Catholics: A Novel by Brian Moore, Post #4

This is the fourth and final in a series of posts on the Brian Moore novel, Catholics: A Novel.  The first post can be found here.   

The second post here.   

The third post here. 

 

 

My Comment:

This is in Part 2 but I'll post it here since it's relevant to this discussion. When the Abbot and Kinsella are discussing the dangers of the TV documentary, this exchange ensued:

 

”A program in the wrong hands, about this subject, could be made to look like the first stirrings of a Catholic counterrevolution.”

 

“Ah, now begging your pardon, Father Kinsella, I find that very far-fetched.”

 

“Far-fetched? To the enemies of the church, won’t it seem that you have acted in direct contradiction to the counsels of Vatican IV?”

Notice Kinsella fears the “Catholic counterrevolution” and characterizes those that would seize on the issue as “enemies of the church.” So the enemies of the church are the counterrevolutionaries, which are people inside the church! And the monks, such as Fr. Manus and Matthew and the Irish on the mainland, could easily be the formation of the counterrevolution. Then how despicable is the Abbot’s mollifying of the monks at the end where he undermines any coalescence of a counterrevolution? Of course, I’m using the word “despicable” because it’s from my point of view, but frankly I have no idea where Brian Moore falls on this because he’s made such amess of the inherent logic of the novel.

By the way, it shows the counterrevolution is the natural opposition to a dystopian situation. It's just that Moore never follows through on it.

Irene Replied:

Manny wrote: "This is in Part 2 but I'll post it here since it's relevant to this discussion. When the Abbot and Kinsella are discussing the dangers of the TV documentary, this exchange ensued:

A program in the..."
I read that exchange a bit differently. I saw the "enemies of the Church" as outside the Church structure. They are those who would only learn of the tension between the traditional rituals and the revised rituals by a secular TV show. They would seize on that and use it against the Church. Presumably, those in Church leadership would not need a TV show in the secular world to learn of this debate. In fact, they already know that is why Fr. Kinsella is there. The abbot rejects that perception. He does not accept the claim that what is happening would be seized on as counter revolutionary by the "enemies of the Church" My reading is that he does not see the actions of the monastery as counter revolutionary. Are the monks mounting a counter revolution or are they simply ministering to the people who come to the monastery seeking spirituality? Are they trying to reform the Church or are they responding to the immediate ministerial needs before them? Yes, they are keeping the Latin Mass and oricular confession alive. But I did not see any evidence that they are trying to reverse Vatican IV on a more grand scale. Certainly, the monks' safe guarding of the tradition could have a revolutionary impact over time. By keeping something alive, they may be planting the seeds of a revolution. But, I don't see any indication that the abbot or the monks are intentionally mounting a revolution to roll back the changes of Vatican IV in the universal Church.

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "I read that exchange a bit differently. I saw the "enemies of the Church" as outside the Church structure. "

That's possible, but the antecedent of "enemies of the church" seems like it's referring back to "counterrevolutionaries." Perhaps in casual conversation it might be construed as that, but any counterrevolutionary would certainly qualify as an enemy of the church, especially in this militaristic context of this new church. On balance I think you're right. There are no current counterrevolutionaries.

But who are these enemies of the church? They could easily be within the church as without. Everything the forces that Kinsella has been working against seems like he's addressing issues within the church.

 

Irene Replied:

Who are the "enemies of the Church"? They are not specifically named. But they could be any force that wants to see its demise. Of course, one could argue that the very changes that the institution is implementing to make the Church more palitable, less offensive, less prone to attack by "enemies" are the very forces that is destroying it. But, as I read that exchange, I thought that Moore was alluding to Church schism and the way secular and outside voices exploited any sign of disunity in the church to discredit the entire Church. Certainly in the early 70s, there was a great deal of public division among Catholics as the liturgical changes of Vatican II were implemented. And the secular prognostigators were forecasting a schism that would end the Catholic Church in a way that the Protestant Reformation did not do. Of course, those predictions were not true. Outsiders could not understand that descent has always existed in the Church as it does in any passionate family. But like any family, we also don't want our family fights to become the next headline either. I don't see any specific group or action being named as "counter revolutionary" in that exchange. Rather I see the fear that "enemies of the Church" will regard the perceived tension as an act of counter revolution.I don't see Kinsella calling the monks "counter revolutionaries" but cautioning that the enemies may perceive their celebration of the Latin mass as counter revolutionary. Schism has been a major cause of concern from the 1st Letter to the Corinthians to the present. The unity of the Body of Christ has always been a primary goal. Maybe this is part of the tension that Moore wants the reader to consider, sins against the unity of the Body of Christ vs sins against orthodoxy.

 

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "Who are the "enemies of the Church"? They are not specifically named. But they could be any force that wants to see its demise. Of course, one could argue that the very changes that the institution is implementing to make the Church more palitable, less offensive, less prone to attack by "enemies" are the very forces that is destroying it. But, as I read that exchange, I thought that Moore was alluding to Church schism and the way secular and outside voices exploited any sign of disunity in the church to discredit the entire Church."

I guess it's vague enough for "the enemies" to be either or both, within and without. Everything is so vague in this novel that one can create any line of thought he wishes.

Yes, Irene, his Lourdes experience is at the heart of his "null." Like everything else in this novel, and including your observation of Hartman, it is woefully underdeveloped. Moore spends pages and pages on the helicopter ride, the boat ride that never happened, the blackberry jam, and a whole lot of meaningless details and he doesn't develop what should be key elements to the novel.

For instance, is Hartman part of the forces of the dystopia or the resistance? And don't say neither, because then it won't fit.

 

Irene Replied to My Comment:

I don't read this as a dystopian battle between the evil institutional Church and the good traditionalist monks. So, I can't answer that question because it does not fit into the way I read this story. Too bad Moore is dead and we can't hear his intent.

 

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "I don't read this as a dystopian battle between the evil institutional Church and the good traditionalist monks. So, I can't answer that question because it does not fit into the way I read this st..."

Well, I guess I can read the Divine Comedy as some sort of Buddhist adventure story but I would be wrong. There is no way to read this novel where the future Catholic world envisions this:

- Priest’s collar and black shirt replaced by military style uniform.
- No praying of the rosary.
- No private confessions, but a group act of contrition.
- No Latin Mass but vernacular.
- Facing the congregation rather than God.
- No Pope but a “Father General”? Is that correct or is Father General head of the Albanisean Order?
- No Rome as center of the Church but Amsterdam being the place of the World Ecumen Council.
- The “interpenetration” between Christianity and Buddhism.
- No traditional church hierarchy but military ranks.
- No transubstantiation but symbolic act.
- Church service similar to a “bingo game.”
- No religious grace before meals but an ecumenical grace.
- No sign of the cross.
- Lourdes is no longer in operation. One would assume all miracle visitation sites are closed.
- No distinction between mortal and venial sins.
- No prayers.
- Christianity without God or faith.
- Clerical dress for priests is optional.
- The sacrifice of the Mass is not a miracle but merely a ritual.

and not see it as a dystopian world, especially given the military allusion that suggest a jackbooted attempt to enforcement if the Abbot chose the other way. That Christianity can only survive if it gets rid of God is clearly an Orwellian doublespeak.

The problem is not your reading, the problem is Moore. He set up incompatible lines of thought, completely under developed everything, and published it. Anyone can read all sorts of things in this. You are ignoring the parts of the book that doesn't fit your reading while grasping onto the parts that do.

 

Joseph Commented:

I have to side with Irene on this one. Dystopian novels have the society at large as the bad guy and its systems. What Moore gives us is kind of a microcosm of what we now call the Liturgy Wars and I think his aim is more to point out the condition of the Church in 1972. It so happens that many of those elements are still current, and thus this novel does present a parable about how we live the Faith when what we have known for centuries upon centuries changes. I find the final scene with the monks gathered in the chapel praying the Our Father to be indicative of how many responded to the changes of the early 70s and how many still have to respond when they cannot find a parish to their personal liking in terms of liturgy or preaching. The conflict is certainly between Faith and non-Faith and it reaches into the institutional Church, but that is a conflict which is fought every day in the hearts of millions of believers around the world and I think that's what the novel, in the end, is getting at.

 

My Reply to Joseph:

No, no, no.  On a dystopia there is absolutely no question.  Definition from Wikipedia:

 

A dystopia (from Ancient Greek δυσ- "bad, hard" and τόπος "place"; alternatively cacotopia or simply anti-utopia) is a fictional community or society that is undesirable or frightening…Dystopias are often characterized by rampant fear or distress, tyrannical governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society.

And further down:

 

Dystopias typically reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and extrapolate worst-case scenarios as warnings for necessary social change or caution. Dystopian fictions invariably reflect the concerns and fears of their creators' contemporaneous culture.

The Catholic Church is acting as a dystopian society and Moore has extrapolated the worst fears that came out of the Vatican II changes. 

This has all the earmarks of a dystopia.  It is set in the future, Vatican IV.  If it’s not a dystopia, why does he set it in the future?  Why is all of Catholicism changed so dramatically already?  No debate, no transition.  And from every character outside the governing structure, we see no one who wants it.  But more importantly, why are all the changes so distasteful?  Every single one is put in a bad light.  Every beloved tradition is extirpated.  There is no moral equivalence.  All the sympathy in the novel are against the governing church.  Look at all the folk (akin to the hobbits of Lord of the Rings) who go to the traditional Mass offered by the monks.  Where is there one good word for the Church and for Kinsella and what he represents?  Show me.  Show me one good word, one positive detail for the governing church.  For crying out loud, Kinsella wears a military uniform instead of priestly garb.  Look at the treatment Kinsella gets by the good earthy folk in Ireland.  He’s made out into an elitist.  He’s contrasted with Padraig who treats him to this.

 

The boatman abruptly let go of the bollard and took up his oars. Kinsella, irritated, reached down and caught hold of the curragh’s stern.

 

“Let go of that.” “I tell you, I am Father Kinsella. The abbot is expecting me.”

 

Padraig, the boatman, let go of one oar, seized up a steel rowlock from beneath it and, swift as a biting dog, struck the knuckles that held the curragh’s stern. With a gasp of pain, Kinsella drew his hand back. The rowlock snapped into its hole, the oar in it, and, with two swift strokes, the boatman swung the curragh out of reach.

That rap on the knuckles is exactly the respect he is paid by the good general folk.  That rap represents the attitude you’re supposed to have toward Kinsella. 

There is no moral equivalence presented anywhere.  No such detail or characterization occurs to characterize the monks or the general Irish folk who go to the old Mass and want the traditions.  None that I find.  Whatever conclusion you want to draw about the Abbot or the ending, it has to be within the context of a dystopia.  On that there is no ambiguity.  On that it is clear.

I’ll say it again here because I don’t want it forgotten: Show me one good detail, one positive word for the governing church anywhere in the novel?  Show me.

 

Joseph Replied:

I don't think there is one. But, by the same token, I don't think there is one for the monks on Muck either. They're not presented as the heroic stalwarts of say, Fr. Percy from Lord of the World, more like a curiosity or a museum piece, and the people they serve are shown more as backwards yokels than principled resistors. The Abbot says it himself in Part 2, "We tried the new way, people didn't like it, so we went back." That's not really something done because they saw the shortcomings of the Vatican IV liturgy, although they did do that, but more like, "We need to find a way to reach these people who have left," and that's the solution they came up with. I find this to be more of a satire than a dystopia, really. Moore has kind of caricatured the two camps in the liturgy wars and presented us with the outlines of the continuing back and forth rather than with a solution. I think he's trying to point out the short comings of the demystification while at the same time noting that just because someone is traditional, it doesn't mean that they have deep faith behind that either.

 

My Reply to Joseph:

Joseph Said: I don't think there is one. But, by the same token, I don't think there is one for the monks on Muck either. They're not presented as the heroic stalwarts of say, Fr. Percy from Lord of the World, more like a curiosity or a museum piece

I would have to disagree.  I think Frs. Matthew and Manus are presented as heroic.  Brian Moore’s characterization is definitely two dimensional, but I don’t think he has the skill to pull off what Hugh Benson did with Lord of the World.  First, everything in Moore’s novel is woefully underdeveloped.  Just look at how much space Fr. Percy is given in Lord of the World.  And Benson was a better novelist.

Joseph Said:  and the people they serve are shown more as backwards yokels than principled resistors.

I can see how you might see that, but I think you’re missing how the Irish see their identity, especially in literature.  The Irish see the peasantry as deeply part of their identity.  Think of the John Wayne in his movie The Quiet Man.  Think of the appearance of Our Lady of Knock and the peasants she appeared to.  William Butler Yeats glorified the peasantry in his poetry.  Read over this article from Irish Studies, “Identity and the Literary Revival.”  I’ll quote two key paragraphs.

 

Both Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and The Stars open with domestic scenes which hint at both plays’ agenda.  Co-founder of the Gaelic League and president National Literary Society Douglas Hyde initiated the ‘stranger in the country kitchen’ motif with his play The Twisting of the Rope in 1901.[1]  This motif uses the “cottage on stage” as a “temple of Irish domesticity, the sacred origin, the mystery of mysteries – within it the Irish are themselves.”[2]  In contrast to the tradition of melodrama, Literary Revival plays sought to present the ‘real’ Irish as opposed to demeaning stereotypes.  They succeeded, however, only in constructing an undifferentiated peasantry.  Despite the diversity in portrayals, all these authors contributed to the process of “turning the peasants into a single figure of literary art…the ‘aestheticizing’ of the Irish country people.”[3]  One generalization has been replaced by another.

 

Yeats and Lady Gregory use the peasantry to define the true spirit of the nation.  When called by Cathleen, a thinly veiled representation of the nation, Ireland’s young men put aside selfish temporal interests to fight and die for her.  The volk are united by a spiritual connection which drives them to self-sacrifice.  This mythologizing of the peasantry reflected Yeats’s own struggle to develop a uniquely Irish literary style: “What distinguished Irish from English writers was a complex national identity, and in searching for that identity Irish writers turned, as if naturally, to the people they imagined to be most distinctively and authentically Irish: the peasants.”[4]  This Anglo-Irish Ascendancy depiction of the peasantry as a primitive, spiritual people blankets over social, economic, and religious differences.  It also expresses many of his individual beliefs.  The peasants counter urban bourgeois commercialism.  Yet Yeats was not alone in using the peasantry as a vehicle for his own ideology: “To speak about the peasant was always to speak about something beyond actual rural life.”[5]

 

In addition, Moore has the monks perform the Mass outdoors using a large rock as an altar.  That’s right out of Irish folklore where when the British tried to shut down Catholicism and the priests moved the Mass outdoors using boulders as altars for secret Masses.  In fact if I remember correctly there was a priest who was shot dead performing such an outdoor Mass and as I think legend goes was shot dead the very moment he held the host up to God.  And the passion for the Mass as dramatized in the novel echoes the Irish identity as the people who saved civilization in the Dark Ages through Catholicism.  In fact the name Padraig, is the Gaelic version of Patrick.  It’s where they get the diminutive “Paddy” from.  Paddy is not actually from Patrick.  Moore uses the most Irish version of the most Irish identity name.  Something else I just thought of, Kinsella is coming to Ireland to tell them how to worship much like the British came to Ireland to do the same. And he brings a similar threat of force.  Moore is wrapping the peasants in Irish motherhood, apple pie, and the national anthem.  No I don’t think you’re supposed to see them as yokels but as the good Irish devout who are going to save civilization again. 

Joseph Said: I find this to be more of a satire than a dystopia, really. Moore has kind of caricatured the two camps in the liturgy wars and presented us with the outlines of the continuing back and forth rather than with a solution. I think he's trying to point out the short comings of the demystification while at the same time noting that just because someone is traditional, it doesn't mean that they have deep faith behind that either.

Yes, but I think that speaks to his skill.  All the characters are two dimensional, the situation is underdeveloped, and the logic of the novel is ambiguous at best and incoherent at worst.

Let me take a crack at what I think Moore meant by this novel, and mind you that this is partially speculation because of the flaws I just mentioned.

That there is a dystopia that has imposed this heresy upon the Catholic world is unquestionable.  That there is a resistance in the Irish people I think is pretty certain as well.  Everything follows from those assumptions.  The questions that follow are (1) why does the Abbot capitulate, and (2) what does Moore wish to imply by the prayer ending?

Why does the Abbot capitulate?  (1) He has a personal interest in not rocking the boat.  He wants to be buried with the other Abbots and that will consummate his career in the history of the Abbey.  (2) He doesn’t really believe, so it doesn’t really matter to him, and so given the choice between fighting the Church or fighting his monks, he sees the monks as the ones he can mollify.  Plus he has authority over them.  He’s pusillanimous, and that’s his least resistance.  (3) He sees fighting the Church as a losing effort, and so doesn’t see its practicality.

What does Moore wish to imply by the prayer ending?  Here is where it gets speculative.  Here are three possibilities.

(1) If Moore is attempting to bring the theme of atheism to the fore, then he is ending with an appeasement to the “Christianity without God.”  The prayer becomes a kneeling before the “null” that the Abbot sees, and the monks become appeased and are mollified, and it’s all meaningless anyway because there is no God and it doesn’t really matter and the novel is so titled “Catholics” from an outsider perspective because this is all Catholic hooey anyway.  That would be the cynical possibility.

(2) Prayer will be the reinforcement that will either strengthen the monks to persevere in the face of what could be a long term persecution or a petition to God to change the state of the Church, much like after the destruction of the first temple and through faith and prayer the second temple was eventually built, and so will Catholicism.  It could be seen as the start of re-civilizing the world again, and in this case re-civilizing the Church herself.  That would be the idealistic possibility.

(3) It could be a way to purely mollify the monks and get over the hump.  That would be the utilitarian possibility.

There are other possibilities too, none of which are satisfactory.  You can read whatever you so wish into the ending, and that’s a pretty crappy way to end a novel.  This indeterminate ending stems directly from the novel’s moral ambiguity. 

 

My Goodreads Review:  

This novel is junk. It's sensationalism. It has more holes than a sieve. It was put together because its original premise (a Catholic dystopia of a secularized and militarized church) titillates. Brian Moore puts forth two incompatible lines of thought: an immoral dystopia and a central figure who has no belief when he is presented as the center of the resistance, and then the author leaves the ending in a sort of undetermined state, probably because the author himself is an atheist. Once the author has established the dystopia, the story line cannot tolerate moral ambiguity, and yet we are left with moral ambiguity. In addition, the novel is woefully underdeveloped, the characters are not much more than cartoon figures, the author violates a basic story-telling craft, such as holding back the critical detail of the central character’s personality until two thirds of the novel, and the novel then ends in a whimper. Bottom line: Don’t bother.