What does it mean to be a Catholic writer in the modern age? No doubt, many of the premier authors of the twentieth century possessed Catholic convictions: Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Paul Claudel, Siegfried Sassoon, Denise Levertov and Charles Péguy, to name a few. But what constitutes a Catholic mode of engagement with the public cultures of modernity? This panel represents an interrogation of what René Girard refers to as “desacralization” and “resacralization.” Recent publications such as Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance and Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England explore the implications of what Charles Taylor calls “The Great Disembedding.” The panelists in this session join in this ongoing dialogue about secularism and postsecularism by investigating the ways in which Catholic literary voices make themselves intelligible within the experiential texture of secular life.

In her presentation, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell will explore the antipathy to modernity evident in works by two premier 20th century American Catholic writers who critique the secular world from the vantage point of an ancient faith that posits the sacredness of the creation and the innate human impulse to ruin it. Walker Percy, in his satirical sci-fi post-apocalyptic novel Love in the Ruins, and Flannery O’Connor, in her biting and barbed tragic-comic short stories featuring “good country people” trying to come to terms with the decay of civilization, grapple with the insanity of contemporary secular culture, one that is characterized by division and polarization, alienation, runaway consumerism, racism, rampant violence, and the naïve belief in science to save us from ourselves. Both writers take their cue from Dante, premier Catholic poet whose pilgrimage in The Commedia, especially in Inferno and Purgatorio, takes him through a landscape of human wreckage, corruption, and self-inflicted harm. Not unlike Dante in his "comedy," which is also an exhaustive anatomy of sin in Medieval society, Percy and O’Connor create modern-day comic parables that enable the reader to see as they do, offering an expansive perspective wherein readers of all faiths and philosophical stances can view ourselves, in all of our brokenness, and the fleeting present moment in the light of eternity.

Next, Joel Nickels will offer interpretations of three short poems by twentieth-century Catholic authors—Mark Van Doren, John Berryman and Léonie Adams—that highlight their contributions to modern depth psychology. Each poem stages a conversation between the conscious mind of the speaker and a presence that resides somewhere in the unconscious. It is impossible, however, to schematize the unconscious dynamics in these poems in terms of the secular psychological theory outlined by Sigmund Freud. Rather, they point in the direction a specifically Catholic depth psychology that features complex interactions between faculties of spiritual discernment, will and subjective disinvestment. To bring this rich and largely unexplored Catholic depth psychology into view, Nickels sets these poems in dialogue with the psychological writings of Catholic mystic and phenomenologist Edith Stein. This will allow us to see these three poets as offering topographies of the psyche that stress the profound relationship between suffering, transcendence and purpose—a relationship unrepresented in the secularized, zero-sum agon between Id and Superego.

Michael Patrick Murphy will conclude, taking as his starting point Josef Pieper’s 1963 study, In Tune with the World, which outlines a modern theory of festivity that claims “the true existential poverty of man consists in his having lost the power to celebrate a festival festively.” In his 2019 book, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, Byung-Chul Han observes a similar disorientation and alienation, claiming that communication without community is a pathology that “does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics.” For Mark Fisher, these convulsions form a kind of liturgical system wrought by historical forces—what he calls “capitalist realism”— where “beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.” With these insights in mind, this presentation explores various ways that spirituality, theology, and religion function in Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian satire, Submission (2015). From the escalating fatigue and acedia of its protagonist, François, to his lazy, bad-faith conversion to Islam that concludes the novel, we are called to see in François a symbol of something bigger and something so quietly tragic: how Western capitalism has itself become a religion—one that proceeds by a curious set of unique and all-encompassing public liturgies.