Delightful Descent

HELL AND OTHER DESTINATIONS

A Novelist’s Reflections on This World and the Next

by Piers Paul Read

Ignatius, 2006

247 pages, $15.95

To order:

(800-651-1531)
ignatius.com



Piers Paul Read is a contemporary British Catholic novelist and critic. This book is a collection of his previously published essays on faith, the Church, liberation theology, history, sex, marriage, the saints and the relationship between the Catholic faith and literature. And heady stuff it is.

Read is acutely aware of the divide found in contemporary English Catholicism, where a vocal group of “progressive” Catholics exert an inordinate influence over Catholic intellectuals. His essays detail his own battles with the resulting heterodoxies. He takes special exception to those who are eager, in something of an Anglican spirit of “openness,” to accept all manner of dissension for which loyal English Catholics of the past — such as St. Margaret Clitherow, to whose life Read devotes a chapter — faced pillory, rack and the literal chopping block.

“Although many Englishmen had died to uphold [papal] authority over the English church, it became fashionable to suggest that it was an exaggeration of Vatican I which had been put right by “collegial” teaching of Vatican II,” Read writes. “Beyond these attempts to accommodate Anglicans, there was a move to make Catholic teaching acceptable to those without Christian faith — to play down anything difficult or audacious or extraordinary in the teaching of Christ; to drop ‘medieval’ notions like Hell or the Devil, angels and even an afterlife; to replace the supernatural yearnings of the Christian life with clear natural objectives like overseas development and famine relief; to reduce the Cross to a logo of one among other benevolent organizations like Oxfam or Dr. Barnado’s.”

Read’s essays are eclectic, ranging in theme from the demise of hell in Catholic preaching to the contemporary efforts to explain away the spiritual impetus behind St. Ignatius of Loyola psychoanalytically. The writings reflect his professional preoccupations, as reflected in such chapter headings as “Jesus as a Character in Fiction” and “The Quest for Graham Greene.”

Read rejects the political correctness of the day in his “Misunderstanding Islam” and “A New Look at the Crusades.” His investigative reporting talents are showcased in “Catechists and Commissars,” where he shows how the Marxist-Christian synthesis of “liberation theology” is long on the former and wanting on the latter.

Read’s literary skill and biting irony is consummately displayed in his update of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, which he peppers with such diabolical advice as: “Stop going to Mass every Sunday. This gives the impression of rigidity, if not fanaticism. Respect the Sabbath by reading the Sunday papers.”

Given an author whose interests are as broad as Read’s, most readers will find something to disagree with in these pages. Some of the author’s thoughts about the role of eros in literature, for example, seem indulgent to this reviewer even though Read vigorously defends Catholic sexual ethics. He also seems to see some things too pessimistically. One wishes at points for a more convincing display of the theological virtue of hope.

The good news is that there’s no time like Holy Week to explore, with a gifted guide, the dark place to which Christ descended on our behalf. And there’s never a bad time to read a writer who defends the Catholic faith with wit, erudition and a distinctly British style.

John M. Grondelski writes from

Washington, D.C.