The values and imagery that permeate Catholic storytelling

Published Date: March 18, 2009

Years ago I read a UCAN report on the impact of Catholic writing on Japanese society. It cited a missioner saying Japanese people tend to respect more what their novelists write than what priests say. Jesuit Father Alfons Deeken had expressed this view at a meeting of Catholic writers.

A somewhat related comment was cited in this column about six months ago. It quoted another missioner saying that in addition to the country´s 1 million Catholics, Japan has 4 million people who “think Catholic.” No doubt, the phenomenon of people who “think Catholic” owes much to the impact of writers like those applauded earlier by Father Deeken.

Hector Welgampola

Shusaku Endo, the best-known among those Japanese Catholic writers, “spent the whole of his life weaving the warp of faith,” his widow said recently. Junko Endo said more. She added her husband left her three tasks: to tell people that death is not the end of life; to make Jesus appropriately appreciated by the Japanese; and to continue his program to make Japanese hospitals friendlier to patients, their families and friends. A massive mandate that overflowed from the writer´s faith commitment!

True, the faith-based literary impulse of all Catholic writers may not be the same. For example, even Endo said he started working on his novel “Deep River” after “going deep into the unconscious” in India. Similarly, Anne Rice says her vampire books prepared her for her recent books on Christ the Lord. She says the vampire was a metaphor “in the atheistic world, grieving for a lost faith, the lost possibility of grace.”

One writer´s search for grace may vary from that of another. Their faith expressions too may take different paths. Korean poet Kim Chi-ha spoke of himself as a priest of “Minjung” — the oppressed. Speaking of her writings, in a BBC series on faith, Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan said, “Every story contains some element of belief about how the world works.”

The late Swiss Bethlehem Father Michael Traber, a revered journalism teacher, called that element of belief “Gospel values.” Such values are central to the ministry of writing, whether it be creative storytelling or narrative storytelling.

In an article published in “America” magazine just days before his tragic accident last November, Father Andrew M. Greeley emphasized the grace that permeates the work of a Catholic storyteller. No doubt the writer-priest was referring to what he called the “grace available in Catholic communities and neighborhoods.”

In his tribute to American Catholic author Jon Hassler, Father Greeley recapped an old question of whether a Catholic novel is possible. The response will depend on “whether a story could have been written by someone whose imagination had not been permeated with the rainforest of Catholic imagery,” he said.

Noting what he called “the pervasive impact of Catholic sacramentality” on theology as well as on fiction, the researcher-priest said Catholic imagination sees solid grounds for hope. He called it “a rain forest of hope.”

The place of hope in Catholic writing is all the more important in Asia where fatalism pervades most cultures. And if their ministry of hope is to be effective, storytellers have to be steeped in the values and faith imagery of their faith communities.

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Hector Welgampola, a Sri Lankan journalist, was Executive Editor of UCA News from 1987 until he retired in December 2001.

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