Catholic Writers

[David Morris]

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/295/oped/Redefining_the_bad_Catholic_+.shtml

Redefining the 'bad Catholic'

By James Carroll, 10/22/2002

''THE NOVEL is a Protestant art form, requiring the free play of the mind,''
George Orwell wrote. ''There are few Catholic novelists who are any good, and
most of them are bad Catholics.'' Orwell did not know the work of Walker Percy
or Flannery O'Connor. I'll leave assessments of my own novels to others, but in
truth I can't read that phrase ''bad Catholic'' without a shudder. What is a
bad Catholic anyway? 

Once it was clear. Orwell probably had Graham Greene in mind, or perhaps Evelyn
Waugh - famously unbridled Catholics. Late in life, writers Eugene O'Neill and
Allan Tate were haunted by their status as bad Catholics. Because of an early
alienation from the church, even as exalted a figure as financier and first
secretary of defense James Forrestal rebuked himself as a bad Catholic not long
before his suicide in 1949. Both O'Neill and Forrestal asked to see a priest at
the end, although neither did. Bad Catholics were in ''bad marriages,'' or they
were openly gay, or they had had abortions, or they practiced ''artificial
birth control.'' They were condemned by their own heart-rending personal
choices.



__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/