My Monster Rant about Christian Fiction, Part 2 (Catholicism)

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Click here for Part 1, which talks about lack of research in some Christian historical fiction. Click here for Part 3, which talks about lust in Christian romance novels.

Issue #2: Catholicism

I think a huge reason that many (not all!!!) Protestant authors struggle to portray the Middle Ages well is because, not only is the era as a whole so vastly different from ours, but also because there is a lack of attempt to understand and portray the Catholic Faith and the mindset of Catholic characters. I’m trying to phrase this right because I know I have lots of Protestant friends here, so please know I’m not throwing shade but simply trying to describe how I see this from my Catholic perspective. (I have also seen some incredibly good depictions of Catholicism from Protestant authors and I appreciate that so much!) However, similarly to her portrayal of the Middle Ages as a whole, I sense that Hedlund and many, many other authors hold a number of assumptions about Catholicism, and as a result don’t take the time to check the truth or falsity of those preconceived perceptions.

Here are just a few of the issues in Waters of Time that, from my Catholic viewpoint, instantly stuck out as things which minimal research should have corrected. I’m starting with the less egregious ones because there was one in particular which I nearly took a photo of to post on my Instagram story with a note that this is my #1 problem reading Christian fiction because it made me so mad 😅

First, when nuns (especially the prioress, i.e. the one in authority) and briefly the archbishop show up, they are mostly portrayed as cruel and heartless. It was interesting to me that it was always the higher authority figures in Church hierarchy that were portrayed this way, while regular priests and nuns like Christina were either background or sympathetic figures. The issue of medieval Church hierarchy is, of course, an extremely nuanced one. There were a heck tonne of corrupt popes, bishops, abbesses, etc.—of course there were, they were human and there are always humans who turn to evil regardless of their position in the Church. (That in itself doesn’t falsify the Catholic Church; if it did, then to be logical modern Protestants would have to admit that corrupt Protestant pastors falsify their denominations. But I digress.) There were also many, many holy ones.

CBTM had a throwaway sentence that plays into this, where I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. When the narrator gives the backstory to St. Thomas Becket, a twelfth-century archbishop of Canterbury whom the king had assassinated, it says “For some reason, the pope declared Becket a saint.” (I paraphrase and add my own emphasis.) From the context of the paragraph and that “for some reason” phrase, the narrator seems to be suggesting that Becket’s canonization somehow stemmed from his assassination, the reasons for which were not mentioned in CBTM, and that declaring him a saint was random, not making logical sense. In fact, Becket was canonized because he was a holy man who defended the Church’s rights. Picking up any book of saints’ lives or even googling his life would have shown this. You can’t even argue that CBTM didn’t need to say this because it was beside the point for the context, because the sentence so easily could have been “Because of his holy life, the pope declared Becket a saint.” That would have solved the problem. But instead, we got this “For some reason” which really felt like it was there to play into this narrative of a corrupt, worldly Church. I have no idea if that was deliberate, but it goes to show that when you’re portraying a religion that’s not your own, you need to do its adherents the respect of five minutes’ research and a thoughtfully-phrased sentence.

I also wanted to comment that Marian thinks to herself that Christina, being a bubbly, friendly person, “could not have been meant for the life of a nun” where she’s locked away and doesn’t get to speak for much of the day. That, among other comments about her time in the convent of St. Sepulchre, signaled to me that the author had not taken the time to understand why nuns lead the strict lives they do. It’s about detaching from the distractions and comforts of this life to grow deeper in relationship with God. Hence the rule of silence in many orders, the uninspiring food Marian mentions, the tough regimen of community prayer breaking up the night, and so on. Marian’s and the narrator’s comments give the impression that this is all, what, wanton cruelty on the part of the prioress? No, it’s about entering as fully as possible into communion with God.

The Catholic concept of vocation (“calling”) is that God calls individuals to a particular state of life, like marriage, priesthood, or religious life. I’m not going to get into the complexities of why different women entered the convent in the Middle Ages, which was not always because they felt a calling to religious life, since it’s beyond the scope of this essay which is already way too long. I will just say that, from a Catholic perspective, Christina’s loving personality has nothing to do with being meant for “greater things” than to be “imprisoned” in a “dreary” convent. I would have appreciated the author approaching this topic with more nuance and respect, which would have meant doing some study of why convents existed, not just that they did and the living conditions within some of them.

Okay and then there was the comment that DROVE ME UP THE WALL. There are certain anti-Catholic stereotypes that are constantly recycled over and over again, and they don’t get any truer the more times they’re propagated. One of these is that the Church opposed the translation of the Bible into the vernacular because she didn’t want the people to be able to read it for themselves. When CBTM stated as an aside (which made it feel like it was thrown in as a cheap shot) that John Wyclif was declared a heretic for translating the Bible into English, I just. Could. Not. John Wyclif was a heretic because he put forth heretical propositions and denied Catholic teachings like transubstantiation. Regardless of whether you agree with him, you can’t deny it’s fair for the Church to condemn teachings which directly contradict her own!

Not only was his Scripture translation not the reason he was declared a heretic, here are a bunch of reasons it couldn’t and wouldn’t have been:

• There were already English (and other vernacular) translations of Scripture. For example, the Lindisfarne Gospels are a tenth-century English translation. Venerable Bede (a canonized saint) translated John’s Gospel into English in the eighth century. These are not the only ones.
• Most people couldn’t read in the first place, and those who could, could nearly always read Latin because it was part of common education.
• Stained glass windows in medieval churches portrayed Biblical scenes specifically to give the people who couldn’t read a visual depiction of those stories.
• A large amount of Scripture was (and is) read at every Mass.
• Bibles were incredibly expensive and fairly inaccessible because each one was painstakingly hand-copied by monks. It has nothing to do with the Church trying to hide the Word of God from her people.
• Obviously the Church was deeply protective of and careful with copies of the Bible, because she did not want copyists’ or translation mistakes creeping into God’s Word. Not just anyone was allowed to circulate copies of the Bible, much less brand-new translations, because of how possible it was for mistakes or even deliberate changes to get in! In Wyclif’s case, consider that the Church was well aware he was denying Catholic doctrine, and surely you can understand, whether you agree or not, why his translation would be banned.

Yet again, it would have taken such a brief google search of Catholic sources to understand why Wyclif’s teachings were condemned and that the Church never tried to “hide” the Scriptures.

I don’t need non-Catholic authors to agree with my faith. I would just love it if my fellow Christians would take the time to understand what I believe and why! And that means going to Catholic sources, not non-Catholic interpretations of Catholic belief and practice. I’m sure many such interpretations were written in good faith and their authors truly believed they were accurate, but when you’re doing research, the first thing my history professor would tell you is that you need to consider the bias of your source. Obviously, a Protestant source is going to be biased against the Catholic Church to some degree. If you want to understand someone else’s viewpoint or culture—and this includes literally anyone, but for my current purposes if you want to understand medieval people and Catholics—you have to go straight to them instead of relying on what someone else tells you about them.

This, above all, is my pet peeve when it comes to Christian fiction that deals with Catholicism. I have come across really awesome books that are so balanced and respectful, but they’re sadly a tiny minority.

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Click here for Part 3!