Catholic writers must stay true to themselves

First I blame the hall phone. The buttons stick, the battery is weak, and when the famous interviewer called from Italy, it wouldn’t let me answer. Great was the hue and cry in the McLean household as I rushed to the kitchen to pick up the other phone before it was too late. But it was too late. I had to wait, embarrassed, until the man called back.

Second I blame a kind friend. Some months ago, she wrote to me of a priest in England who considers me an unsafe person to talk to his conference of  English Catholic teenagers about the single life. Apparently I might be too liberal, a concern that would make my friends, enemies and family members fall about with loud guffaws. However, it is also the sort of libel that makes Catholic theology professors have nervous breakdowns and Catholic authors second-guess every word they write or say.

Third I blame the interviewer’s question, “Do you consider yourself first a woman writer or a Catholic writer?” It completely unnerved me. Like most writers, I don’t write fully conscious of either my sex or my religion. I just write. Writers are writers. But instead of saying that, I chose “Catholic writer” and pontificated at great unnecessary length.

For all these reasons, when I was subsequently asked, “What is the first duty of a Catholic writer?” I clutched at a slippery answer like a drowning swimmer grabbing at a passing fish, and now I’m imagining all my former professors reading it and sighing their sad and gentle sighs. My answer was “orthodoxy,” and the noise you just heard was a professor at Regis College banging his head on his desk.

As a Catholic, I do believe orthodoxy — literally, right teaching — is crucial. But as a theology student, I know the word can be used as a weapon, either to attack people or to defend oneself from attack. And as a writer, I have to admit that orthodoxy, though a pressing concern, is not my very first thought. Gabbing into the phone about how I strive to be orthodox and how, if I made a mistake, I would humbly accept correction was all very nice and pious, but it was also a colossal failure of nerve.   

To tell you the truth, the first answer that popped into my jangled mind was that the first duty of a Catholic writer is not to bore Catholics rigid. Not boring your readers is, of course, the first duty of all writers. The goal of every writer is to make you read to the very end of his or her piece of writing. Therefore, another duty of a Catholic writer is to write in such a charming way that Catholics do not snarl in disgust, scrunch up the paper into a ball and throw it across the room. This is a challenge for Catholic writers, who write about deeply personal piety and about strongly controversial issues. Pious writing can get icky very fast, and controversial issues just seem to invite paper-scrunching.

The way I avoid being either icky or scrunched is just to write whatever pops into my mind as interesting and true and to present it as lucidly as I can. And this can be a difficult thing to do. People believe all kinds of things that are inconvenient for them to believe, and therefore they do not write them down. For example, there are Catholic theology professors who dissent on teachings regarding priesthood and marriage. They will say so to students, who sometimes feel pressured to assent to this dissent, but not many will say so in writing.

This double-talk is unfair to Catholics like me, who can make decisions about faraway Catholic teachers only by what they write. I was greatly surprised when I went to the United States and discovered that my beliefs about priesthood and marriage were opposed to the beliefs of some professors there whose work I had read and admired. My surprise made me unhappy. I felt I had been tricked. Catholic writers have no business tricking Catholic readers.

So perhaps the first duty of a Catholic writer is to write candidly. She must not be afraid her professors or students or random English priests might get mad. She must not be afraid her readers will call her names. She must not be afraid her interviewer will not plug her book after all. She must simply tell the truth, insofar as she knows what the truth is, and always keeping in mind that Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Truth.

Next, as I cannot stress enough,  she must not be boring.

I’m afraid I was boring.

“Can I edit my remarks?” I asked my interviewer’s secretary.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “We will send you the whole transcript for review.”

Whew! That was a relief. Now I must go out and buy a new phone.