Itâ??s not altogether easy being a Catholic, and itâ??s immeasurably harder being a novelist, so you might imagine the myriad conundrums of being both. The French critic Charles Du Bos, writing about novelist François Mauriac in 1933, dubbed this le problème du romancier catholiqueâ??the problem of the Catholic novelist. And what a whopping problem it remains.
In his 1984 essay â??How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,â? Walker Percy writes of when his publisher requested that he cut the subtitle of his novel Love in the Ruins (1971) because it contained the term â??Bad Catholicâ?â??â??the suggestion being,â? says Percy, â??that the word â??Catholic,â?? even â??Bad Catholic,â?? might put people off.â? Percy was irked by this for the very simple and truthful reason that being a Catholic writer is not â??dishonorable,â? but when we brand a novel â??Catholic,â? Percy writes, that brand â??entails a tighter and more inclusive semantic bondingâ? than if the novel were branded â??Protestant.â?
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