'After Greene: Catholic Fiction' - by Adam Carlton

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Can Literary Catholic Fiction Still Be Written?

This is no more than a mildly interesting note.

When Graham Greene was writing his “Catholic novels” in the mid-twentieth century, the cultural landscape was quite different. Religion was not a private eccentricity but part of the shared furniture of English life. The Church of England still propped up the House of Lords, bishops moved in clubland circles, and the Oxbridge tone of the ruling class presumed Christianity as a background. Catholicism, though always a little suspect and marginal in England, belonged within this larger milieu. It could be dramatised without much explanation.

Greene did not preoccupy himself with the scholastic intricacies of Aquinas or his orders of angels. His terrain was moral conflict: adultery, betrayal, guilt, the peculiar weight of sin and grace. These dilemmas were intelligible to readers precisely because Christian categories of morality still carried cultural salience. Even if one rejected them, they were recognised. The novels worked because they played Catholic tension against an assumed Christian backdrop.

Eighty years on, the background has changed utterly. The moral and doctrinal architecture of Christianity has collapsed as a shared cultural framework. Outside the shrinking circle of believers, religious scruple is often perceived as antiquarian, even faintly absurd. To write a novel in Greene’s mode today would risk sounding apologetic or merely quaint.

Where, then, is the space for Catholic fiction? And note I really mean critical fiction, not cosy apologetics acceptable to the Magisterium.

Perhaps the answer lies in new directions:

• The Interior Turn: Catholicism as a language for interiority and metaphysical disquiet. Not adultery and confession, but meaning and grace in an age of anxiety.
• Counterculture: Catholicism as subversive, a jarring insistence on transcendence within a secular consensus that allows only immanence.
• Symbolic Depth: Catholicism as a mythic repertoire - those rituals, sacraments, archetypes which dramatise desire, guilt, forgiveness and loss, regardless of belief.
• The Post-Secular Opening: In the ruins of disenchanted modernity, Catholic categories - sin, mercy, communion - may be rediscovered as conceptual tools still capable of ordering experience.

So yes: Greene’s mode of Catholic fiction cannot be revived. Its shock depended on a cultural matrix that no longer exists. But that does not mean Catholic writing is impossible. It has a future: not as the moral conscience of a de-Christianised society but as a counter-voice, a subterranean register, symbolic language ready to ambush secularism from unexpected directions. JD Vance would understand.