Preface: J.F. Powers
I just finished reading every bit of fiction ever written by J[ames] F[arl] Powers, his two novels and short stories having been issued by the New York Review of Books. Powers, a master to people who know how novels and short stories are supposed to work, was a Catholic author, contemporary and correspondent of Flannery O'Connor and, I gather, one of Frank O'Connor's golf buddies when he summered in Ireland.
JFP's 1962 novel, "Morte D'Urban" won the National Book Award, not because it's a truly great book, but because Vatican II was on at the time and the artsy-fartsies who make up the literary establishment figured it was PC to give awards to Catholics. And literary awards, like Nobel Peace Prizes, are given only for PC reasons.
Powers was an English professor at St. John's U. the Benedictine foundation in Collegeville, MN, but reading his fiction about mid-Western priests has a church- insider like myself thinking he was also a fly on the wall in rectories and chanceries. Having been in the stage-crew of Roman Catholicism for ten years, I found many a familiar personality and behavior pattern in Powers' work.
Whether they love religion or distrust it, people assume that people in the church, especially priests, are preoccupied with religious matters, with being holy-Joes. As people are, hopefully, learning through the recent scandals and the works of outside-the-American-Church-Establishment reformers such as Mike Rose, George Weigel, Pope John Paul, what is assumed is often not the case. There are plenty of bishops, priests, nuns, bureaucrats, non-profiteers in the church who have little or no interest in Catholicism at all.
Four decades ago, Powers challenged the assumption. Readers going to meet his priests with the thought that these would be kindly men with folded hands who hide foxes from the hunt were probably shocked to encounter ambitious SOBs angling for pastorships, enjoying an easy ride through life with rich idiots and jerks, trying hard, with good reason, not to beat the bishop at golf.
Having just witnessed weeks of angst and deliberation over the location of a statue in my office, I found particularly amusing one priest-character's preoccupation with furniture: should I get the bed with the cannon-ball or pineapple posts?
Powers was often sympathetic to such spiritual pygmies. Yes, they aren't what people expect, but they keep the church going. However, time is teaching us that religious who worry about the stain on the wainscoting and curse the dogleg left at Kenwood also allow such scandals as we are witnessing to develop and get out of hand. The character of priests doesn't matter to pygmies.
And his is why the U.S. bishops, when they aren't fumbling around to appease public anger, come up with pathetic PC schtick on tired old subjects such as racism, or rewrites of the Just War Theory or, without regard to the encyclical "Dominus Jesus," this document about the Jews not needing the saving power of Christ.
Priests--and all Catholics--are supposed to be preoccupied with prayer, the history and wisdom of their church, growth in holiness, their own character, the character of their fellows, the building of the Kingdom. To hell with the pineapples.
--NJC
Copyright © 2001, 2003 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.