As any novelist knows, his characters can be a surly, seditious bunch who rather enjoy thwarting his intentions for them, and the wise novelist will let them revolt. But when a novelist summons and enacts his religious faith, he robs his characters of their free will, of their own capacity to be alive, to morph or evolve in whatever direction is truest. Feeling bullied by a God who probably doesn’t exist but who nevertheless has torpedoed his affair with Sarah, Bendrix here refers both to himself and to his own fictional creations: “We have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of nonexistence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us here and there according to His intentions.” Substitute “Greene” for “God” in that passage and you see how the author suspects himself: A novelist creates just as God is Creator. It’s not in Sarah’s character—not her history, not her agency—to end her passionate communion with Bendrix, the only genuine love she’s ever known, and then convert to Catholicism. And let’s never mind the absurdity of those final slapdash pages, Sarah’s becoming a martyr and saint and seraph. Greene might mobilize his usual skill in forcing her through these permutations, but it’s still force. When Edith Sitwell said to Greene, “What a great priest you would have made,” you take her meaning.

In an essay on Mauriac, Greene writes that a novel must put forth “another world against which the actions of the characters are thrown into relief,” and I have no quarrel with that. You want the tension and the tremble that can happen when faith infiltrates fiction. But let it be achieved as Percy achieves it in The Moviegoer, as O’Connor achieves it everywhere in her work, as Greene achieves it in his finest novel, The Quiet American: The religious elements aren’t obnoxiously grafted onto the narrative but emerge intrinsically from the circumstances of the characters. Writing about Maugham, Greene suggested that art is “a function of the religious mind,” which is entirely accurate but also entirely different from being the function of religion, regardless of how many masterworks were fired in the hearth of piety and praise. A novel should indeed be a groping after some form of the metaphysical, a benediction to unseen powers, the upholding of the mysterium tremendum, those insistent inklings of the numinous.

But a novel should not be a tract, an apologia, dogmatism attached like strings to the limbs of characters; it should not seek to convert or persuade or indoctrinate. And when we tag a writer “a Catholic novelist,” we attribute to him the agenda of the Catholic, and not the aim of the novelist. You can try to reconcile the agenda of the one with the aim of the other—Mauriac grappled consistently with this reconciliation, as did O’Connor and Greene himself—but it’s a fraught enterprise: Blake’s “mind-forged manacles” become faith-forged manacles when the purely imaginative and linguistic motive of the novelist is sullied by the believer’s allegiance to Catholicism. That’s the pinch: Catholics already have the truth, whereas novelists write novels in part because they don’t. The Church has all the righteous answers; a novel is after the right questions. “We Catholics,” wrote O’Connor, “are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any.”

If my being a Catholic must be predicated on the belief that the God of the Israelites decided to inseminate a peasant woman in the Levant in order to birth a human sacrifice who would rise from the dead and redeem the world, and whose resurrection would then inspire an apostolic company who could interpret the sacred while taking my money and demanding my servitude, then you’ll forgive me, but I can’t call myself a Catholic. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy admits: “I am not sorry to have been a Catholic”—“this sensuous life,” she calls it, and like Percy and O’Connor she speaks of “the sense of mystery and wonder,” of how in certain “exalted moments of altruism the soul was fired with reverence.” I’d like to second that: I am not sorry to have been a Catholic. An upbringing in the Church has, I suspect and hope, outfitted me well as a storyteller. In his essay “The Holiness of the Ordinary,” Percy contends that “whatever else the benefits of the Catholic faith, it is of a particularly felicitous use to the novelist,” and I’d like to second that, too. It gives a writer that dramatic itch for sin, for judgment and damnation, for the rottenness of the world and the holy in us all.