A Very Short (and Personal) Introduction to the History of Catholic Literary Studies in America
The Challenge
One afternoon about twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in an English Department meeting at the Jesuit university where I taught. I was a younger member of the department and was expressing my enthusiasm about a new course I had been invited to create and teach by the newly formed Catholic Studies program. It would be a survey of Catholic poetry that would count as an upper-division English course, as well as a Catholic Studies course.
My colleagues, except for two who were involved in designing the new program, looked less than thrilled. After some conversation about the course, one faculty member finally spoke up, a productive scholar and senior member of the department who seemed to be speaking for both himself and his skeptical colleagues: “Someone is going to have to prove to me that this is a legitimate way to approach the study of literature.”
Some History
There was, of course, no way to “prove” the legitimacy of Catholic literary studies. There had been plenty of reputable scholarship that explored the intersection of the literary and theological imagination, beginning (arguably) with William Lynch’s masterful Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination in 1960, followed by at least a dozen books over the next several decades that explored the subject of what came to be called The Catholic Imagination, including David Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (1981), Paul Giles’s American Catholic Fictions (1992), and Fr. Andrew Greeley’s popularization of some of Tracy’s ideas in what has become a kind of handbook for readers interested in this subject, The Catholic Imagination (2000). Yet there was resistance to this coupling of theology and literature in the English departments of Catholic colleges and universities, a resistance that is still present in many places, due to an array of cultural forces at work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
First, as we know from the history of Catholic higher education in America, Catholic institutions had to fight their way in a secular culture to be accepted as academically reputable. The assumption that they were bastions of backward, insular, anti-modernist thought was pervasive in non-Catholic spaces throughout the first half of the twentieth century—and beyond. The battle to prove otherwise, much of it fueled by Vatican II, had been hard-fought, and by the year 2000 seemed to have been won. This period of great ferment is carefully analyzed and summarized in Phillip Gleason’s excellent study Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (1995). To some of my colleagues at the above-mentioned university, the idea of establishing a Catholic Studies program in itself was anathema as it risked returning us to the ghetto mentality that we had fought so hard to free ourselves from.
A second reason for this prejudicial view of Catholic Studies is related to the first. In an effort to shake off the undeserved reputation that professors at Catholic colleges and universities were lesser thinkers, scholars, teachers than those at supposedly enlightened secular institutions, many Catholic intellectuals made an effort to compartmentalize and insist that the religion they practiced had nothing to do with the vocation they pursued. For many literature professors, this was true. What, after all, did the study of Shakespeare, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, or Robert Frost have to do with Catholicism? At best, Catholic Studies seemed irrelevant; at worst, it seemed vaguely sinister, an attempt orchestrated by mysterious forces to return us to the bad old days. The pursuit of Catholic Studies by an individual faculty member or scholar seemed to suggest an inordinate attachment to the religion, one that could very well get in the way of one’s freedom of thought. Ironically, even in Catholic institutions of higher learning, it was not (and, in many places, still is not) intellectually respectable to self-identify as a believing Catholic, let alone one who is interested in studying Catholic ways of seeing the world.
This is an unfortunate scenario, but not an unfamiliar one. From one perspective it might seem inevitable that Catholic universities would internalize the anti-Catholicism that greeted Catholic immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century. This was the price of assimilation in American culture, both for individuals and for institutions. Adaptation is a survival mechanism, and we (Catholics and Catholic institutions) adapted and survived. But the question begs to be asked—at what cost? If Catholic higher education has nothing to offer that is distinctive from what secular educational institutions offer, what is the point of its existence? This leads to a larger—and less practical—question: what does Catholicism itself have to offer the world of ideas?
Hotly in Pursuit of the Catholic Imagination
I first became interested in the concept of the Catholic Imagination from the standpoint of a practicing writer rather than that of a professor. As a poet raised in a working-class Italian-American family (the Irish surname is my husband’s), I had grown up in a moderately observant Catholic household in Northeastern Pennsylvania, an area populated by Italians, Irish, and Poles who emigrated from their homelands to work in the coal mines. My mother took us to Mass on Sundays and holidays (my father never went, as in our community religion was women’s work); we prayed before bed and meals, and we had the obligatory statue of St. Anthony in the parlor, crosses on all the walls, busts of the Virgin Mary, and the big sentimental portrait of blue-eyed Jesus looking up to heaven that all good Catholics displayed in their homes. Not only was our family Catholic, everyone we knew was Catholic. Even though we went to public school, it might as well have been Catholic school as the same kids we went to church with we went to school with. They bused us all to Our Lady of Sorrows Church a mile away to our catechism classes after school. We were so steeped in the culture, I did not know it was a culture. Not until I left to go to college.
Attending large secular state universities for my undergraduate and graduate education was a revelation. Not only was everyone not Catholic, very few people seemed to be, particularly among my professors. For the first time in my life being Catholic felt to me like a strange and exotic identity. I had fallen in love with literature as a child and I pursued that passion with abandon. I loved my courses and all the writers I was discovering and studying. Interestingly, the subject of religion came up rarely, and only when it was particularly germane to the writer’s life or work. Studying literature was an entirely secular enterprise—even in the case of writers who were very religious, such as John Milton or T.S. Eliot. I remember reading Flannery O’Connor’s story of murder and mayhem, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for the first time as a freshman and being horrified and utterly puzzled by it. No mention was made that O’Connor was Catholic, a fact that would have made the theology of redemption that lies at the heart of the story evident and the meaning of the story accessible. As far as my professor was concerned, her Catholic background had nothing to do with her fiction. As O’Connor once quipped, many readers misread her work, mistaking her for “a hillbilly nihilist” whereas in reality she was “a hillbilly Thomist.” My professor was one such reader. In my training for my chosen field, I was taught to think that religion and literature were circles on a Venn Diagram that never overlapped.
Fast forward to one evening about a month after taking my first job—a teaching position at the previously mentioned Jesuit university. The guest lecturer was a Jesuit and his subject was the poetry of Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his lecture, he laid out in careful detail the ways in which Hopkins’s poems channeled the Spiritual Exercises of his mentor, the founder of the Jesuit order, St. Ignatius of Loyola. He spoke of the ways in which the poems were actually forms of Ignatian prayer and embodied an Ignatian imagination. I like to tell my students that my first day of Catholic school was the day I showed up to teach at one. Here was a fellow professor who was talking about the way in which religion shaped the mind and the work of one of the finest English poets. It suddenly became apparent to me that teaching at a Catholic university would open up for me a whole new way of thinking, talking, and writing about literature. Contrary to the stereotype about Catholic higher education being narrow, my prospects were broadened, and I felt as if I had entered a world where I belonged.
Catholic Studies by Another Name
This was my first introduction to Catholic literary studies, though that term was not in common use in 1987, and it made a deep impression on me—in part because it aroused in me a curiosity about my own practice and identity as a poet. If Hopkins’s work was shaped by his religious formation, could the same be true for me? To what extent were my poems an embodiment of a worldview I inherited from my Italian-American Catholic childhood, along with a very particular vocabulary, a rich repository of stories and symbols, and a deep sense of mystery associated with the intersection of the word and the Logos? I had never thought of myself as a Catholic poet or thought of my writing as a sacramental activity, but perhaps, in some essential ways, I was, it was.
Thus began a new direction in my reading and research, as well as in my work as a poet. I began to seek out poets, both past and present, who wrote from a Catholic perspective, whether consciously or unconsciously, and discovered a rich assortment of writers whose work was shaped by their Catholic formation. Some of them were converts who consciously used poetry to explore matters of faith—writers such as Thomas Merton, William Everson/Brother Antoninus, Denise Levertov, and Mary Karr. Others were cradle Catholics, some of whom no longer considered themselves members of the Church and yet created work that bore the imprint of the faith they had been reared in—writers such as Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Erdrich, Adam Zagajewski, and Seamus Heaney. Still others were Catholics who wrote poetry that was well received by the secular poetry community but who kept their Catholic identity concealed, in part due to the anti-Catholic prejudice spoken of earlier in intellectual and artistic circles—writers such as Robert Lowell, Josephine Jacobsen, and Dana Gioia. Indeed, I discovered that there were many different kinds of Catholic writers as the Catholic Imagination took a seemingly infinite variety of forms. I began to seek out their work in order to read it through this new lens, and I also sought out poets closer to my own age and living in my own era whose work seemed to bear the stamp of a Catholic Imagination. I found many of them: Paul Mariani, David Craig, Marjorie Hafer Maddox, Maryann Corbett, Scott Cairns, and James Matthew Wilson, to name but a few.
What I did not find was a community of Catholic writers. So many successful and influential literary movements can be traced to groups of like-minded writers who supported one another’s work: they read it, reviewed it, published it, and even offered economic support to the struggling writers. I realized, at some point in my search, that if there was no existing community of Catholic writers, one had to be created. So create it we did.
The Conference on the Catholic Literary Imagination
In 2014, a few years after stepping down from his role as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (2003-2009), poet Dana Gioia, fellow-Catholic and fellow writer who had become a friend, invited me to help him plan the first Conference on the Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination. At the time, Gioia was on faculty at the University of Southern California and was working in partnership with USC’s Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, directed by Fr. James Heft. We planned a modest conference, inviting some of the most visible and talented Catholic writers to give readings and lectures, including Tobias Woolf, Ron Hansen, Julia Alvarez, and Paul Mariani. We also invited publishers, literary critics, and journalists. In February of 2015, about 150 writers and readers gathered, along with a large contingent of local Catholic high school students. We also offered workshops on poetry writing, Hopkins’s poems, and Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. After three days of rich and nourishing fellowship and conversation, we all agreed on one thing: that there had to be a second conference.
Two years later, in April of 2017, Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies hosted the second iteration of the conference at our Lincoln Center campus. As Associate Director of the Center, I was honored and excited to be in a position to continue this great tradition that we had begun at USC and to put a Jesuit, New York stamp on the conference. We invited over sixty writers who worked in a variety of genres, many of whom were flourishing in and writing about New York, all of this presented a mile from the iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral in one of the most Catholic cities in the nation. The conference drew over 400 participants, and one of the hallmarks of the event was the participation of a number of younger writers who had not previously thought of themselves as Catholic writers, but upon discovering our growing community were grateful to be invited into the fold. The Fordham conference also performed the essential function of ensuring that the first conference would not be a one-time event but an ongoing, community building experience.
In 2019, a third iteration of the conference took place at Loyola University Chicago, another Jesuit school, sponsored by the Hank Center for The Catholic Intellectual Heritage. Hank Center director and theologian Michael P. Murphy took the blueprint of the first two conferences and expanded upon it, inviting more speakers from a broad background of practice. He also created a mini-conference for graduate students interested in pursuing Catholic Studies in their careers as scholars, enriching the academic and critical element that had always been part of the conference and also inviting young scholars, as well as young writers, into the community. This was the largest of the conferences yet, attracting about 800 participants.
By this time, the Catholic Imagination Conference community was well formed. We had also, quite without intending to, created an ad hoc committee, consisting mostly of people who had helped to plan and organize the first three conferences. Covid prevented what had become a biennial event from taking place in 2021, but, fortunately, a fourth, if more modestly sized, iteration of the conference took place at the University of Dallas in 2022, sponsored by the Donald and Louise Cowan Center and directed by Jessica Hooten Wilson, keeping the tradition going. The fifth conference, sponsored by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and the University of Notre Dame, will take place in November of 2024. It promises to be the largest and most ambitious conference yet.
The Catholic Imagination Conference has succeeded in accomplishing what we had hoped for. Writers from across the country—as well as those from outside the U.S.—who identify as Catholic writers are in communion with one another: we know each other, read and review one another’s work, and collaborate on projects that help to promote the Catholic Imagination. Among the many good things that have emerged from our gatherings is a journal devoted to Catholic poetry now in its fifth year, Presence, edited by Mary Ann B. Miller and published at Caldwell University; the launch of several book series that publish critical and imaginative work associated with The Catholic Imagination, including the series that I edit in partnership with Fordham University Press, “Studies in the Catholic Imagination”; a small press devoted to publishing work by Catholic critics and artists, Wiseblood Books, founded by Joshua Hren; and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, co-founded by Hren and James Matthew Wilson, grounded in the Catholic intellectual and artistic tradition.
In addition, the conference has inspired other spin-off conferences. Among them, The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination Conference held in Rome in 2023, sponsored by the Jesuit journal Civiltà Catholica, and co-sponsored by Georgetown University, Loyola Chicago’s Hank Center, and Fordham’s Curran Center, wherein forty Catholic writers from nations around the world gathered to share their work. Thanks to the partnership of Jesuit collaborators and conference organizers Antonio Spadaro and Mark Bosco, the highlight of the conference was a private audience at the Vatican with Pope Francis, who prepared and read an address expressing gratitude for the work of writers and their role in calling our attention to the great spiritual challenges of our time, and who greeted each writer personally afterwards.
A final aspect of the conference that is worth remarking on is the great diversity represented by the writers and readers who attend the conference and the spirit of amity that pervades the gatherings. The community that assembles every two years welcomes Catholics (both large “C” and small “c”) from across the religious and ideological spectrum, left-leaning and right-leaning, the politically liberal and the politically conservative, The common denominator that unifies the participants, in addition to a shared Catholic identity, is a love of literature and devotion to the idea of the Catholic Imagination. In an era characterized by bitter opposition and polarization in the public square and in Church-related conversations, The Catholic Imagination Conferences serve to remind those who attend that there is more that unites us than divides us. They also remind us that just as the conference is a big enough tent to house us all, so is the Church. The great Catholic writer James Joyce once described the ethos of the Church with the acronym H.C.E. (Here Comes Everybody): the ethos of the conference might be described this way as well.
Conclusion of The Essay, Though not The Story
This is just a sampling of some of the many measurable outcomes of the Catholic Imagination Conference. There is, of course, much good that has flowed from the conference that cannot be measured. It is impossible to name or number all of the books (both critical and creative), poems, plays, films, songs, and works of visual art that the conference has inspired—as well as those to come. The world of Catholic literary studies is incomparably richer and more robust than it was twenty-five years ago when I sat at a conference table with my colleagues and was asked to prove the legitimacy of Catholic Studies as an approach to creating, understanding, and teaching literature.
Happily, this sea change has not gone unnoticed in my discipline. Though there are still holdouts, more and more of those resistant are becoming convinced of the legitimacy of the enterprise, largely on account of the quality of the work that is being produced. In fact, some members of the resistance have become part of the Catholic literary studies community. Among them is my former colleague who posed the question with which this essay began, who now holds a chair named for a great Catholic writer and has produced ground-breaking work in the field of Catholic Studies. Some years after the challenge he issued at that fateful department meeting, he accepted my invitation to attend the first conference in 2015, saw the future unfolding before him, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.
EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay originally appeared in the American Catholic Studies Journal as “Here Comes Everybody: A Personal, Professional, and (Inevitably) Partial History of Catholic Literary Studies in America.”
The topic of this year’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference will be Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination (registration still open).