Author chronicles lives of four Catholic writers

Four prominent Catholic writers of the 20th century are profiled in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage," by Paul Elie, who uses the metaphor of a pilgrimage to talk about the devoutly religious -- but intensely independent -- faith of Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton.

Day established the Catholic Worker movement during the Depression; Merton converted to Catholicism in 1938 and entered a Trappist monastery; and O'Connor and Percy became world-renowned novelists.

Based on his study of their lives, Mr. Elie -- who grew up in Our Lady of the Assumption parish in Latham and served as an altar boy at nearby St. Ambrose -- concluded that the typical tale told by historians about mid-century American Catholicism isn't the true one.

Image of faith

Catholicism at the end of the Second World War is usually painted in broad brushstrokes and sweeping generalizations, Mr. Elie told The Evangelist, describing a "thick Catholic culture" where adherents clung to a strict morality, obeyed the Pope and kept to themselves in ethnic enclaves.

"Generalizations that broad don't help us to understand history," he said. "One hundred million Catholics lived between 1948 and now in this country. There's incredible variety in those lives."

The four people in his book searched, like many Catholics at the time, for a way to be individual and independent while remaining within their religious tradition, he said.

Authors' messages

Mr. Elie said the four authors he wrote about craved religious experience after reading Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and the Bible.

They were "converted by books," he said, "and achieved great things through their determination to comprehend the Catholic traditions and make them their own." They wrote at a time when the culture thought "if you were Catholic, you couldn't be an artist because you'd be too pious."

As a young adult, Mr. Elie found himself inspired by the authors. Upon reading of "Wise Blood," O'Connor's first novel, he remembers "recognizing the power of the book, even though I didn't understand it at all. The age we live in now really begins with that book -- the experience of darkness in the book, not knowing what you believe."

Commonality

As a senior editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, where three of the four authors published their work, Mr. Elie gained firsthand knowledge about the writers by speaking to Robert Giroux, who had known them.

"What strikes me about all four of them was just how much they expected of life," he said. "They wanted to know in the deepest sense about what it meant to be a human being. Their sense of life was grand; it included the depths of hell and the heights of heaven. That, alone, was powerfully inspiring to me."

(Paul Elie will speak about his book at Siena College in Loudonville, Sept. 25 at 7:30 p.m. For information, go to www.siena.edu/ellard/paulelie.htm. He will also read at Our Lady of the Assumption parish in Latham, Sept. 26, 7 p.m.)

(9/18/03) [[In-content Ad]]