and returned to England to raise four children with his beloved wife, Edith.
The author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarilion, Tolkien is a household name in American and British homes. All of his stories are imbued with Catholic theology, though it is not immediately obvious. For example, the threefold office of Christ – Priest, Prophet, and King – can be seen in the characters of Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn. Lembas bread, the Elvish waybread, which gives strength to the characters as they travel, has been thought to be a symbol of the Eucharist.
Though he did not always agree with the pastoral direction of the Church, especially after Vatican II, Tolkien remained a faithful Catholic to the end, with a deep devotion to the Eucharist. To his son Michael he wrote:
“I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”
