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.

Faith Filled Friday: Saint Dominic de Guzman

On Sunday August 8^th will be the feast day of St. Dominic de Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers, commonly known as the Dominicans.  This is not only the annual feast day, but, having died in 1221, the 800^th anniversary of his death. 

St. Dominic is not as well-known as his contemporary, St. Francis of Assisi, but both near simultaneously founded mendicant orders which almost defined Catholicism in the late Middle Ages.  St. Dominic had the vision to realize that a religious order was needed to preach the Gospel to overturn the heresies that had built up in his time.  As I think about all times build up heresies.  We have had heresies from the first century on, and just look around today and notice how many heresies exist.  In order to preach, St. Dominic realized that his friars needed to study, and so learning and communicating became a foundational element to the charism of Dominicans.  Ultimately all learning gained must be shared as a fruit of the prayerful process.  It is meant for the salvation of souls.

By the way, St. Dominic, ever so humble, never wanted his order to be named after him, and so it is not.  It is and has always been officially the Order of Preachers.  It was after his death that his name was unofficially linked to the order.

What was Dominic like?  A couple of years ago I reviewed here The Life of Saint Dominic by Augusta Theodosia Drane.  I have lots of little excerpts to provide a portrait.  If I were to provide some adjectives I would say: humility, kindness, gentleness.  He connected with people that made others feel dignified.  He was just loved as a man and leader.  The Middle Ages are not known as a time where women were allowed to self-determination, but one of the first acts Dominic ever did was create a place and sanctuary for the women who converted from the Albigensian heresy and allowed them self-government in their own monastery.  I wrote about the establishment of one of these convents in highlighting the icon called “The Madonna Advocata.”  

Sr. Marie Trainar, O.P. writes at the Order of Preachers website that while learning was important to evangelization, what must go along with it is personal holiness.  To preach the holy, one had to live holy.

 

What is striking about Dominic is that he was perfectly attuned to “the urgent need of his time” (PG 2). Now, as Pope Francis points out, this need was twofold. There was the need for a new evangelization, to which St. Dominic responded with poor, itinerant preaching; but there was, “equally important, […] a summons to holiness in the living communion of the Church” (PG 2). And Dominic understood at once that without a lived holiness, his own and that of his communities, preaching would sooner or later be doomed to failure, that without this resolute return to the way of life of the first Christian community, the word of the Gospel would be lost in the hubbub of the din of the times.

Last year I also reviewed In the Image of Saint Dominic: Nine Portraits of Dominican Life by Guy Bedouelle, O.P. where the author, a Dominican himself, provides portraits of nine famous Dominicans and how their personas somehow reflect and exude St. Dominic, their founder.  You can read about it here and in Part 2 here.   

Now I’m going to provide another little insight in the great man.  This is a passage from The Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the Dominican Saints by Ambroise Gardeil, O. P.  The premise of the book is that Gardeil takes one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and demonstrating how they are manifest in particular Dominican saint.  For St. Dominic Gardeil attributes the gift of knowledge, but he goes back to an episode in Dominic’s life that reveals innate knowledge beyond his youth.

 

His vocation is foreshadowed in that distant episode of his student life when a famine was raging in Polencia.  Dominic sold his books, his treasure, saying, “How can one study upon dead skins while there are men dying of hunger?”  When one day a more fearful error which poison’s men’s souls, was revealed to a heart thus disposed from on high, the whole of the knowledge which he had acquired during twenty years of silent study adapted itself to save them.  Behold him on that night in Toulouse when the divine call was revealed to him in that discussion with the host he sought to convert.  The same spirit which had wrung from his compassionate heart that cry of pity for the starving now animated him “to give knowledge of salvation to his people.”  All the while he was conversing, he sought earnestly for some arguments which could affect his host.  He made himself aware of his moral and intellectual condition: he wished to discover the common idea, the truth admitted by both parties, a ray of God still preserved by the misled spirit, upon which he could draw to rekindle the light.  At this moment, unquestionably he would sell, as “dead skins,” all the knowledge he had acquired by the labor and meditations of twenty years to find the right word, the decisive phrase, which would deliver and satisfy this soul.  (p. 72-3)

So think of it.  There are a couple of parts to that passage that require some explanation.  Here is Dominic a student at a university and while a famine is causing local starvation, Dominic sells his books to raise money for others to eat.  Just think how in the 13^th century books were preciously difficult to come by and the sacrifice one must make to sell them.  If Dominic were anything like me, giving up ones books is like tearing part of my insides out.  And yet he did it.

The other part of that passage refers to the host of an Inn Dominic was staying in his travels who believed in the Abignesian heresy. The legend goes that Dominic stayed up all night with the man speaking theology, and by the morning had converted the man out of his heresy.  It was this incident that gave Dominic the idea of a preaching order, which of course would ultimately become his order.

So as you can see I have written much about St. Dominic and the Dominican Order over the years.  I may have alluded to this in passing, but I’m going to reveal it now officially.  I have been studying and undergoing the process of being a Lay Dominican.  I have completed postulancy and novitiate years, and am ready to take my temporary promise, also called the first promise.  Covid has slowed things down but God willing I will take that promise in the fall.  Three years from temporary promise one becomes fully professed with a final promise.  May I also be shaped into the image of St. Dominic.  Pray for me that I complete it.

Finally I leave you with this picture of a statue of St. Dominic.  You don’t see too many statues of St. Dominic.

 

I took this while at a funeral Mass for a close friend of 43 years—we knew each other since our teens!—at a church in Brooklyn named after St. Dominic.   And get this, my friend’s middle name I found out was Dominic.  I had never known that in all the years.  There are no coincidences in life!  So say a prayer also for the repose of my friend Joseph Dominic. 

Pray for us St. Dominic and happy anniversary of the 800^th year entering heaven.

Edit:  Great article from Catholic World Report commemorating the feast day, “In praise of St. Dominic and the Dominicans” by Peter M.J. Stravinskas.  Well worth reading.

 

Catholics: A Novel by Brian Moore, Post #3

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

The second post here.   

Summary

Part Three

Fr. Kinsella wakes up the following morning and is met with Fr. Manus instead of the Abbot, is asked if he would like to celebrate Mass, which he declines, and then is brought to breakfast.  The Abbot finally meets him after breakfast and is told Kinsella will be leaving shortly with the helicopter.  Kinsella finally asks the Abbot what his decision will be, continue to rebel against the Vatican authority or comply with the new ecumenical rules.  The Abbot tells him he will comply and deflect the TV news.  At the helicopter landing, monks have congregated to swarm Kinsella over what they see as heresy, but the Abbot mollifies them enough for Kinsella to get on board and take off.

Part Four

The Abbot knows he will now have to face his monks.  They press him for what came out of the discussions with Kinsella, and he reveals the monastery will now comply with the new rules.  The monks are now angered, especially Fr. Matthew.  The Abbot enjoins them to pray, and kneels and starts the Our Father.  The monks kneel behind him and the novel ends with all of them reciting the Our Father.

###

Some major questions here. 

(1) Why does Moore avoid the coming together of the two sides of the conflict?  Why does he have the monk’s advocacy of the traditional rules not engage the Kinsella, the advocacy of the new rules, come to a head?  He has avoided this the entire novel and here in Part Three the two sides are perfectly aligned for a conflict, and he makes sure it gets avoided.  Why?

(2) Is the Abbot sincere in his praying at the end?  Here he is in a tight spot where his leadership is at stake, and he then resorts to what could be an appeasing move.  When he was alone in Part Two in the church, he decidedly didn’t pray.  Here when it serves his interest, he does.  Is he sincere?

(3) Why does Brian Moore call the novel “Catholics?”  The perspective is from one who is not a Catholic.  It’s as if I were to write a novel about Islam and call it “Muslims.”  The perspective is from the outside and not the inside.  What is he trying to say?  Is he condemning the whole religion? 

###

If there is any theme to be drawn from this novel, it lies in these passage from Part IV.  First, Fr. Matthew accosting the Abbot.

“And I will not be put off like that,” Father Matthew shouted. “I will not be ordered to believe something that I do not believe.”

 

“No one can order belief,” the abbot said. “It is a gift from God.” But even as he said this, said the only truth left to him, he saw in these faces that he was failing, that he was losing them, that he must do something he had never done, give something he had never given in these, his years as their abbot. What had kept him in fear since Lourdes, must now be faced. What he feared most to do must be done. And if, in doing it, I enter null and never return, amen. My time has come.

“No one can order belief,” that is a true enough statement.  But what is he getting at?  Is the true presence a matter of belief or a true reality?  I seem to take that as a statement of relativism.  What is this entering into the “null?”  I think Moore is suggesting that the Abbot is facing the nothing of the supernatural, its non-existence.  Of course, coming this doesn’t mean Moore doesn’t believe in the supernatural, just that the Abbot is facing his non-belief.  Then we come to this.

 

Stood, holding the door for them, as they moved past him, his eyes on their faces, these faces he knew better than his own, seeing every shade of wavering, from confusion, to doubt, to anger at him, to fear, to Father Donald’s dangerous tears and Brother Kevin’s hysterics, tight on snaffle, a horse ready to bolt. He entered behind them and shut the door. Moved past them in the aisle, going up into the great vault of the nave, moving in that silence, in the gray light of this place where he had spent the longest years of his life, this place where his body would lie, this place he feared most. He entered the chancel. He faced the altar.

 

“A miracle,” he told them, “is when God is there in the tabernacle.”

 

“But you said the opposite, you said that the sacrifice of the Mass is just ritual, that bread and wine remain bread and wine, that there are no miracles!”

So the Abbot moves to the place he fears most, the place where his body will be eventually interred.  What specifically is his fear here?  His fear here could be either facing God’s judgement or facing the nothing that is from an atheist’s perspective.  So when he says he is entering the “null” above, is he saying he is facing God’s judgement or the nothing of death from an atheist’s perspective?

And then we get the final part of the scene.

 

Matthew, thundering: righteous, wronged. The abbot, his back to all of them, heard their stiff intake of breath, the fear of their lives at these words, said in this place. He stared at the golden door of the tabernacle. His fear came. “Prayer is the only miracle,” he said. “We pray. If our words become prayer, God will come.”

 

Slowly, with the painful stiffness of age, he went down heavily on one knee, then on both. Knelt in the center of the aisle, facing the altar, the soles of his heavy farm boots showing from the hem of his robe. He trembled. He shut his eyes. “Let us pray.”

 

He bent his head. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” he said. His trembling increased. He entered null. He would never come back. In null.

“His fear came?”  Which fear is this, because I think it’s not clear, the fear of God in the tabernacle or the fear of losing the leadership of the monks?  One can’t help thinking that his words at that moment is Brian Moore’s central theme: “Prayer is the only miracle,” he said. “We pray. If our words become prayer, God will come.” 

So if that is the case, Moore is a relativist, and the Mass is just a ritual.  That I think is the central theme of the novel.  That would explain why he names the novel “Catholics,” because his perspective is not within Catholicism but outside of it. 

Frankly, this novel is such a mess I can’t draw any conclusion with any certainty.  In the end, Kinsella and the dystopian forces are right?  You got me.

### 

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.

###

I have to say I giggled out loud when I read this.  That is Kinsella speaking first in dialogue with the Abbot.

“Are you asking me what do I believe?”

 

“Yes, if you wish. There is a book by a Frenchman called Francis Jeanson, have ever you heard of it? An Unbeliever’s Faith, it is called.”

 

“I have not read it.” “It is interesting. He believes there can be a future for Christianity, provided it gets rid of God. Your friend, Father Hartmann, has mentioned Jeanson in his own writings. The idea is, a Christianity that keeps God can no longer stand up to Marxism. You have not heard of the book?”

Christianity can only survive if it gets rid of God…hahaha.  Was that meant to be funny?  Is Moore satirizing here or is he serious?

###

I skimmed through the book to make a list of all the “Vatican IV” changes to Catholicism.  It’s pretty interesting and funny.

• -       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.

I probably missed others.  It’s fun in a dystopian novel to see what the details of the dystopia amount to. 

###

Kerstin comment:

I expected more fireworks. I expected a more detailed discussion with a lot of back and forth regarding the merits of Tradition and the Latin Mass that goes back to Gregory the Great (if I remember correctly). I expected a deeper delving into the spiritual needs of the people and how the Latin Mass serves these needs on a deep level. Instead what we get is an Abbot who falls like a house built of straw at the slightest puff from Kinsella. Kinsella wasn't really needed to be there in person at all to bring about the desired change for the Vatican, a stern letter of 'cease and desist' would have sufficed.

This to me is what made this novel so dissatisfying. Why bother? In Lord of the World we have a group of priests whose faith is never in question, who are steadfast to the bitter end. Here the end feels like a whimper.

 

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "Fr. Matthew defied the abbot's orders and organized a vigil as part protest, part hope that God would somehow make things work out the way he and the other monks desired. "

I didn't read your whole comment, I'll do so later, but I did see that which I quoted. No, I don't think anyone has an obligation to obey clear heresy. See St. Athanasius and his struggles against 4th century heresy from his bishops. If the Pope tomorrow declared the Eucharist to be only a symbol, I would imagine you would defy it? I would hope. I would.

This is the problem with Moore's novel. He has clearly laid out a dystopian heresy of which there can be no compromise. Any intended compromise can only be seen as immoral. He did not lay out a grey position but a black and white one.

 

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "Is is possible to force someone to believe what they don't believe? These monks are not in public positions. They are not being asked to teach something heritical. The TV cameras are being headed o..."

Community shapes belief. Would my son believe if I didn’t? Of course the Mass is critical to community belief. And no, they should be bringing the faith to the media. That is the moral thing to do. It is akin to Martin Luther King bringing to the attention of society civil injustice. This heresy is even of greater moral concern to Catholics than civil rights. Denying the true presence in the Eucharist is even greater than the Arian heresy St. Athansius fought against in the very church. You seem to be down playing how big a deal this is. I’ll ask again, would you obey this?

I’ll ask the book club readers, would you be fighting against or going along with these “Vatican IV” heresies?

There is no question I would be fighting against, with my whole heart, soul, and life. If ever a case for martyrdom we’re called, this is it. In fact St Michael Pro and the Mexican martyrs gave their very lives over a similar issue, of which we’ll get to in the next novel

 

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "All that is left is to surrender all in prayer. And, if they can find God in that surrender, in that humility, in that prayer, that is MIRACLE. Faith is a gift, one that the abbot has not enjoyed for some time. But he must have had it once. So he enters that null because there is nothing else to do, because all that is left, when everything has been taken, is to kneel in surrender and humility and hope. And he does it out of love, love for these men that he has shepherded for all these years despite the emptiness in his own life. Beyond the social reforms, beyond the doctrinal certitude, beyond the arrogance of intellectualism, beyond exquisit liturgies, beyond it all is the surrender to what is beyond what we can know or persuade or define or control."

OK, now I've read your entire comment, and can agree with that. But isn't that proof that Brian Moore doesn't understand the material? What exactly is the point to come to the end and have it end in a prayer? As Kerstin said, this ends in a whimper. This is like ending a novel with someone detonating an atomic bomb on a timer and having the group kneel down and pray that it doesn't kill anyone when it goes off. Moore has set off what amounts to as an atomic bomb in Catholicism. He can't just end it like this. What will happen on the next day when the monks have to perform the non valid Mass? Are they simply going to go along and obey now? That would be incredible. Moore has invested no space in that kind of change in Frs. Matthew nor Manus. This novel is so flawed it's a joke.

 

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "O, and I did not answer your question. Would I obey an order to stop believing in the Real Presence? No. Would I obey an order to accept a new liturgical form? Yes."

Oh I missed that earlier. Thanks.

 

My Reply to Frances:

But Frances, the monks weren’t shy. They were ready to engage just as St. Catherine would have. And you’re right, she wasn’t shy about talking back to the Pope. The problem is not the monks. The problem is Brian Moore. He has them apparently capitulate when no precedence in the novel has been established for this to occur. It’s still another flaw in the novel.

As to being shy, the word that to me defines the Abbot is pusillanimous. He has been pusillanimous throughout the novel. In way it’s the only character consistency in this work. The abbot has been pusillanimous when originally his monks kept the Latin Mass against Rome, he was pusillanimous in his decision to fight Rome, and when he is forced to disagree with his monks, he is pusillanimous in standing up to them.

 

Kerstin Replied to My Comment:

Manny wrote: "I’ll ask the book club readers, would you be fighting against or going along with these “Vatican IV” heresies?"

I wouldn't go along. The heresy is too blatant. In Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict wrote the following:

The formula "the Church is the Body of Christ" thus states that the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives us his body and makes us one body, forever remains the place where the Church is generated, where the Lord himself never ceases to found her anew; in the Eucharist the Church is most compactly herself - in all places, yet one only, just as he is one only.

In other words, if the Eucharist becomes only a symbol, the very life of Christ is no longer within the Church - all we have is a human construct. In the Latin Mass reverence for the Eucharist is especially pronounced, and this is why Kinsella makes the trip to crush it.

Despite all its faults, the novel does pose some hope, and I don't see it with the Abbot. The hope lies with the monks. They are the faithful remnant. Throughout salvation history God has worked with a faithful remnant, they are the key for the rebirth of the Church.