Rumbles Roman and Rebellious

Abstract

From the Revolution to the 1960s Catholics complained that the rest of the country undervalued or just plain abused them. The non-Catholic population always gave reasons to justify its anti-Catholicism, and insisted that this prejudice, if no other, was high-minded. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it accused the Vatican of wielding a sinister influence on politics, and was revolted by Catholics' crime, booze, and corruption. Later it tut-tutted at their high birthrate, their stand-offishness, and their thin intellectual attainments, alleging that to be Catholic was to be Philistine. A tradition of Catholic writers stretching from Orestes Brownson and Cardinal Gibbons to Andrew Greeley and Michael Novak tried to defend Catholicism against its detractors but never quieted their suspicions. Even today the nabobs of multiculturalism do not speak out on behalf of Irish-, Polish-, and Italian-Americans, and the cultural diversity crowd still does not fret about the neglected Slavic heritage in America. It is fitting, then, that the big new book that aims to put Catholics squarely on the cultural map, and may well succeed, should flow from the pen of a non-American, a recent immigrant who wrote most of it before moving from England to Oregon. Paul Giles's Catholic Arts and Fictions is powerful, full of large claims, and controversial enough to delight and to annoy every reader. Giles's main argument is that cultural paladins have placed Catholic arts and fictions outside their canon because these works are not American in the right way. A long literary tradition, culminating in such critics as Richard Chase and Harold Bloom, he believes, has elected Protestant works to the mainstream canon because of their romantic humanism, allegorical style, individualism, and faith in exceptionalism. Elaborating on the theme of Laurence Moore's Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986), Giles points out a nice irony, that to be in the literary mainstream you need to pose as a radical individualist like Thoreau, Melville, or Whitman: one who puts himself outside the everyday world, sometimes to