A Catholic View

After I sent in my request for A Passion Most Pure, the author emailed me. She said that she noted on my blog that I was Catholic and said that as her book was one of the few works of Christian fiction about a Catholic family, she was looking forward to hearing my opinion. Well, here it is.

First of all, the book is a story of a Boston Irish Catholic family in the year just prior to and all through WWI. It especially focuses the two oldest daughters, who are dating age and the parents, whose 20 year marriage is still full of passion, not only for each other but for God. To say that there is sibling rivalry between the girls is to put in mildly. However, in the end, everyone lives happily ever after--and much as I like happily ever after, given other things that happened in the book, this one was almost too happy--one of those "trust God and everything will be great in the end" type of things. I really liked the overall message of the book--that it is by following the rules set down by God for romantic relationships that we will achieve the relationships that give us the love we seek, including the passion. Disobey those rules and we open ourselves up to using and being used by others. I enjoyed the story and had it been about a Protestant family, I'd say it was about what I expected--an enjoyable light read. The characters were a little one-dimensional (the good sister had few if any bad characteristics and the bad sister had little good in her). The problem is that the book is about a Catholic family, yet for the most part, they acted like the main market for this book--Evangelical Protestants.

I hope that some of the problems with the book are due to the author's lack of familiarity with Catholicism especially as it was practiced at that time, rather than a deliberate choice to mis-represent it. She has a main character, one of the teeanged daughters of this devout Catholic family, going over to the house of the Protestant next door and reading the Protestant's Bible to her. That would not have happened. Catholics didn't read the King James Bible; the teenaged girl would have known that and if she forgot, her parents would certainly have reminded her. On both Christmas and Easter the family went to mass at noon--after breakfast. At that time you had to fast from midnite to receive communion at mass, and its likely the family would have wanted to go to communion on Easter especially. It's not inpossible that they went to noon mass, just unlikely. At one point the oldest daughter, the religious one, has a date on Friday nite. They were in Ireland at the time. The author mentions they were eating chicken. My guess is that in Ireland at that time, no restaurant would have served chicken on Friday because no one would order it--Catholics didn't eat meat on Fridays. Good Friday and fasting is metioned, but attending Stations of the Cross or Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday was not. AT one point a daughter was reading from her prayer book--but the scripture quoted was from the KJV, not the Catholic Douay-Rhiems.

There are other things that I wonder if were left out because they didn't agree with the author's religion, or the faith of the majority of the people for whom she is writing. At one point a character who is practicing his faith only to impress the family is told by the "good" daughter that he should go to confession. He refuses, saying that just because he is acting this way to impress the family doesn't mean he is going to tell his sin to any priest. I don't have any problem with that, after all, why should someone who has no faith confess his sins, and repent of them? However, there are a couple of occassions where members of the family sin seriously and repent, but no mention is made of them going to confession. Any decent Catholic of that era was in the confessional regularly and would have certainly sought it out in the case of serious sin. We hear the family praying on many occassions, but they never make the sign of the cross. The family is told that a member of it died, and no one prays for him.

As you'll note, I read Christian ficton on a pretty regular basis. I know I'm not their target audience but I have basically the same moral values, and those values are reflected in these books. I like happy ending stories, and these usually are. I like to see faith reflected in the lives of people, and Christian fiction usually does that. In some ways, in reading these books I feel like I'm visiting their churches with a friend. As such, I expect to hear things with which I disagree--if I agreed with them, I'd be Protestant, but I don't like to see my faith and Church knocked either. I wouldn't say that A Passion Most Pure is critical of Catholicism but all the characters who are just going through the motions of religion are Catholic. The Protestants who are mentioned are people of faith who spread the faith. The good Catholics really seem to act more like Evangelical Protestants who happend to go to mass than like Catholics.

I sent the author a copy of a draft of this review. She agreed with my comments about the Communion fast and the chicken on Friday. She also noted that she had been a practicing Catholic until her 30's. When she first told me that the book was about a Catholic family I wondered whether 1)they'd end up converting 2) they'd be rule-bound unhappy folks who constantly invoked the saints (except for the one smart person who had become Protestant in heart if not by formal conversion) or 3) they'd be portrayed as they were--as Evangelical Protestants who happened to go to mass, utter an occassional prayer to a saint and say the rosary. I wasn't expecting a true picture of Catholic spirituality, doctrine or practice so I can't say I was disappointed in what I read, and frankly of the three options, I guess the third option was the least objectionable. There didn't appear to be any deliberate attempt to make Catholicism look bad or misrepresent it, it is just that some things that could have been there weren't. I've said before I wish someone out there was writing Catholic fiction like this. This story, written by a Catholic,or taking into account the comments I made above could have been a four start pick for me; as it is, I'll give it three (out of five).

Catholic Carnival

I've decided to start trying to participate in the Catholic Carnival. If you aren't familiar with it, basically it is a weekly compilation of blog posts that have a Catholic theme. Someone hosts each week and others email links to their posts. The host gathers them together and adds a little commentary. It is a good way to explore blogs outside your usual reading list. Here is a link.

Endless Chain

As my regular readers have no doubt figured out, much of my recent reading material has been Christian fiction. I decided to change genres briefly and picked up Emilie Richards' Endless Chain If you go back a few weeks you'll see where I read the first book in her Shenandoah Valley series; this is the second. Like Wedding Ring, this one is set in a small town not too far from Washington DC, in rural Virginia. Like Wedding Ring, it involves a quilt. The main characters in Wedding Ring play an important part in this book. Endless Chain is the story of Sam Kincaide, the new minister at Community Church. We learn that he was hired after getting out of prison, where he served a sentence for an act of civil disobedience involving the School of the America, which is a Georgia school run by the US government which trains Central and South American military leaders. Prior to his run-in with the law he was an assistant pastor at a society church in Atlanta, where he met his fiancee. Endless Chain is also the story of Elisa, a secretive Latino woman he hires as sexton (which from what I can tell seems to be a fancy word for custodian). It is the story of their relationship with each other and the people in the community.
Its funny that when looking for a change from religious topics I pick up a book that really has a lot of religion in it, though it isn't marketed as such. It would never make the cut as Christian fiction--Sam's requirement for having sex with a woman is that they be engaged with a date set. One of the characters is a Catholic who, while she is engaged, and having sex with her fiancee, doesn't want to get married until they can agree about kids--she already has two young ones and wants a break before having more. He wants kids right away and lots of them. Even though they are having pre-marital sex, she doesn't want to use birth control because of Church rules. Elisa gives her some Cycle Beads, which are used in a calendar method of NFP. Sam's religion is much more in the liberal social justice sphere than the conservative social values one. Things he says make it clear he is not a fundamentalist--but he is a man of faith whose faith causes hardship in his life and, at the end, leads him to a vocation he never planned on. I liked the book and I hope I can find the third book in the series.

My Review: Love Starts with Elle

This book is about a young woman who lives in the South Carolina Low Country. She is engaged to marry a handsome charming man who is also a minister at her church. The book is the story of her relationship with him and her relationship with a man who is renting a house from her--and as you can probably guess from the title, by the end of the book she finds love.

The main character belongs to some generic Christian church and that is where her renter attends church as well. I found a couple of things interesting about the religious aspects of the book. First, after a crisis point in her life the main character, at the urging of an older woman in the congregation, starts going to the chapel (which used to be the church before it was outgrown) to pray for an hour every morning. A Catholic doing this would be praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament. I guess even among low church Protestants there is a sense of the church building as a holy place. The second thing I found interesting is a scene from the novel her renter is writing. He is writing about a WWII pilot and the girl he left behind, who just happens to be a minister's daughter. Well, before the pilot left, they got too close and soon thereafter she learned that she was pregnant. After telling her dad about the pregnancy, she decides that the way to deal with it is for her to stand up in front of the congregation and confess her sin and express repentance. I guess in some ways I can see that as her sin was going to be pretty evident very soon. However, the story then states that after her confession, one man in the congregation stood up, with his wife sitting beside him, and confessed to adultery and that other people also confessed sins that were heretofore not known to the congregation. One thing I often heard on AOL religious debate boards was "Why do you Catholics go to confession? We confess our sins to God, not to some man" I may confess to a man (who is sitting in the person of Christ) but what is said in that room remains in that room. I just can't see confessing private sins to a room full of people.

The author brings out some interesting facts about people in this book. How often do we ignore the gifts God has given us (and wants us to use) because of what people say? How often do we ask God's guidance in making life decisions? Do we allow God to use the valleys of our life to bring us back to Him?

I enjoyed the book and recommend it.