Catholics
By Brian Moore

160 Pages • $12.95

Catholics
By Brian Moore

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

Brian Moore’s 1972 novel Catholics is a short, intense parable that depicts both a possible Catholic future and the inner struggle for faith. The story it tells is of a fierce conflict between Catholics with very different views of the nature of the Mass, the efficacy of prayer, and the content of faith. It invites the reader to examine the basic issues of belief. How do we have a relationship with the hidden God? How do we resolve the tension between faith and doubt?

Catholics takes place in an imagined near future. Vatican Council IV has completed the Catholic Church’s capitulation to the spirit of secularism. Talks leading to a merger between Catholicism and Buddhism are proceeding nicely. Church authorities understand the Mass to be a purely symbolic ritual. Religion is seen as primarily an engine of social change.

The monks at Muck Abbey, on a windswept island off the west coast of Ireland, maintain one of the last remaining centers of the traditional Catholic faith. They remain deeply attached to the rosary, private confession, the real presence, and other practices that the church considers outmoded. Pilgrims from around the world flock to the abbey to attend the Latin Mass and receive the old sacraments. This worries and embarrasses church authorities, so they dispatch an American priest named James Kinsella to the island to shut down this scandalous anachronism.

Facing Kinsella is Tomás O’Malley, the abbot of Muck. Abbot Tomás turns out to be a complicated character. He lost his faith years ago and goes through the motions of worship and piety because that is expected of him. But the abbot is engaged in a profound inner struggle: he resists God because he deeply fears the implications of a sincere faith.

Tomás is caught between Kinsella’s passionate secularism and Tomás’s own duty to the pious monks. He must choose. His choice, its significance, and the circumstances that lead to it make for an absorbing story that deals with important questions of religion and personal faith.

Though it was published in 1972, Catholics articulates debates and anxieties that have agitated the Catholic Church since Vatican Council II ended in 1965. The council altered traditional liturgical practices and opened the church to a sympathetic engagement with other religions and post-Enlightenment ideas. Catholics examines the risks of this new openness. How far should the church go in accommodating the modern world? How important are traditional liturgical practices and devotions? What price does the church pay in making changes in its practices, desirable as these changes may be?

The novel also raises profound questions about the nature of faith. Can people of faith nevertheless harbor doubts about God? Does doubt eventually overwhelm faith? What’s the relationship between the essentials of faith and the traditions and practices by which faith is expressed and conveyed? Sitting before the tabernacle, Abbot Tomás regrets his loss of faith:

Aggiornamento, was that when uncertainty had begun? Changes of doctrine. Setting oneself up as ultimate authority. Insubordination. He looked at the tabernacle. Insubordination. The beginning of breakdown. And, long ago, that righteous prig at Wittenberg nailing his defiance to the church door.

Some say Catholics closely reflects the religious attitudes of its author. Brian Moore claimed to have abandoned the Catholic faith of his youth, but questions of faith haunt his novels.

Moore’s preoccupation with faith brings to mind the work of Flannery O’Connor, another great religious writer of the twentieth century. O’Connor, in contrast to Brian Moore, was a fervent Catholic. She memorably replied to an acquaintance who thought that the Eucharist was a symbol, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” Yet, in her fiction, true faith comes no more easily to her characters than it does to Abbot Tomás in Catholics.

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About the Author

Brian Moore was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on August 25, 1921, one of nine children of Dr. James Moore and Eileen Moore. He attended Catholic schools and then began studying medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, but he did not finish his education there. He served in the British Ministry of War Transport in North Africa, Italy, and France during World War II, a decision that deeply angered his anti-British father.

In 1948, Moore immigrated to Canada, working first in the office of a construction camp and then as a reporter in Montreal. It was there that he began writing pulp-fiction novels under the pseudonym Bernard Mara. He eventually turned to more serious fiction.

Moore’s first attempt at literary fiction was interrupted for months as he recovered from a serious motorboat accident. The book was published under his real name in 1955 and was an immediate success. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a study of a middle-aged alcoholic Belfast woman, based in part on a woman who had been an acquaintance of his mother.

Moore wrote nineteen other novels over the next few decades, some inspired by historical events: No Other Life (1993) echoes the events in Haiti during the rise of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the priest, activist, and eventual president, and Black Robe (1985) is based on the story of French missionaries in Canada in the seventeenth century. Moore adapted the book for the acclaimed film version, which was released in 1991 and directed by Bruce Beresford.

Moore’s novels include Cold Heaven (1983), The Color of Blood (1987), Lies of Silence (1990), and his last, The Magician’s Wife (1997).

Moore, whom Graham Greene referred to as his “favorite living author,” moved to Malibu, California, in 1966, and lived there until his death in 1999, at the age of seventy-seven.

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Links for Brian Moore

“Pursued by Faith: The Literary Journey of Brian Moore,” by Charlotte Hays

“Brian Moore, 1921–99: Cool Prose Craftsman”

“Brian Moore: Forever Influenced by Loss of Faith” (obituary)

“An Irishman in Malibu,” by Tom Christie

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