What Catholic Literature is
and how to produce it
What is Catholic Literature? Great question … here is one answer given in 1942 by Sr. Mary Madeleva Wolff, CSC (1887-1964). The following is a snippet of a piece titled “Catholic Literature” found in Prose Readings: An Anthology for Catholic Colleges (Scribner’s, 1942).
Catholic literature is any literature that is treated as a Catholic would treat it. It is a literature in which there is a discipline, the discipline of the mind and the will, the discipline of the supernatural life.
The perfectly disciplined Catholic is a saint. Our greatest literature has been the work of saints, the Scriptures, the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, the poetry of the Middle Ages, the autobiographies that followed. Its supreme asset is the influence of sanctifying grace, the power of the Holy Ghost.
We talk of a contemporary Catholic literature. We try with painful self-confidence to produce it. We run to schools of creative writing; we gather in writers’ colonies to learn the trick. After all these things do the heathens seek. Let us first be great Catholics, profound lovers of Christ, ardent disciples of the Holy Spirit. Expression will follow. If we will become a generation of saints, I promise that we shall be laurel crowned.
That’s a world of wisdom in a few short sentences. When she wrote this she was 55 and professor of English at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, where she earlier received her BA. She earned her MA at the University of Notre Dame, and her doctorate in English at UC-Berkely in 1925.
The brief bio that accompanied her essay noted that she had by then published six volumes of verse “which have caused critics to call her the foremost American Catholic poet now living.” With that, here is one of her poems:
In Desert Places
God has a way of making flowers grow.
He is both daring and direct about it.
If you know half the flowers that I know,
You do not doubt it.
He chooses some gray rock, austere and high,
For garden-plot, traffics with sun and weather;
Then lifts an Indian paintbrush to the sky,
Half flame, half feather.
In desert places it is quite the same;
He delves at petal-pans, divinely, surely
Until a bud too shy to have a name
Blossoms demurely.
He dares to sow the waste, to plow the rock.
Though Eden knew His beauty and His power.
He could not plant in it a yucca stalk,
A cactus flower.
For more of Sister Madeleva’s remarkable life story see the article that appeared in the May 21, 2024 issue of America magazine here.
"Let us first be great Catholics, profound lovers of Christ, ardent disciples of the Holy Spirit. Expression will follow." These words of Sr. Madleva stood out to me, as they are what I would intuit. One must first "be" and the words will flow from that, as it were.
Beautiful, thank you for this! I'm going to write on Sr. Madaleva for an upcoming issue of Magnificat, on the recommendation of a friend...I hadn't known of her. Those of us who write from and in some cases for, the Church, ponder What Catholic Literature Is...I have a whole slew of what i call my Personal Communion of Artist Saints who may or may not be Catholic as in worshipers of Christ, but are "Catholic" in that they treat their work as a Catholic would treat it, with discipline of the mind and the will...celebrating them is one of the joys of my life. Anyway, your post is bookmarked and will be of great help.