Though I consider myself agnostic, a curious pattern, and a source of jest for my friends, has emerged from my reading. Most of my favorite imaginative writers are Catholic. And not just cultural or nominal Catholics but devoted practitioners like Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor and Czeslaw Milosz, who wrestled unabated with all the demands of their faith.
This curious confluence is unintentional. I would enjoy a novel or book of poems and only later learn that the author was Catholic. But it has happened too many times to be coincidental. Why are Catholic writers attractive to one such as me, who is unable to take the final leap of faith?
Greene insisted he was not a Catholic writer but a writer who happened to be Catholic. This sounds disingenuous. It would be hard to imagine a more Catholic novel than The Power and the Glory. In his introduction to the Penguin edition, John Updike wrote of 'the Roman Catholicism, which infuses, with its Manichean darkness and tortured literalism, his most ambitious fiction'.
The priests in The Power and the Glory are ineluctably compromised: Father Jose has capitulated to state pressure to marry; the unnamed whisky priest has fathered a daughter and drugs himself with alcohol.
But Greene's achievement, and a marker of his faith, is his ability to 'distinguish ... between the man and the office'; the former, hopelessly flawed, the latter, indispensable. 'What he wanted now was [sacramental] wine. Without it he was useless.' Yet with the sacrament the whisky priest becomes a symbol of resistance to terrorised villagers who are well aware of his failings.
Catholicism is a strict system, yet preaches the forgiveness of all who fail it. The Church acknowledges the universality of human experience beyond the borders of class, race and other distinguishing factors.
There is something attractive about an absolute moral order in any time, but possibly more so in our frenetic and increasingly interconnected yet isolating world. And despite what many seem to think today, religious belief can be a friend of progress. According to Greene, 'Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows'.
It is currently fashionable to say, as Les Murray does in his essay 'Some religious stuff I know about Australia', that 'the religious dimension in man