Have you ever heard of The Foundling? I’d be surprised if you had. It’s been out of print for some time, and it is not exactly one of the timeless treasures of Catholic literature.
My own information is sketchy, but from what I can tell, in the early ‘50s the then-Cardinal-Archbishop of New York, 
Francis J. Spellman (1889-1967), as ardent a public anti-communist and anti-obscenity crusader as they came, even by his era’s standards, wrote a novel by this name, a sentimental story of a baby found in St. Patrick’s Cathedral (on Christmas Eve, of course) by a one-legged World War I veteran, emotionally scarred from his combat experience. The foundling child is placed in a Catholic orphanage; the finder wishes to adopt, but is not permitted to because he is a Protestant; thwarted but undaunted in his would-be paternal love, he spends the next two decades visiting the orphanage and doting on the boy. The aging one-legged veteran finds peace and fulfillment in the boy’s healthy and happy growth; the boy becomes a man and goes off to fight in World War II, in which HE is also maimed, but he comes home and lives happily ever after, accepted by the woman he loves, sustained by his faith, etc.
Time magazine’s 1951 review gets right to it: “Nobody expects a cardinal to be able to write a great novel, and The Foundling leaves that solid assumption undisturbed,” writes the critic. “As a novelist, Cardinal Spellman is bland and amateurish. But if his book will not advance American literature, it will do positive good in another quarter: every nickel of the proceeds…goes to the New York Foundling Hospital.”
In the non-fiction writings of Flannery O’Connor, who could probably be said to have “advanced American literature,” whatever that means, Cardinal Spellman’s Foundling seems to serve as a watchword for all that she found defective in mid-century American Catholic letters: dreary prose, implausible characters, a sentimental plot built upon moral pieties about what ought to happen, all derived from an underlying mistake: the confusion of subjective intentions, however noble, with artistic skill, which is the only thing that can justify a work of art.
Spellman’s Foundling was by no means unique in its day as an example of Catholic kitsch. And in our own age of mass-produced culture, in which Catholics have half a dozen reliably orthodox publishers and distributors trying to sell us Catholic books, films, and music, O’Connor’s warnings about bad art hiding behind orthodoxy are as needful now as fifty years ago. There is more Catholic kitsch for sale than ever before, and one-click internet ordering renders us especially vulnerable to it.
There are perhaps Catholic readers and critics who would say that an earnest attempt to write fiction by a robustly orthodox archbishop like Cardinal Spellman should be respectfully welcomed, that aesthetic or literary criticism of such a book would be out of place; he has, after all, furnished his readers with a story that has a positive message about the Faith, and that is a rare thing in the modern age.
This would not be Flannery’s view.
“If we must have trash this is the kind of trash we ought to have,” she wrote about Spellman’s novel in a private 1953 letter. Is that even faint praise? And in a 1963 public lecture at Georgetown, parts of which were published under the title “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” she digs in a little deeper:
Poorly written novels—no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters—are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying…An individual may be highly edified by a sorry novel because he doesn’t know any better. We have plenty of examples in this world of poor things being used for good purposes. God can make any indifferent thing, as well as evil itself, an instrument for good; but I submit that to do this is the business of God and not of any human being.
A good example of a very indifferent novel being used for some good purpose is The Foundling, by Cardinal Spellman. It’s nobody’s business to judge Cardinal Spellman except as a novelist, and as a novelist he’s a bit short. You do have the satisfaction of knowing that if you buy a copy of The Foundling, you are helping the orphans to whom the proceeds go; and afterwards you can always use the book as a doorstop. But what you owe yourself here is to know that what you are helping are the orphans and not the standards of Catholic letters in this country.
How to explain the desire for “trash,” as she called it? What is it that makes the Catholic reader prefer the kitschy and sentimental? The answer, according to O’Connor in another speech called “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”, lies in a deep if unacknowledged heresy looming large in the modern Catholic mind:
…the average Catholic reader…(is) more of a Manichaean than the Church permits. By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him. He forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence…We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality…
Pornography…is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purposes and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake.
The decidedly unsentimental Flannery O'Connor
O’Connor’s close juxtaposition of smut and sentimentality is an interesting one: both phenomena seem to spring from the same defective theology of the human person: the ancient heresy of Mani, known well to Saint Augustine in the 4th century, to Saint Dominic in the 13th, to John Paul the Great in the 20th. The view is that man is either all angel OR all beast: if he thinks he is the former, he will try to hide from real life and the slow and often painful workings of redemption in puritanism, in the ardent fanaticism of the one who think he has found the shortcut to redemption through his own efforts. But if the modern Manichee believes man to be in truth nothing more than a beast, he will attempt to hide from grace and from his own spiritual nature by rutting like a chimpanzee. Viewed from one aspect, the ascetic puritan is much closer to God than the animalistic fornicator; but when viewed from the exacting standards of philosophical and theological truth, both views distort reality by abstracting one part of truth (that holiness is otherworldly; that man has a body) from the whole and inflating it up to gross proportions.
And as puritanism is a falsehood and a distortion of life, so too is the literature of sentimentality a falsehood and a distortion of art. The sentimentalized story betrays the rules of art by portraying a false world, one in which the good and honest always persevere, temptation and other obstacles are always dispelled, suffering is rewarded, and the supernatural is on vivid display, in the expected packaging—all with a stirring soundtrack. There are always those who demand such art or literature, because they want to be encouraged by tales of the world as they wish it was—but the serious Christian artist cannot gratify such appetites.
In this same speech O’Connor tells of an “old lady in California” who wrote her in a scolding letter “that when the tired reader comes home at night he wishes to read something that will ‘lift up his heart.’” O’Connor’s response: “I wrote her back that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up…one old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her 250,000 times and what you get is a book club.”
She also writes of a Catholic journalist who once made a general demand of writers for “a positive novel based upon the Church’s fight for social justice, or the liturgical revival, or life in the seminary”. On that latter possibility, O’Connor remarks that if you want believable novels about seminary life, then your seminarians are going to have to drop out or get kicked out in order to have the time to write them. “Are (we) to assume that anybody who can write at all and who has the energy to do some research can give us a novel on this or any needed topic and can make it positive,” she writes incredulously. For that would be nothing more than hack journalism; and hacks we will always have with us, though there is no guarantee of the availability of good writers.
Both the old lady in California who wants to be uplifted and the Catholic critic who wants novels to be “positive”—the Scylla and Charybdis of the Catholic public, demanding sentiment or utility, but blind to art—, are confused about what a work of literature is in its essence: they expect it to DO something specific for them and are from the beginning uninterested in its representation of any unpleasant realities, which is to be uninterested in at least half of reality. To want only simplistic sentimental stories is really to want to be lied to, and while there is no shortage in our age of those willing to lie to make a buck, the Christian artist, bound by his theology to see the world as it is, and sanctioned by his morality against deceiving anyone, cannot in good conscience join in.
The conscience of the artist requires him to portray the world as he sees it, to be faithful to his vision in the work he creates. True religion clarifies and completes our natural vision, enabling us to see nature AND grace, virtue AND sin, comedy AND tragedy in their proper relationships. It enables us to see man as what he is, neither fully angel nor fully beast, but capable of both the bestial and the angelic by turns. The Christian vision does not require that either the artist or the reader close his eyes to the merely natural, the fallen, or any of the truths of life. It does require us to entertain the possibility that God is active even though he is not obvious—whether in life or in the representations of art. Only the faithless reader demands signs and wonders.
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An interesting essay. I may actually have heard of the poor book, but I’m not entirely sure. Of course, it bears noting that O’Connor’s commentary is about the qualities of good adult literature: she was quite explicit elsewhere that the sort of stories she wrote were not for children.
For that matter, I don’t see that much Catholic kitsch these days. Growing up I saw a lot of Protestant kitsch in Catholic churches and schools, but that’s different. But I don’t pretend to read a lot of new releases.
Well a lot could be said for other forms of catholic art. Take the sugar sweetened plastic statues that can be bought for instance. There you have a jesus or mary figure with what looks like lipstick and mascara ingloriously slapped on there faces (no disrespect to our lord and lady here) Kitsch and sentimentality abound here, and to use our most honourable writers expression ‘trash’. Deal with the mascara and lipstick….. pleeeeze!
I wonder what she thought of Chesterton, Ralph McInerny, and Malachi Martin. Maybe not a lot ;>)
Or Giovanni Guareschi…
I love Guareschi!
Fantastic! You’ve hit the nail on the head. The nature (and therefore purpose) of art is not to push an agenda. That is called propaganda. Neither is it the nature of art entertainment. It may teach and entertain, but only insofar as it is cathartic in Aristotle’s sense.
Art is cathartic because, through art, one is made able to live a life other than his own. This can be satisfying and entertaining, but only as a side-effect. The essence of art is re-creation (or sub-creation as Tolkien called it) of the world around us. Otherwise, it isn’t possible to live a second life through the art, because it doesn’t mimic life and reality.
Stop by my blog, PopSophia.
Great article! I think that those who hope to be uplifted by sentimentality in art are fooling themselves. Kitsch isn’t uplifting – it’s insulting. It lacks the emotional honesty of real life experience.
Perhaps the least artistic and most sentimental kitsch is an obsession in seeing kitsch in others.
Excellent article!
Reading Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being recently prompted me to read Spellman’s The Foundling. (The Protestant World War I vet, Paul, is missing an arm, not a leg.) The novel’s Catholic hero, Peter, the foundling himself, is both a Staten-Island-orphanage-trained farmer and a budding symphonic composer. He’s blinded in combat in the Pacific but, yes, welcomed home with open arms by his beautiful fiancée. The book emphasizes New York City’s ethno-cultural diversity. In the orphanage, the hero’s best friend is black, leading to several scenes taking place in Harlem. A couple of elderly Jewish men, sympathetically portrayed, also figure prominently. In the final chapters a patriotic New York bishop pops up that the reader can safely assume to be a Spellman self-portrait. No, there’s not the remotest clue as to the author’s sexual orientation. And contrary to Flannery O’Connor’s assertion, the book does not make a good doorstop, being less than 200 pages long.
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