COMMENTARY: Looking at US Catholic history through a fictional lens.
Fiction can often convey the human texture of a time and place better than scholarly works of history. Herewith, and in honor of the national semiquincentennial, some novels that help tell the Catholic story in these United States through a fictional lens.
The Pre-History: Through the life of one of my native state’s notable daughters, Margaret Brent, Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Mary’s Land recounts the initial settlement and later struggles of the only English colony founded as a refuge for Catholics. In Shadows on the Rock, the great Willa Cather limpidly describes the extraordinary labors of Catholic settlers in the 17th-century proto-Canadian wilds of North America, while in Black Robe Brian Moore limns the spiritual as well as physical hardships borne by French missionaries of that era, who worked in what is now Upstate New York as well as Canada.
Settling a Continent: There are very few novels I read time and again for the elegance of their language and richness of their insight. Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop — a fictional telling of the story of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy of Santa Fe and his friend
