Clerical character(s): rereading J.F. Powers.

In the mid 1960s, I finished parochial school in a newly constructed, handsomely maintained suburban parish in upstate New York. The pastor had two assistants, and at least eight or nine Sisters of Mercy staffed the school. One summer evening, the parish honored the senior of the two assistants, who'd been reassigned, with a farewell party and a color TV. His replacement was a much older priest. Under his breath, in the back of the room, the youngest assistant, who served the parish until he had a nervous breakdown, described his new colleague as the diocese's "Dean of Curates." I tried to be appropriately impressed by the title. He said, "It's not an honor."

Re-reading J.F. Powers's short stories and novels has evoked these memories, and others just as vivid. Reading Powers today is like visiting an archaeological site. The dialectic between his texts and my memory has excavated the truth in each and brought back to mind a comfortable world of unquestioned assumptions. These assumptions are now leavened, thanks to Powers's fiction, with an awareness of apparently innocuous venalities that masked surprising dangers.

Because he has published relatively little and concentrated so sharply on a very narrow kind of human experience, it is fair to wonder how long J.F. Powers's work will continue to be appreciated. Moreover, in responding to it now, is it possible to avoid sounding elegiac? And can one respond to Powers's work personally without nostalgia?

Powers's niche in contemporary letters is so singular that most responses to his work will necessarily be idiosyncratic. Though there are short stories - like "The Old Bird, A Love Story," from his first collection (1951) and "Tinkers" from his last (1975) - centered on the disappointments and intricacies of family life, Powers mainly writes about priests. Flannery O'Connor's observation is acute (and made before the first of his two novels, Morte D'Urban, was published): "Powers's stories can be divided into two kinds - those that deal with the Catholic clergy and those that don't. Those that deal with the clergy are as good as any stories being written by anybody; those that don't are not so good."

Powers's fiction is not apologetic; it's about character. The characters happen, more often than not, to be priests. His prose is lapidary, and his irony is cool and pervasive as this sample from an early story, "The Forks," demonstrates: "Monsignor proceeded at a precise pace to the back door of the rectory. There he held the screen open momentarily, as if remembering something or reluctant to enter before himself - such was his humility." J.F. Powers will always be significant to readers who value and learn from good writing. No elegies are required on that score.

In 1963, the year Morte D'Urban received the National Book Award, Commonweal published a short symposium on "The Catholic as Writer" to which Wilfrid Sheed and Michael Novak contributed. Sheed discusses the complexities that burden the "Catholic" writer concerned with conveying truth in narrative since, "besides telling his story right, he has to worry about giving the right impression about Catholic doctrine." Novak's elegant essay looks beyond the (then) current fixation with priests ("all our Catholic imaginations seem dominated by the priests") to the creation of "prophetical" novels that "expose the ideas and patterns of emotion by which men do or should live." Both contributors mention Powers; he was a solid, established, talented writer. Midcentury American Catholics had a voice.

However, midcentury American Catholicism has long since passed away. Our narrative - that is, the story we compose for ourselves about our origins, about who we are and what we believe in and yearn for - has obviously ruptured. Some of the issues that concerned Wilfrid Sheed in 1963, divorce and marital fidelity, for example, now seem almost poignant. Choices that were unnamed, if not unimagined, thirty years ago are confronted today. However regrettable it may be to some, the moral truths fiction now encompass denote a world of expectation and desire and grace that is broader than the problems revolving around the heterosexual marriage bed. Nonetheless, Michael Novak's diagnosis is still apposite: "The problem of the novelist is to discover the ways of grace in order to be able to contrive their likeness in a work of art."

We live in a breech. The absence of certainty, of definition, of cultural security - whose substance Powers's Catholics depended upon in the 1950s - is our predicament. The cheap certainties are irrecoverable, and only the truly fearful would mistake them for real ballast. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's confident observations, in an interview published in the New York Times after his death, give end-of-the-century American Catholics another kind of voice. "The essential elements of the church have been the same for the last 2,000 years. But the way we go about the ministry of the church has changed enormously. After we've gone through this phase, we will begin to see good things. But it's going to be different. If you think that to go in the right direction we have to bring back the good old days, that's not going to happen."

Powers's clerics and parishioners in many respects have been overtaken by events. Their deepest confusions and aspirations, however, have survived the cold war. The particulars of observance (does anyone still wear a biretta?) have been supplanted. The mystique of the priesthood has certainly been shattered. And the current dynamic of life in many parishes could hardly have been predicted. Nonetheless, men and women, ordained and not, are still susceptible to "the ways of grace," and Powers's take on that encounter is anything but parochial.

Catholics of a certain age, over forty, say, have seen the priesthood transformed during their lifetimes. The transformation, though necessary, has not been particularly edifying. Powers's narratives are rooted in a world where priests are encapsulated by an aura that intentionally separates them from most conventional varieties of social intercourse. Novak's point, in 1963, was obvious. "Beyond what the sacrament of Holy Orders makes legitimate, the Catholic priest receives an extraordinary degree of veneration from his people. Since he confects the Eucharist - 'holds God in his hands' - in Christ's name, but by his own judgment absolves sins, and lives that extraordinary life, the life of voluntary celibacy, the priest has a great hold on the imagination of his people. They are habituated to his broadened authority." Notwithstanding, what seemed to be a privilege carried high hidden costs. Powers's stories subvert the mystique by showing - often comically - that the lure of temptation is no easier to resist if one wears a Roman collar.

Powers's priests operate in an enclosed world that isolates them more completely than any monastic cloister. Their isolation makes them particularly vulnerable to the "wickedness and snares of the devil," as the prayer to Saint Michael, recited at the end of every Mass, went. Powers's heartfelt and heartbreaking accounts of human traffic with the devil will outlast current fashions in liturgy or theology. He identifies the Culprit (his first collection of short stories was called Prince of Darkness) and thereby confronts our narcissistic, quasi-gnostic, guilt-free sensibilities. Furthermore, he limns the mysterious source of consolation that sustains us - his second collection of stories was called The Presence of Grace.

The two novels, Morte D'Urban and Wheat that Springeth Green, are Powers's major achievements and demonstrate the difficulties of negotiating with the devil. Neither Father Urban Roche nor Father Joe Hackett is a great, or even an interesting, sinner. Both are ambitious, lonely, manipulative (in Urban's case), and alcoholic (in Hackett's) bachelors. Their faults are utterly pedestrian, and Powers makes us see that evil doesn't need to be overwhelming in order to be lethal. These priests are not blessed with heroic sanctity, yet the grace of redemption they find emerges from the same mysteries that consoled the martyrs and mystics whose struggles involved more drama.

In Morte D'Urban, Urban's energy, resourcefulness, and contacts seem to be the only distinction owned by the fictitious, unambiguously second-rate Order of Saint Clement. "The Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at all." Urban's assignment was the mission band. He stumped the Midwest, like any other traveling salesman, looking to score the main chance. "Not running off the mouth at every opportunity, but knowing when to cast one's pearls, and how - that, in the best sense of the word was priestcraft." Urban practices his craft relentlessly. An operator whose performance is burnished by every choice he makes, Urban, I think, is burdened by the noonday devil. A French theorist of an earlier generation, John Cassian (in Helen Waddell's wonderful collection, The Desert Fathers, he's called Cassian of Marseilles), has the symptoms of Urban's spiritual boredom nailed down: "Finally our malady suggests that in common courtesy one should salute the brethren, and visit the sick, near or far . . . or there is that religious and devout lady, destitute of any support from her family, whom it is a pious act to visit now and then and supply in holy wise with necessary comforts, neglected and despised as she is by her own relations."

When he is transferred to the order's latest white elephant, Saint Clement's Hill, a decrepit retreat house in remote Minnesota, Urban is concerned that he has alienated Billy Cosgrove, the benefactor he has most recently cultivated to take an interest in the order's affairs. However, before long, Urban is able to circumvent what he perceives to be the intentions of lesser men - his superiors - and is making the most of all the opportunities available in his new territory. One night he speaks at the "Poinsettia Smorgasbord, held in the Greenwich Village Room of the General Diggles Hotel" and is saluted afterward by "one man saying that, though he was not a Catholic himself, he had always regarded Catholicism as one of the world's top religions and had never felt closer to it than he had that evening."

As he has with every assignment, Urban makes Minnesota a personal triumph. Even Cosgrove remains loyally on the hook. Urban has undeniable star quality, which he would never exercise except in the interests of the church and his order. And it bears fruit. "To the Hill had come a number of those better types who had never made a retreat before and whose support - and not just material support - was required if the place was to succeed as a spiritual powerhouse or oasis (Father Urban used both terms), although the less desirable types were still in the majority."

Ever the dreamer, Urban arranges a real estate deal with Cosgrove's backing and the local bishop's approval that allows him to build a golf course (in order to redress the imbalance between the more and less desirable) next to the Hill. Urban's success seems to be a mixed blessing when the bishop begins eyeing the Hill and its amenities as a possible site for a new seminary. Nerves are taut in a round of golf with the bishop and his protege, "Father Feld [whom Urban fears] would be just the man to head a seminary. 'He's been over in Europe for three or four years. Louvain. He's fit for nothing else, now.'" However, when Urban is knocked unconscious on the final green by the bishop's ball, his excellency immediately becomes less proprietary.

In consequence of his injury, Urban's visions slowly take a decidedly unfamiliar turn; he recuperates without recovering his zest. A disastrous hunting outing with Cosgrove, whose spoiled petulance and cruelty are finally turned on Urban, appears to jeopardize all that Urban has been trying to build.

Urban is unused to failure. He can no longer flee from the demon who pursues him, and his new conflict is interior. Thus disposed, Urban is elected provincial of the Clementine's Chicago Province by a constituency that expects to be dazzled by the old magic, that expects to be relieved of "the curse of mediocrity." To describe their hopes as disappointed is to understate the result. Urban, who suffers incapacitating headaches, becomes passive. "Thus he tried to disguise his condition from others, and thus, without wishing to, he gained a reputation for piety he hadn't had before, which, however, was not entirely unwarranted now." The knock to Urban's head initiates the intrusion of grace. His surrender to its claims costs him his health and reputation. Having lived a life of aggressive friendliness but no intimacy, he now has to face God in silence and alone. In Powers's hands, a reader feels that Urban is prepared for the encounter.

The clergymen who occupy Powers's rectories and chancery offices are torn between serving God or Management. The church operates confidently on the corporate model, and the middle managers - pastors and their assistants - who learn how to work the system efficiently are amply rewarded. Ambition is the sublimation of choice, and it is easy to provoke suspicion. Human nature remains impervious to the changes in the church's structures that Powers chronicles from his earliest stories through his last novel. The humble Monsignor in "Forks" bears his curate like a cross. "He found Father Eudex reading the Catholic Worker one day and had not trusted him since. Father Eudex's conception of the priesthood was evangelical in the worst sense, barbaric, gross, foreign to the mind of the church, which was one of two terms he used as sticks to beat him with. The other was taste. The air of the rectory was often heavy with The Mind of the Church and Taste."

Throughout all of Powers's work, the evangelical counsels compete with the demands of the American Century. In "The Devil Was the Joker," included in The Presence of Grace, Myles Flynn, a hapless ex-seminarian still hoping somehow to be ordained, becomes an assistant to a huckster who sells religious goods and promises Myles an introduction to a sympathetic bishop ("a bishop was more necessary than a vocation"). Alas, Myles has a dream of the priesthood that is unlikely to be realized in any Midwestern rectory. "Not a punch-drunk seminary professor or a fat cat in a million-dollar parish . . . but a simple shepherd ministering gently to the poorest of God's poor. He wouldn't mind being a priest-worker, like those already functioning so successfully in France, according to reports reaching him. 'That can't happen here,' Mac [the religious supplies entrepreneur] said. Myles, however, saw difficult times ahead for the nation . . . there would soon be priest-workers slaving away in fields and factories by day and tending to the spiritual needs of their poor fellow-workers by night. 'Poor?' Mac asked. 'What about the unions? When I think what those boys take home!'"

Father Joe Hackett, the protagonist of Wheat that Springeth Green, tries to withstand the turmoil engendered in the church by Vatican II and in the world by the 1960s - most of the novel takes place in 1968. After dabbling with ascetical rigors and mysticism during his seminary days, his first assignment is to Holy Faith Parish, whose pastor, Father Van Slaag, is reputed to be the diocese's only true contemplative. Faced with the real thing, Hackett abandons his mystical inclinations and throws himself into the work for which he has both the aptitude and the will. "But the best times for Joe were those times when he could be of real use to people as a priest - those times of trial, tragedy, and ordinary death - into which he entered deeper than he had before. 'After years of trying to walk on the water, you know . . . it's good to come ashore and feel the warm sand between my toes.'"

Hackett turns his vocation into a career. "His vices, his eating and drinking, did tend to silence the prophet in him, but so did common sense." After Holy Faith and a number of years running Diocesan Catholic Charities, he gets a parish of his own. With no other real attachments in his life, he invests his emotions heavily in the activity of running an organization and treasures the successes he achieves as an efficient manager. "As for feeling thwarted and useless, he knew that feeling, but he also knew what it meant. It meant that he was in touch with reality, and that was something these days."

Besides poker with a fast set of fellow priests and his dependence on drink, nothing much intrudes on Hackett's solitude. Even the assignment of a curate to his parish is perceived as an fulfillment of the system's perduring success: He will now have a younger priest to initiate into the thorny joys of priestly fellowship. However, Hackett is unable to maintain control of either his assistant's attitudes or his choice of friends and inevitably succumbs to the demands of human responsibility: he finds a friend in the young priest rather than a pupil.

Historical realities impinge on Hackett's pastoral behavior as well. When a particularly hawkish parishioner's son chooses to flee to Canada rather than serve in Vietnam, Hackett supports the decision. He lives in a vortex that includes the rapid changes in the Catholic church as well as the apparent unraveling of civil society. In the midst of the chaos, he discovers real asceticism. Hackett's earliest inclinations, if somewhat hysterically indulged as a seminarian, were sound and had merely remained dormant. At a propitious moment of minor crisis in the parish, "one of those times when the wise pastor takes off for a week or two, in the hope of absence making the heart grow fonder," Joe travels to Montreal. He stays in the Catholic Worker house where his draft-dodging former parishioner has found a home-in-exile. For a short, transforming time, Joe Hackett behaves like a simple, sober priest.

The depth of his transformation, perhaps it is better to call it his conversion, is symbolically reinforced by the move he engineers when he returns home. He asks the archbishop for a new assignment - to Holy Cross, a languishing inner-city parish with no status and no curate. The name is obviously deliberate: Hackett is able to embrace the cross after his own purgation, after he's been stripped of the images that made up his notion of what it means to be a priest. Hackett had created an idol that held him in thrall until, late in his career, by looking at faces and the needs behind them one at a time, he recovered his vocation.

To date, Hackett's story is Powers's last word on the vagaries of service and the costs of sacrifice. Yet a great deal has happened in the church and in the country since 1968. (Jesse Jackson referred to 1993 as the twenty-fifth anniversary of everything.) Is it nostalgic to wonder whether it was easier once to knit together one's identity as a citizen and a believer? Moreover, what does it mean to be a Catholic in America if our suspicions of the pontifex maximus are as profound as our distrust of the prevailing cant of those building bridges to the twenty-first century? Perhaps we've lost everything but the questions and must rely, like Father Hackett, on the turbulent consolation of the cross.

Looking for God is treacherous, perhaps especially so for those who seem to have a professional stake in the enterprise. However, J.F. Powers's work reminds us that grace is never as remote as the devil would have us believe.

J.V. Long's critical essay on J.F. Powers is another in our series of articles on contemporary Catholic writers of fiction. We have asked our essayists to give an overview of the author's work, showing our readers where and how this writer locates the central human drama, the big questions, the religious crisis of our time. What does the Catholic sensibility of J.F. Powers tell us about our common world, about the state of our souls? The most recently published article in the series was written by Suzanne Keen on Seamus Heaney (May 17, 1996).

Books discussed in this essay

Prince of Darkness and Other Stories Doubleday, 1951

The Presence of Grace Atheneum, 1962

Morte D'Urban Modern Library, 1966

Look How the Fish Live Knopf, 1975

Wheat that Springeth Green Knopf, 1988

J.V. Long lives in Portland, Oregon. His essay on Brian Moore appeared in the October 20, 1989 issue of Commonweal.