Saving Grace
Author Martin Kennedy’s goal is an admirable one: to communicate Catholic beliefs within the fictional context of a novel. To consider his book, A Philadelphia Catholic in King James’s Court, strictly on its literary merits, therefore, might be unfair. Let’s look at it first (necessarily) as a novel and then as apologetics.
Kennedy’s protagonist is 17-year-old cradle Catholic Michael O’Shea, whose firefighter father has died saving someone from a burning house. Afterward, Michael—along with his mother, Tammy, and three younger siblings—moves from Philadelphia to spend the summer in rural Kentucky on the family farm of his mother’s brother. It is here that Michael learns about life close to the land and far from the mind of the Church.
Michael’s uncle Les McGuffey, is a Fundamentalist preacher who considers it his duty to show the young Catholic the error of his religious ways. During the day, Michael helps his uncle and 18-year-old cousin, Eli, with the farm chores. In the evenings and on weekends he accepts invitations to the Bible studies and church services that McGuffey conducts. Tammy is a little concerned, but she figures he son’s faith formation is strong and he is of the age to make up his own mind about religion.
Over the several months of his stay in Kentucky, Michael’s faith is challenged in increasingly less subtle ways by the Fundamentalists that surround him. At first he is unable to articulate the reasons for his beliefs. He begins to study some of his father’s Catholic books that he has brought along—writings of the Church Fathers, books by Thomas Merton, G. K. Chesterton, and Scott Hahn—in order to better defend his faith.
But the folks around him are hard-core, Bible-toting, sola scriptura Protestants who have no truck with Tradition or theological writing. When Michael is invited to a Bible study to explain the Catholic teaching on the primacy of Peter, there is a nice scene where he starts to unload the books he’s going to refer to. “You ain’t plannin’ to use any of them to support what you have to say tonight, are you?” asks one of the men (183). Michael is forced to offer proof of Catholicism only from the King James Bible of his audience.
As he ably defends the papacy, then, in a subsequent meeting, the Catholic position on Mary, his Uncle Les and other leaders of the Fundamentalist community become uneasy. Michael is invited by an unscrupulous pastor named Hank Brown to discuss his Catholic beliefs at a Bible study at Pastor Brown’s church. When he arrives, Michael discovers that Pastor Brown has packed the house with his followers by advertising the event with lurid posters that read, “Catholicism: The True Faith or Fantasy?” He is put onstage in a spotlight and grilled mercilessly by Pastor Brown.
As Michael begins to go down under the pastor’s hail of biblical blows, the Fundamentalist thinks he is about to win a convert in front of the big audience. But at the last minute the O’Shea boy pulls out 2 Timothy 3:15—the Church as “the pillar and foundation of truth”—like a thundering hook and drops the pastor in his intellectual tracks. “‘Get out!’ the pastor screamed” (309). Michael does and the story ends.
As fiction, A Philadelphia Catholic in King James’s Court fizzles. The writing is clunky. Kennedy violates with abandon the “show-don’t-tell” rule taught in every beginning fiction-writing course. Too often he tells a character’s intent when the words of dialogue should be enough to show it (“‘They did all right by you, big brother,’ Tammy responded, trying to relieve the anxiety she perceived in her brother’s tone” [31]).
The plot device of a recurring dream in which Michael faces a menacing opponent is hackneyed, especially in the final scene when we realize who the dreamed figure is. Many of the characters are three-dimensional in the same way cardboard is. This is due in no small part to the author’s tell-don’t-show writing style.
The narrative swings back and forth from scenes of rural life to scenes of Michael’s apologetics. Unfortunately, both are equally didactic: The descriptions of farm life and work, as detailed and interesting as they are, read like a textbook, not a novel.
As apologetics, though, the book is a success. Kennedy’s understanding of the mind of a sincere Fundamentalist is keen and charitable. Because of this, the Fundamentalists’ objections and challenges during the apologetic passages ring true. These are—except for the conniving Pastor Brown—not straw-man Protestants. They articulate forcefully sola scriptura Christianity.
By the same token, the rejoinders and rhetorical tactics of Kennedy’s young Catholic protagonist are dead-on. Kennedy’s defense of Peter’s primacy (186–202) is a fine passage of apologetics. His biblical defense of Mary’s position of honor (220–234) is also outstanding.
A Philadelphia Catholic in King James’s Court would be a good way to get teen-agers to study apologetics. In recognition of this, the publisher has recently issued study guides for the book. Anyone younger than 11 or 12, even if well-formed in his faith, might be a little confused, since the first half of the book is rife with unanswered arguments against Catholicism. The author answers them, but not until the second half when his protagonist has learned the rebuttals.
Of course, the scope of the 17-year-old’s knowledge and his articulateness under pressure after only a month or so of study strains credulity. But its apologetic strength is the saving grace of A Philadelphia Catholic in King James’s Court.
—Tim Ryland
A Philadelphia Yankee in King James’s Court
By By Martin de Porres Kennedy
Lilyfield Press (1999)
316 pages
$12.95
ISBN: 0-9671492-1-5
Middle Age Crisis
The Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years and were filled with bloodshed, slavery, superstition, and ignorance!”
Anyone who has attended a history class, conversed with an “enlightened” secularist, or debated an anti-Catholic is familiar with this sort of remark. The Middle Ages, that period from roughly 500 to 1500, sometimes called the “Dark Ages,” is, in the minds of most people, characterized by dim thinking and dull living—not to mention disease and hypocrisy.
Not so, insists the famed French historian and archivist Régine Pernoud (1909–1999). Pernoud wrote numerous books about the Middle Ages, most notably Joan of Arc: By Herself and Witnesses. In Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, the author has an axe to grind and isn’t afraid to let the sparks fly when it comes to expressing her frustration with the lack of accurate teaching about the Middle Ages. “The Middle Ages is privileged material,” she writes. “One can say what one wants about it with the quasi-certitude of never being contradicted.”
Originally published in 1977 for a French audience, this book is both a helpful introduction to the real Middle Ages and a pithy commentary on the importance of a sound education in history, something many Americans have never been exposed to.
Pernoud notes Chesterton’s statement “that a man is truly a man only when he has looked at the world while standing on his head with his feet in the air,” an observation that captures Pernoud’s ability to right the record by turning stereotypes and fallacies upside down. Her concern is that what passes for an education in history within public schools is often little more than a string of stereotypes held together by the glue of gullibility.
“The Middle Ages still signifies a period of ignorance, mindlessness, or generalized underdevelopment,” she writes, “even if this was the only period of underdevelopment during which cathedrals were built!” Pernoud laments that the strides made in scholarship in this area have yet to reach the general public, a situation that hasn’t changed much since the 1970s, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
The heart of Pernoud’s argument is that the revival of Roman law and the infatuation with Greek and Roman culture that occurred in much of western Europe during the sixteenth century eclipsed all that existed between the “two periods of light, antiquity and the Renaissance.” The intermediate period—the “middle” age—came to be viewed as “crude” and “obscure,” failing to measure up to the eternal standards of ancient Greece and Rome.
In the realm of art the result was “an anathema on the Middle Ages. All that was not in conformity with Greek or Latin modeling was mercilessly rejected” and even purposefully targeted for destruction. But the great cathedrals were all built during the Middle Ages. The literary forms of the epic and the novel were products of the same era, as well as the bound book (codex), which replaced the use of scrolls.
The Middle Ages produced scholars of incredible learning—Isidore of Seville (unofficial patron saint of the Internet, since the structure of his extensive dictionary, Etymologies, was similar to what is now called a database), Bede the Venerable, Gregory of Tours, and Hildegarde of Bingen. The latter is not, as Pernoud demonstrates, an exception: Many women religious were outstanding scholars and theologians. Another, Petronilla of Chemillé, was an abbess who presided over convents of both women and men—at the ripe age of 22.
Far from being a time when women were “oppressed,” the Middle Ages witnessed a flowering of the feminine element in the Church, society, and home. It was in the seventeenth century that women began to lose privileges and authority, essentially reverting to the status of property under the revived Roman law. Similarly, slavery, which had died out during the Middle Ages, emerged again with the “colonial expansion that characterized the classical period.” As Pernoud takes pains to show, the feudal system was a far cry from slavery—despite modern misconceptions––and was a way of life built upon honor, specific rights, and a deep commitment to the agrarian life.
Pernoud also addresses the two issues most commonly mentioned in ordinary conversation about the Middle Ages: the Crusades and the Inquisition. But the former she touches on too briefly, and she provides only a general overview of the historical context of the latter. One wishes she had spent more time on both subjects, especially since they are so misunderstood and are such significant parts of the erroneous perspective many people have about the Middle Ages.
The last two chapters are my favorites, focused on the necessity of studying and appreciating history because “History does not furnish any solutions, but it permits––and it alone permits––us to pose the problems correctly. . . . There is no true knowledge without recourse to history.”
—Carl E. Olson
Those Terrible Middle Ages!
By By Régine Pernoud
Ignatius Press (2000)
179 pages
$12.95
ISBN: 0-89870-781-1
Hidden Treasure
A book that was a great help to me on my journey to the Catholic Church was James T. O’Connor’s The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist. At the stage I first encountered the work, the first part of the book—”Lauda Zion”— was especially helpful to me. It offered a plethora of quotations from the Church Fathers documenting that belief in the Real Presence and the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist had been with the Church from its earliest days.
Indeed, O’Connor cites works from both before and just after A.D. 100, during the ages of the apostles and their immediate followers. O’Connor then goes through the great Eucharistic writers of the patristic period, including Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine.
The first part concludes with a discussion of figures toward the end of the first millennium—Paschasius Radbertus, Rabanus Maurus, and Ratramnus of Corbie.
Part two of the book—titled “This Is a Hard Teaching. Who Can Accept It?”—deals with the disputes that arose concerning the Eucharist in the second millennium. Among those covered are Beregarius of Tours, the Cathari, Wyclif, Huss, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the treatment of the Eucharist given in Anglicanism’s Thirty-nine Articles. The section concludes with a discussion of uniquely twentieth-century controversies such as the “transfinalization”/”transsignification” controversy of the 1960s and the efforts to forge ecumenical statements on the Eucharist without violating doctrinal integrity.
Part three of the book—”Peter and the Eucharist”—focuses on what the popes of the second millennium have said concerning the Eucharist, though it steers far enough afield to also include what several councils said (notably the Council of Trent) and what Thomas Aquinas wrote on the subject.
The final part of the book—”Mysterium Fidei”—offers a synthesis of patristic, magisterial, and theological teaching. It is the part in which O’Connor has the chance to explicate his own theology of the Eucharist rather than simply summarizing that of others. In this section he offers chapters dealing with the Real Presence and transubstantiation and the Eucharist as a pledge and foretaste of heaven, as sacrifice, as the sacrament of sacraments, in relation to the Church, and in relation to Our Lady.
In all of this, both the historical sections and in the theological synthesis, O’Connor takes a balanced and even approach that is firmly orthodox and that consistently vindicates the Church’s teachings regarding the Eucharist.
All told, this is one of the best books available on the Eucharist, and I can hardly recommend it enough. It offers an approach that is theologically sound and filled with more useful apologetic information than you can shake a stick at. I am pleased as punch that Ignatius Press has recognized the value of this work and kept it in print in the years since my conversion. It is useful not only to one desirous of seeing the Church’s position on the Eucharist vindicated in history but for anyone—convert or not—who wishes to understand and more fully appreciate the Eucharistic Presence of Our Lord.
—James Akin
The Hidden Manna
By By James T. O’Connor
Ignatius Press
353 pages
$$17.95
ISBN: 0-89870-288-7