how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.” As Cranly says of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “It is a curious thing. Pynchon, like James Joyce before him, rejected the faith of his youth but could never fully quit Catholicism. Take Thomas Pynchon, whose friends at Cornell described him as “very Catholic,” a guy who regularly “went to Mass and confessed, though to what would be a mystery.” Over time he seemed to drift away from his active practice of the faith, yet his fiction teems with a parodic Catholic worldview. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic-a dictum that is true both theologically and emotionally. (As a cradle-to-now Catholic myself, I’d love it if we did a lot less judging.) Rather, I use “bad” to capture the significant number of Catholics who are lapsed, unsatisfied, tired, checked out the people who don’t go to Mass often (or ever), but who still make the sign of the cross to calm their nerves, or holds a special place in their heart for the Virgin Mary. To be clear, I don’t mean “bad” in the pejorative sense, as if I am claiming that these artists are to be judged for not being dogmatically solid Catholics. These bad Catholics are able to draw upon a rich array of imagery, symbolism, and story-and while they might not be conventionally doctrinaire, their work is undeniably Catholic. Yet some of the best Catholic storytellers achieve their power at a distance from traditional devotion. The faith has inspired many gifted artists, and certainly a number of them remained devoted to their beliefs. Catholicism is a deeply theatrical religion based in provocative stories. Smells, bells, blood, guts, spectacle, and of course, bodies, bodies, bodies. The Nobel laureate was in good company: bad Catholics often make great art. Morrison, who had a wry sense of humor, would later call herself a “lapsed Catholic”-a bad Catholic. But she had what she called “a moment of crisis” on the occasion of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which largely abolished the liturgical use of Latin, which she saw as “the unifying and universal language of the Church.” She found herself “fascinated by the rituals” of the faith and was especially transfixed by the ornate, almost otherworldly experience of Latin Mass. Though Morrison was a self-described “disaffected Catholic,” she was a Catholic nonetheless: She converted when she was 12 and took Saint Anthony of Padua as her baptismal name. On the cross in the church, there’s the body, with the cuts and all the bruises.” “Now, you know, I’m a Catholic,” Toni Morrison told Cornel West during a 2004 conversation at The Nation Institute.
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