On Being a Catholic Writer

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.