The best Catholic fiction is always written by the worst Catholics. Not the saints in all their virtue—and especially not the heretics, who are willing to undo the whole of Christianity if only their vices can be redefined as secret virtues—but the sinners in all their sin are the ones who are able to create a genuine story. The best Catholic novels seem to be written by those who know, no …showed first 75 words of 3266 total…

…showed last 75 words of 3266 total…complain in This Side of Paradise, and he replied to Wilson: "I am ashamed to say that my Catholicism is scarcely more than a memory—no that's wrong, it's more than that; at any rate I go not to church nor mumble stray nothings over crystalline beads." Dorothy Parker was right: "The poor son-of-a-bitch." What he knew was true hounded him, no matter how much he believed that he had ceased to believe it.