J.F. Powers at Aquinas Hall

Like so many other things, the book club at my Catholic parish went into suspended animation during the pandemic. Finally, this past September, I saw a “last call” notice in our Sunday bulletin asking for a new volunteer to lead it; otherwise, the “Literarians” would be taken permanently off life support. I’m not a very outgoing person – I’m not even a good talker – but I raised my hand.

We meet once each month in Aquinas Hall – in the “Fireside Room,” where I’m yet to find a fireplace. There are couches and comfy chairs. Wine or beer are served, and snacks of one kind or another. We recite a brief prayer before we begin, a mash-up of St Thomas’s “Prayer Before Study” and a verse from the Psalms. I’ll be fifty this year but I’m the baby of the group; the average age is probably nearer to seventy.  

It’s the prerogative of the group leader to choose the books we will read. Curating a list like this is a pleasure but I also find it stressing. What if the others don’t care for my selections but are too kind to say so? What if a book I’ve chosen is considered somehow inappropriate for the group? Have I really put enough thought into the list after all?

The authors we read need not be Catholics. We recently read some Tolstoy and Austen and we’ll read some Willa Cather (Shadows on the Rock) during Lent. For last week’s meeting, however, we read a selection of short stories by American Catholic writer J.F. Powers. I chose six of them: “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” “The Forks,” “Prince of Darkness,” “A Losing Game,” “The Presence of Grace,” and “One of Them.”

None of my fellow group members had read Powers before; most had never even heard of him. I’m happy to say they were sincerely thrilled with the discovery. It’s wonderful when you’re able to introduce friends to a new author they immediately enjoy. They asked how I’d come across Powers and I gave the credit to Patrick Kurp, whose Anecdotal Evidence has introduced me to so many good books over the years.

Powers’ novel Morte d’Urban won the National Book Award in 1963 (beating out Nabokov’s Pale Fire), but he’s not much read anymore. This obscurity is probably due to his preferred subject matter: the lives of Catholic priests in the American Midwest of the 1950s and ‘60s. Is there any category of protagonist readers today are less likely to sympathize with or relate to?

And yet, is it really so difficult? Few of us are royalty, and yet we read ourselves into Shakespeare’s kings without any great effort. Majestical, imperiled, triumphant, melancholy, a toy of fate: who has never in his own mind been a Richard II, a Lear, a Henry V, a Hamlet, or a Macbeth? I don’t mean to say he stands on a level with Shakespeare, but Powers’ priests are also a species set apart – without being so very far apart. Few are saints; few are devils. Often ambitious, prideful, lazy, you-name-it, they still know themselves summoned to a higher calling, like the rest of us.

Club members were charmed by Powers’ humor and perception, and by the economy of his prose. They found the priests in these stories perfectly familiar. They were especially fond of Fr Didymus (from “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does”) and the unnamed pastor of Holy Trinity (from “A Losing Game,” “The Presence of Grace,” and “One of Them”).

One of our group – a woman I’ll call Cecelia, who recently retired after decades in religious education and counseling – even found a soft spot for the gluttonous, abrasive, and ambitious Fr Burner in “Prince of Darkness.” “He’s missing the point of his calling. That’s his tragedy,” she said, “but he fulfills his duties honestly enough and there’s still hope for him.”

Of the sacred function and the inadequate human material that are always united in the person of the Catholic priest, Powers in his novel Wheat that Springeth Green writes:

“The greatest job in the world, divinely instituted and so on, was that of the priest, and yet it was still a job – a marrying, burying, sacrificing job, plus whatever good could be done on the side. It was not a crusade. Turn it into one, as some guys were trying to do, and you asked too much of it, of yourself, and of ordinary people, invited nervous breakdowns all around.”

Or, as Cecelia put it: “It’s hard to see your priest in persona Christi when he’s washing his car.”

At one point I asked the group: Is there really such a thing as a Catholic writer? And is there a difference between a Catholic writer and a writer who is Catholic? The consensus was that, yes, Catholic writers exist (though not all of them are Catholic by creed), but there is no distinction in the second case. Being “Catholic” in this sense has to do with sharing a particular vision of Man and God and the Cosmos. That’s why, said Cecelia, “Some people may be naturally Catholic even if they never become Catholic. And unfortunately, some Catholics never become really Catholic at all.”

When asked if he had any thoughts on the “special vocation” of the Catholic writer, Powers answered: “No…except that he obviously should not write junk.” He acknowledged, however, that “I would not fly blind and write without regard to a body of philosophy… There are laws, moral laws, as real as gravity.”