Abstract
Flannery O'Connor's stories, recognized as one of the best works of fiction, is highly-charged with Catholic themes and readers sharing the same beliefs would be expected to have an advantage in capturing the various levels of meanings in her stories. The study explores a semester class of mainly Catholic Filipinos reading her short stories and a novel. Classroom observation and weekly journals provide feedback on how students understand O'Connor's works. Results show that despite sharing the same Catholic beliefs, learners in the study fail to reach the anagogical level of meaning in her stories, remaining mainly on the literal level. The most probable cause for this failure is due to a lack of reading skills of the learners which keeps them from connecting the literary qualities of the text with the religious implications. Reading O'Connor does not require theological knowledge but it demands close reading of a text and with at least a basic understanding of the author's beliefs.
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