Why should Catholics bother to read novels?

Getting people to read these days is tough.

Blame it on our age of social media, electronic games, infinite distractibility: if a text is more than a hundred words in length—beyond say what fills a smartphone screen—the gaze will likely flicker and flick away.

And as someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, I will add this: even harder is finding folks to read the massive word-clumps known as novels. I am not alone in noting this. Recently, I visited Ignatius Press (which has been publishing my work) and chatted with president Mark Brumley. He said that he has noticed the same trend among the readership of the press’s Catholic titles. Readers, he says, go for everything nonfiction—theology, devotionals, biographies, polemics.

Fiction? That comes in dead last.

The problem isn’t new. Catholic storyteller Flannery O’Connor had something to say about this problem decades ago, in the 1950s. Mark asked me to elaborate my thoughts on this issue. Here goes!

Many Catholics today are dismayed by the world they see around them. For some, at least, the instinctive response is to take refuge in Catholic doctrine and adopt a defensive crouch. The result is a tendency to view with suspicion anything they cannot readily identify as orthodox and clearly Catholic.

This may help explain why some Catholics seem to view fiction with suspicion. Stories don’t always offer immediate clarity.

And why is this? Because stories take us on a journey. They ask us to accompany total strangers—fictional characters we don’t know—through experiences that may be uncomfortable or unfamiliar to a destination we cannot see clearly in the distance. Given this potential for intellectual discomfort, many people—including many Catholics—might just decide to stay home and never open to page one, never set foot outside the door of their intellectual household, and simply leave the story untouched.

Which would be too bad. Because when you think about what it means to lead a Catholic life, it’s good to recall what Christ tells his disciples. He does not say: Get comfortable, stay home, stay safe. Instead, he gives them a command, a job to do: He tells them to go forth; he encourages them to do what he did and engage with all kinds of people, accepting hospitality wherever they can find it.

And if we imitate Christ in going forth to engage with the world as we find it, we will discover the potential for a very productive exchange. We’ll have the chance to grow in our faith and learn from others, even as we bear witness to our life as Catholics in what we say and do. It’s a kind of dialogue, an extended conversation in which the participants can grow spiritually.

And something akin to this process happens when we read a novel. We rouse ourselves from the world we know and engage the world created by the storyteller. We make the acquaintance of new individuals—the characters in the story—and we watch them as they live their lives and tell their tale. As they do so, thoughtful Catholic readers might talk back to these characters, exclaiming: Hey, don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself! Or: Hey, stop, you’re turning your life into a train-wreck; I know, because I did that once myself! Or: Hey, I never thought of that; this character is offering me a glimpse of wisdom.

Who knows? By the end of the book, you may feel you have just made a friend for life. I know for sure my own stagger-step lurching through the years (and that’s the best we can manage, isn’t it: Lurch forward, lurch on!) has been made easier by the companions I have met in great fiction. Don Quixote, Prince Myshkin, Lord Jim: they give me comfort, they make me feel I am not alone in what I go through.

They give me the sense, as Joseph Conrad wrote, that I have got company of the “kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life.”

(Come to think of it, didn’t Christ himself do something like this with his parables? Prodigal son, good Samaritan, wise and foolish virgins: easy enough for us to find glimmers of our own behavior as we feel our hearts responding to what the divine Storyteller has to say.)

A cautionary note might be in order at this point. We shouldn’t expect that the novels we will read will offer us straightforward prescriptions on how to act and what to believe. The novel is not a catechism. Here it’s good to glance at what Flannery O’Connor stated in her meditations on what it means to be a Catholic novelist. “The main concern of the fiction writer,” she says, “is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”

Note the pair of very Christian words she uses in this claim. ‘Incarnated’: the belief that the Second Person of the Trinity becomes man, and in so doing makes this whole messy fleshly existence of ours worthwhile—and worth contemplating.

The second word is ‘mystery.’ It comes from an ancient Greek term that means to have one’s eyes closed. ‘Eyes closed’; here it’s good to note something else O’Connor tells us: “Faith is a ‘walking in darkness’ and not a theological solution to mystery.”

In other words, when we read a story, we are in the dark; we don’t know what’s ahead. But the storyteller takes us by the hand and guides us as we feel our way through dim corridors and vast caverns out into strange worlds and unfamiliar situations.

Be warned here: We will not receive clear-cut resolutions to our existential questions. As O’Connor says, “We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery.”

But if novelists do their job, at a minimum, we should be left with a greater sense of awe and gratitude to God for this mysterious gift we call life.

Now some Catholics might say, Whoa, fella, hold it right there. There are plenty of books that are simply bad; they glorify sin and self-indulgence and godless materialism.

True—all too true. But this is where Ignatius Press steps in.

Because the staff members at Ignatius Press believe in publishing novels that can help us explore and strengthen our Catholic faith. They’ve selected a library full of novels that are written from a faith perspective.

They’ve assembled an array of stories that help strengthen our Catholic faith, even as the tales entertain us and hold out the hope that we can make two new and distinctive sets of friends: the characters in the story in whose struggles we become involved; and the fellow readers with whom we can discuss the story we’ve just read.