Let's write about Greek Catholics....

Maine Writer- Because my father John Jubinsky was a Greek Catholic. Here (below) is my grandmother's obituary:

Shenandoah, Pennsylvania

Wonderful history reporting published in Commonweal by Kathryn David:

In February 2022, as the Russian military crossed into Ukraine and marched toward Kyiv, Ukrainians and foreigners alike spilled into L’viv, a city thought to be safer because of its proximity to the Polish border. More than six months later, L’viv has become more than a temporary refuge—it has become a center for humanitarian aid, a cultural capital, and a safe haven for thousands of displaced people. As the world has turned its attention to L’viv, observers have recalled the city’s past as the diverse Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg. An urban center in the borderlands of the Habsburg Empire, Lemberg produced political activists, artists, and writers who wrote in Ukrainian, Polish, German, and Yiddish. These figures were critical to the creation of a transnational European culture.

This is the St. Michael the Archangel Greek Catholic cemetery in Wierchomla, Poland, where by Grandfather Joseph Jubinsky lived. (Dzubinsky).

Still overlooked, however, is the city’s role as a Ukrainian spiritual center: under the Habsburgs L’viv became the seat of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. While most Ukrainians today identify as Orthodox (80 percent), a sizable minority are Greek Catholics belonging to this Eastern-rite Catholic Church. These nearly four million Greek Catholics, about 9 percent of Ukraine’s population, are concentrated in L’viv and its surrounding area. Indeed, most of the historic churches in L’viv’s downtown are Catholic.

The Carpatho-Rusyns of Pennsylvania: A project over two decades in the making to write the history.

The Catholic presence in L’viv is not simply a historical curiosity. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has played an outsized role not just in the local culture, but in the creation of the Ukrainian nation. Historically, it has been in the moments when the fate of Ukraine hung in the balance that the Greek Catholic Church made its largest impacts. As L’viv takes on new importance in the Ukrainian war effort, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has again become more visible, not only locally but throughout the region. 

What can history tell us about how this current war will influence this overlooked religious community? Will the Church yet again be in a position to shape Ukrainian history?

Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church is a product of the shifting borders that have characterized so much of Eastern Europe’s history. When an alliance of principalities coalesced to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, its leadership had to figure out how to absorb Orthodox Slavs from the territories of what is now Ukraine into their Catholic realm. 

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

In fact, the nobility and the clergy settled on a church union in 1596, which would allow locals to continue to practice the Eastern-rite customs of Orthodox Christianity while accepting the spiritual authority of the pope, creating what was known then as the Ruthenian Uniate Church and is known today as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Although the institution was founded in 1596, this Church traces its Christianity to Grand Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) who adopted Byzantine Christianity for his kingdom in medieval Kyiv in 988. In this way, Greek Catholics see their spiritual heritage as emanating from the same source as the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches.

When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth weakened in the late eighteenth century, its territories were partitioned and Greek Catholics found themselves divided between two empires with radically different approaches to this Church: the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Imperial Russia saw the Greek Catholic Church as an imposition of Catholicism on a population that it deemed part of the Orthodox world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the imperial Russian state banned the Church and forcibly transferred clergy, believers, and properties from the Greek Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church. All the while, they called this process a “reunification,” claiming they were “reunifying” Greek Catholics with their Orthodox brethren as their lands and sacred spaces were annexed by Russia. Tellingly, Putin and his allies use similar rhetoric of “reunification” to justify Russia’s current war in Ukraine.

The treatment of the Church by Catholic Austria-Hungary was quite the opposite. As Catholics, the Habsburgs poured resources into the Greek Catholic Church to place it on more even footing with the Roman Catholic Church. This included state funding for seminaries, programs to allow Greek Catholic clergy to study in Rome, and money to build opulent cathedrals in the styles of the day. In 1817, the support of the Habsburg emperor allowed the Vatican to establish a metropolitan in Lemberg for the Greek Catholic Church. For the Habsburgs, this move was also meant to fight Russian influence. A well-funded and state-supported Greek Catholic Church, it was thought, would insulate the population from Russian state-funded Orthodox missions in the borderland city.

Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church is a product of the shifting borders that have characterized so much of Eastern Europe’s history. When an alliance of principalities coalesced to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, its leadership had to figure out how to absorb Orthodox Slavs from the territories of what is now Ukraine into their Catholic realm. The nobility and the clergy settled on a church union in 1596, which would allow locals to continue to practice the Eastern-rite customs of Orthodox Christianity while accepting the spiritual authority of the pope, creating what was known then as the Ruthenian Uniate Church and is known today as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Although the institution was founded in 1596, this Church traces its Christianity to Grand Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) who adopted Byzantine Christianity for his kingdom in medieval Kyiv in 988. In this way, Greek Catholics see their spiritual heritage as emanating from the same source as the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches.

When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth weakened in the late eighteenth century, its territories were partitioned and Greek Catholics found themselves divided between two empires with radically different approaches to this Church: the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Imperial Russia saw the Greek Catholic Church as an imposition of Catholicism on a population that it deemed part of the Orthodox world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the imperial Russian state banned the Church and forcibly transferred clergy, believers, and properties from the Greek Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church. All the while, they called this process a “reunification,” claiming they were “reunifying” Greek Catholics with their Orthodox brethren as their lands and sacred spaces were annexed by Russia. Tellingly, Putin and his allies use similar rhetoric of “reunification” to justify Russia’s current war in Ukraine.

The treatment of the Church by Catholic Austria-Hungary was quite the opposite. As Catholics, the Habsburgs poured resources into the Greek Catholic Church to place it on more even footing with the Roman Catholic Church. This included state funding for seminaries, programs to allow Greek Catholic clergy to study in Rome, and money to build opulent cathedrals in the styles of the day. 

In 1817, the support of the Habsburg emperor allowed the Vatican to establish a metropolitan in Lemberg for the Greek Catholic Church. 

For the Habsburgs, this move was also meant to fight Russian influence. A well-funded and state-supported Greek Catholic Church, it was thought, would insulate the population from Russian state-funded Orthodox missions in the borderland city.

Yet, perhaps the most consequential impact of Habsburg state support for the Church was the creation of a highly educated clergy deeply ingrained in European networks of both religious and secular scholarship. And because the Greek Catholic Church, like the Orthodox Church, permits married clergy, these highly educated clergy soon became scions for families that served as the foundation of an intelligentsia in Austria-Hungary. It was these educated priests and their children who laid the foundation for the Ukrainian national movement in the late nineteenth century, a movement that emerged alongside Russian, Polish, and Jewish national movements in the region. These activists sought to forge connections with Orthodox Ukrainians across the border in imperial Russia, grappling with a key question: Could a population that straddled multiple empires and confessions become one people?

As Europe entered the twentieth century, the clergy of the Greek Catholic Church found that their visions for the Ukrainian nation were quickly being overtaken by more radical forms of nationalism.

At the same time, some of their parishioners were eschewing national identifications altogether, embracing socialism and class-based solidarities along with it. 

How could the Church remain a meaningful presence in the lives of its flock with all of these shifts? This question fell to the man who was selected as metropolitan in 1900, serving until his death in 1944: Andrei Sheptytsky. 

The Church’s history in the twentieth century came to be defined by Sheptytsky, not just because he was an extraordinary leader, but because in those forty-four years, Sheptytsky radically redefined the Church’s role in society and left a legacy that shapes the Church to this day.

From 1900 to 1944, the seat of the Church, then Lemberg and today L’viv, and its surrounding region changed hands from Austria-Hungary to Poland (1918), and later Soviet Ukraine (1939), weathering two world wars. There were also short-lived but incredibly consequential occupations as imperial Russia fought Austria-Hungary during War World I; Reds fought Whites during the Russian Civil War; Soviets fought Nazis during World War II; and partisans of various loyalties fought each other, all in the city of L’viv. In the absence of a stable government, Sheptytsky positioned the Church to serve as a government for his stateless flock and, as metropolitan, was given a seat at tables normally reserved for diplomats. 

Andrey (Andrei) Sheptytsky (1865-1944)

A statesman as well as a churchman, Sheptytsky used his own family’s vast personal wealth and the Church’s holdings to create institutions where the string of states in the region had failed, founding museums, schools, and charities to serve L’viv’s vulnerable population, including veterans of the countless wars. 

With each new government, he used his position as head of the Church to advocate not just for Greek Catholics but for the Ukrainian minority as a whole, lobbying for Ukrainian-language rights and religious tolerance for both Orthodox and Catholic Ukrainians.

Despite this advocacy, Sheptytsky would have bristled at the suggestion that he was a nationalist, at least in the way it was understood at the time. Indeed, Sheptytsky was a vocal critic of radical nationalist movements taking hold in the region. 

He especially criticized violence between Poles and Ukrainians, using his platform to condemn the Polish government’s treatment of its Ukrainian minority in the 1930s, as well as terrorist acts committed by right-wing Ukrainian nationalist groups against Polish rule.

But there were limits to his influence among a population of believers that then numbered around three million. Sheptytsky may have condemned radical nationalism as counter to the Church’s teaching, but his parishioners and even members of the clergy did not always see it that way. The combination of the Great Depression and an increasingly repressive Polish government left the local population desperate for fundamental change. The Church’s refusal to engage in a real way with mass politics caused many to search elsewhere for advocacy, including among the local nationalist and socialist movements. In letters preserved in the Vatican’s Archive for Eastern Churches, Sheptytsky wrote to the Vatican in the 1930s about these developments, fearing that nationalist politics were replacing Christian values among his flock, including within the priesthood. He feared the consequences of a population committed to the nation above all, instead of service to God.

Even with these prescient insights, Sheptytsky could not have predicted what he and his Church would face during the Second World War. In 1939, L’viv and its surrounding region were annexed to Stalin’s Soviet Union after the Nazi–Soviet pact split up Poland. From 1939 to 1941, Sheptytsky did his best to serve as a diplomat yet again, negotiating with the officially atheist Soviet state to protect his Church in exchange for a promise that the Church would not criticize the new Stalinist order. For their part, the Soviets understood that because of the Church’s influence in the region, an all-out assault against Sheptytsky and the clergy would only inspire anger. That assault would come later—once the Soviet Union had decisively won the war and Sheptytsky was no longer alive to combat it.

In letters to the Vatican that Sheptytsky managed to smuggle out during this first Soviet occupation, he did not hide his true feelings about the regime he publicly declared loyalty to. He documented the crimes perpetrated against the local Polish population, which was singled out by Soviet authorities for mass arrest and deportation as a remnant of the old regime. He noted that the ubiquitous secret police presented the population with a series of impossible choices and commented on an overall moral degradation in the face of the violence of Soviet occupation.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Sheptytsky was forced to face a new reality. The series of choices Sheptytsky made in this period have come under a great deal of scrutiny by historians and remain a topic of debate. Although many avoid engaging with the complexities of the Church’s history during World War II, the full picture offers insight into what Ukraine faced during this era, and crucially, what the Church might mean for Ukraine today.

Like many other L’vivians, Sheptytsky initially saw the Nazi invasion in 1941 as a liberation from Soviet rule. While some locals, especially radical nationalist groups, welcomed the opportunity to participate in violence against Jews and “Soviet collaborators” in service to the Nazi regime, this was not the case for Sheptytsky and many of his fellow clergy. Rather, Sheptytsky simply believed that nothing could be worse than the imposition of Stalinism his community had faced in the past two years. He took seriously promises from the Nazis that they would honor religious freedom and support movements for Ukrainian independence. It was this hopefulness that perhaps explains why Sheptytsky said nothing when pogroms against the local Jewish population broke out in the first months of Nazi occupation in the summer of 1941. Many of his own flock were the perpetrators of these pogroms, and, according to reports gathered later, Greek Catholic priests condoned the violence as revenge against the Soviet secret police, blaming local Jews for the crimes of the Soviet state.

But Sheptytsky’s compliance with Nazi authorities was short-lived. As the Nazi occupation grew more violent and repressive, Sheptytsky used the little freedom he had to make his views known. His pastoral letters were banned by the Nazis, but he found ways to circulate them anyway to his parishes. In these letters he condemned those who had collaborated with the Nazis and the violence being committed by both the German occupiers and the local population against Jews and later Polish civilians. 

Moreover, Sheptytsky was the first religious leader to report to the Vatican about the mass killings of Jews that later became known as the Holocaust and pleaded that these crimes be made known to the world.

Considering how many of Europe’s religious leaders openly collaborated with Nazi occupation, this alone distinguishes Sheptytsky and the Greek Catholic Church from other religious institutions. But Sheptytsky went further. He and his brother Kliment, also a Church hierarch, were instrumental in helping conceal Jews from the Nazis, allowing them to hide out in rural monasteries, ultimately saving the lives of over a hundred local Jews. He managed to orchestrate all this while confined to a wheelchair by injuries and illnesses caused by old age and the trauma of war.

Still, despite Sheptytsky’s objections, Nazi authorities hoped to use the Church and its symbolism to give themselves moral authority. As Soviet forces were closing in, the Nazis formed a special SS unit to be made up of local Ukrainians and asked for the Church’s assistance in mobilizing it. While Sheptytsky sanctioned this, he also lobbied for this unit to have Greek Catholic priests serve as chaplains—making it the only Nazi SS unit with a chaplaincy. Scholars have been split on the meaning of this decision: Was it an attempt by Sheptytsky to encourage these draftees to remember their values and the Church’s teachings as they fought a thoroughly unjust war? Or was it a way for the Church to give its blessing to these soldiers, in support of their ultimate mission to defeat the rapidly approaching Soviet army?

Here lies the central dilemma in interpreting the Greek Catholic Church and its leadership during a cataclysmic war. Those who denounce Sheptytsky as a “collaborator” ignore both the moments he risked everything to resist, and even more significantly, the limitations imposed on anyone trying to negotiate between Hitler and Stalin. At the same time, Sheptytsky himself argued that war should not be used as an excuse to abandon one’s values. Therefore, to get a full picture of the complicated people and institutions of the Church, it is necessary to acknowledge the moments it did not lead the way it should have.

Andrei Sheptytsky died in 1944, a few months after the Soviets retook L’viv and annexed it to Soviet Ukraine, where the city would remain until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Soviet state authorities allowed Sheptytsky an official funeral in acknowledgement of, if not respect for, his authority. In Soviet state reports from the funeral, informants said that mourners came from all sectors of society—including workers, peasants, students, and members of the intelligentsia—and remarked upon the massive influence this man and the Church had on the local population. Soviet authorities took this to mean that his death had left open a power vacuum and an opportunity to repress the Church once and for all.

Indeed, a few months after his death Soviet authorities began attacking the Church and Sheptytsky himself, claiming the Church had supported Nazi occupation and had to be punished along with all other “collaborators.” Soviet authorities banned the Church and forcibly transferred its clergy, property, and believers to an official, state-run Russian Orthodox Church, echoing the policies previously pursued by imperial Russia. Those who resisted faced arrest, exile, and death. Under duress, some clergy and parishioners accepted the imposition of Orthodoxy, finding ways to outwardly appear dedicated members of the Orthodox Church while holding on to their Greek Catholic faith. Others formed an underground Greek Catholic Church that operated in secret throughout the rest of the lifespan of the Soviet Union. When movements for independence gained momentum in Soviet Ukraine in the 1980s, members of the underground Greek Catholic Church played a pivotal role. Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was once again permitted to operate legally from its seat in L’viv, now a city in independent Ukraine.

What lessons does this history offer the Greek Catholic Church today, as it once again confronts an unexpected war? The Church of today wants the public to understand its historical role as a moral authority for Ukrainian society. In this way, it can offer a powerful alternative to Russia’s narratives about Ukraine. Unlike the Orthodox Church, its spiritual heritage is separate from Russia. The role of its clergy and believers in the Ukrainian national movement in Austria-Hungary ties Ukrainians to Europe. In response to Russian charges of Ukrainian “fascism,” the Church can demonstrate that it was one of the few churches in Europe that resisted full collaboration with Nazi rule.

But how to apply the lessons of history in practice? In some ways, the legacy of Sheptytsky is carried on through the Church’s active engagement in Ukrainian civil society. In the early 1990s the Church’s ability to draw on European Catholic networks, as well as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic diaspora in the United States and Canada, gave the institution access to people and resources that other Ukrainian institutions did not have. Through these networks the Church helped to found one of Ukraine’s most prestigious universities, Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv, in addition to a plethora of humanitarian organizations and NGOs. Critically, the Greek Catholic Church’s access to global Catholic institutions allowed the Church to mobilize a Ukraine-wide network of social outreach that extends far past west Ukraine and has outpaced smaller charitable endeavors by Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches.

A true test for the Church’s role in post-Soviet, independent Ukraine came with the outbreak of war in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine. Between 2014 and 2021, over fourteen thousand soldiers were killed fighting in eastern Ukraine and over one million Ukrainians were internally displaced. While the battles took place in eastern Ukrainian regions with few Greek Catholics, the Greek Catholic Church managed to mobilize extensively for the war effort—far more so than Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches. As anthropologist Catherine Wanner has argued, the Church’s ability to draw on Roman Catholic war relief networks allowed the Greek Catholic Church to fill in gaps left by the Ukrainian state, including through direct support for the Ukrainian armed forces.

Most critically, in 2010, the Greek Catholic Church established a military chaplaincy that took on a new urgency when the war began in 2014. These chaplains were called to address the spiritual needs of Greek Catholic soldiers, overrepresented in the armed forces due to west Ukraine’s high level of military service, as well as the needs of soldiers from various Orthodox denominations.

The Church’s role as a spiritual bulwark for Ukraine’s armed forces takes a physical form in the Garrison Church in L’viv, which is run by Greek Catholic chaplains and dedicated to soldiers and their families. While the church structure and much of its sacred art date back centuries, the church intentionally mixes traditional religious objects with modern symbols of warfare, like shell casings and pieces of shrapnel. Reporters who have attended Mass at this church note the presence of military families among the congregants and sermons that are specifically about the challenges of the war. As a Times of Israel journalist recalled, priests at the Garrison Church were as likely to be found packing up food and supplies for soldiers, military families, and refugees as they would be leading the liturgy. This building offers a clear example of how the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church sees its role: not simply as a spiritual guide, but as an active participant in shaping Ukrainian society at war, just like Sheptytsky’s Church.

Still, debates that engulfed the Church in the previous century remain unresolved. What is the role for a minority Catholic Church in Ukrainian nation-building, especially for a nation that draws so much on its Orthodox heritage? In 2019, the Orthodox world recognized the existence of an independent (autocephalous) Ukrainian Orthodox Church, separate from the Russian Orthodox Church. While Russia denies the legitimacy of this independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its existence has been a powerful tool for the Ukrainian state to assert a religious foundation that cannot be claimed by Moscow. Where does this leave non-Orthodox religious groups like the Greek Catholic Church? There is an opportunity for the Greek Catholic Church to advance the same idea some Ukrainian activists supported in the nineteenth century: a Ukrainian nation with roots in multiple spiritual traditions. Just as Sheptytsky advocated for the rights of Ukrainian Orthodox alongside Ukrainian Greek Catholics, the present-day Church has supported the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s campaign to be recognized as autocephalous. But the two Churches remain in tension as they grapple with the idea that only one Church can claim to be the moral authority of the Ukrainian nation.

And just as in the twentieth century, many Ukrainians remain unsure of the Church’s capacity to address the problems Ukraine faced before this war and that have only worsened since. The Church remains more conservative on social issues than the rest of Ukraine’s population, recently opposing Ukraine’s participation in the Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women. As Ukraine attempts to promote an image of itself to the world as more progressive than Russia on women’s and LGBT rights, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church consistently opposes legislation meant to protect these communities from violence and discrimination. Moreover, in the project of reckoning with Ukraine’s complicated past, the Church has remained mostly silent. In some cases, Greek Catholic organizations have even sponsored initiatives to present a whitewashed version of Ukraine’s history, such as in the case of the controversial Lonsky Prison Museum, which lionizes some radical nationalists whom Sheptytsky himself condemned.

In wartime it is tempting to gloss over these complexities. It is clear to Ukrainians of all faiths that the Church is involved in multiple projects to sustain the country through this brutal war, building on a tradition of serving the needs of the Ukrainian people when other institutions fail them. In this way, the Church is certainly molding itself in the image crafted by Sheptytsky.

In a recent piece for the Economist, Fr. Andriy Zelinskyy, chief military chaplain for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, offered his view of the Church’s role during this brutal war: “There was never a reason for this war and the Russian army has never had a mission. It was void of sense right from the very beginning. That’s why it is imperative that, if we are to restore global security and personal dignity, we answer the questions it raises.”

In the twentieth century, Sheptytsky’s Church saw itself in the same role as it endured brutal occupations by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union’s repression ultimately made it difficult for the Church to confront the trauma of war and reckon with life after. 

Today, as Fr. Zelinskyy reminds us, it seems that the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine may have the chance to answer the questions raised by the war. What answers it will provide, and whether they are the right ones for today’s Ukraine, remains to be seen.

Let's write about people who we will not like

One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the "Whisky Priest", in The Power and the Glory. 

A journalist and MI6 officer, Graham Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself.

The Unquiet Englishman biography braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions...

Maine Writer:  I agree with this statement by Gerald Russello:

"I knew nothing about Graham Greene’s life when I began reading his novels. Only because they were books I could not put down did I want to learn about the life of the man who had written them."

Stirring the Embers of Faith:  Let's write about Graham Green

Book review: The Unquiet Englishman: "Stirring the Embers of Faith", By Gerald J. Russello

Critics can continue to fight over the question of whether Greene was a Catholic writer or, rather, what he called himself: an author who “happened to be Catholic.”

Book review echo published in Commonweal

So, a poet friend of mine complained about the common assumption that learning the biographical details about a writer brings us closer to the quality of the work. Learning that a scene in a novel came from a real-life meeting with a Mrs. Smith in Soho or the author’s experiences in Vietnam does not inevitably make the scene more appealing, or even more intelligible. A literary biographer must establish or assume that her readers already find her subject’s writing interesting. The fact that Tolkien got bitten in a Great War trench by a large spider will be of interest only to those already interested in Shelob, from The Lord of the Rings.

As it happens, The Unquiet Englishman, Richard Greene’s sparkling new biography of Graham Greene, would have a lot of interest even if the latter were not an important writer who, twenty years after his death, still has a large audience. Graham Greene traveled widely, through Europe, Mexico, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, and the United States, and he wrote about what he saw in all those places. He worked for the British secret service during World War II, and spent a lot of time with Kim Philby, who would later turn out to be a double agent for the Soviet Union. Greene became a Catholic in 1927 in order to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, but almost from the start, he had trouble with the practical demands of Catholicism—and in particular, trouble with marital fidelity. Soon after his marriage, he began a long series of affairs, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, and he continued to support her.

“There is no understanding Greene except in the political and cultural contexts of dozens of countries,” Richard Greene writes. But he does not explicitly say that those contexts are needed to like the novels. 

I knew nothing of Graham Greene’s life when I began reading his novels. Only because they were books I could not put down did I want to learn about the life of the man who had written them. Richard Greene, a professor of English literature (and no relation to his subject), does draw out the facts behind Graham Greene’s fictions, insofar as these are available. Even more usefully, though, he discusses how the novels work together or draw on the same themes.

We learn, for example, about a dinner Greene and his wife had with T. S. Eliot in 1935. The typically tightly wound poet got to “unbutton” himself when talking about detective stories. Greene liked them too, and the following year would finish a kind of detective novel, A Gun for Sale. But Richard Greene points out that some of the themes and techniques associated with detective fiction can also be found in Greene’s following book, Brighton Rock. In both books, “he put a repulsive character at the heart of the novel and set about making him compelling.” This is biographical literary criticism at its best. 

In the Eliot story, some helpful context is provided, but more important to readers of Graham Greene’s fiction is the observation that both A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock—very different books in most ways—have the same challenge of dealing with a character a reader may not want to like.

A whole chapter of The Unquiet Englishman is devoted to the facts behind Brighton Rock. That town was apparently a rough place where murder was not infrequent. Graham Greene had spent a lot of time there and some version of the town is the setting for several of his stories. He wanted his anti-hero, Pinkie, to be a “repulsive” character whose life had “failed utterly.” 

Originally, Brighton Rock was meant to be simply another detective story, but after the first fifty pages it turns in a different direction. Pinkie marries a woman named Rose to keep her silent about a crime he has committed. Both are Catholic. Pinkie finally decides that he won’t be truly safe until Rose is dead; but, cornered by the police, he ends up killing himself before he can kill her. Rather than feeling relief at having been spared, Rose continues to feel responsible for Pinkie and vows to accompany him into the “country of mortal sin.”

Greene could have written the same story without any confusing religious issues entering into it. For nonbelievers “the country of mortal sin” means less than it does for Catholics. The priest to whom Rose speaks after Pinkie’s death refers to the “appalling... strangeness of the mercy of God,” suggesting that we cannot know whether anyone is damned, even after committing suicide. 

At one point, Pinkie says of himself “I suppose I’m real Brighton.” Greene’s “repulsive” anti-hero thus stands for an entire town, and by implication for our common humanity. If the mercy of God could reach him, whom couldn’t it reach?

Critics can continue to fight over the question of whether Greene was a Catholic writer or rather what he called himself: an author who “happened to be Catholic.” Some of his characters were good Catholics; many were not. And as Richard Greene reminds us, Graham had a lot of trouble practicing the faith he never quite abandoned. 

The late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once said about himself, “I am a failed Catholic, but still a Catholic.” Greene could have said the same thing. Though a convert, he was deeply steeped in the culture of the faith from all the time he spent in Catholic countries. 

It is hard to believe that anyone but a cradle Catholic could have come up with the “whisky priest” in The Power and the Glory, but Greene’s extensive travels in Mexico and his own struggles with Catholicism allowed him to bring that character to life and to keep him from becoming simply a theological emblem.

Toward the end of his life, Greene said, “I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything, or rather my faith tells me that death is not the end of everything and when my belief wavers I tell myself I am wrong.” 

In a letter to Fr. Albert Huerto, SJ, Greene wrote, “I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic.” The Unquiet Englishman helps us understand what that might mean. Greene was in Mexico during the suppression of the Church, and took the Church’s side in the conflict. He criticized America for its support of troops that murdered Jesuits in other parts of Latin America. The “magic” of the Church continued to hold him even when his rationality was not satisfied. Some part of him continued to believe there was more to reality than rationality.

In any case, Greene knew better than to confuse theological standards with literary standards, and he would not have wanted his novels to be read or admired as apologetic works. 

Fortunately, his best work succeeds on its own terms, and can be appreciated by non-Catholic readers as much as by his coreligionists. The psychology of Rose and Pinkie is fascinating and convincingly wrought, no matter what you think of their beliefs about the afterlife. The Unquiet Englishman is a joy to read for the light it sheds on Greene’s novels, but much of their real-life inspiration remains mysterious—which is just how Greene himself would have wanted it.

The Unquiet Englishman
A Life of Graham Greene
By Richard Greene

Rachel Carson's environmental protection metaphor

Environmentalism emerged as a popular grassroots political movement in the 1960s, with the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. Her book's title became a metaphor for "environmental protection".

"Serious, informed, yet also passionate, Silent Spring is a model of how to write for the general public about complicated things", wrote David Cloutier

“I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.” - Rachel Carson

Science and Religion in alignment

Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

An essay published in Commonweal Magazine by David Cloutier

Commonweal is a liberal American Catholic journal of opinion, edited and managed by lay Catholics, headquartered in The Interchurch Center in New York City. It is the oldest independent Roman Catholic journal of opinion in the United States. 

Rachel Carson was not anti-science. Nor was her approach what we would now call “deep ecology*.” Instead, it reflected an understanding of humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature that is now enshrined in Catholic teaching.

Cloutier essay:  I live in a large apartment building perched on the edge of what is surely the most obscure treasure in Washington, D.C.—Rock Creek Park. I had never heard of it before I moved here, but it didn’t take me long to realize that a trail at the end of my block led into miles and miles of forest, right in the middle of a city. As a native Chicagoan, I had no idea that a city “park” could be like this. Thanks to Rock Creek Park, I’ve not only encountered plenty of deer grazing peacefully on my apartment building’s front lawn, but I also get to wake up every morning to the sound of birds chirping away.
It turns out, I may have Rachel Carson (1907-1964) to thank. In a lecture included in this new Library of America edition of her work, Carson notes that among the “destructions of beauty” being planned is that of “a small but beautiful woodland area—Rock Creek Park.” There was at the time a proposal “to run a six-lane arterial highway through the heart of that narrow woodland valley.” Sadly, some of the Maryland portion of Rock Creek Park was sacrificed for the Capital Beltway, but the D.C. portion remained unbuilt, leaving only the original winding tourist roads (much to the chagrin of locals who still try to use those roads to commute).

But of course, it is those chirping birds that make me most grateful for the enormous impact Carson’s most famous book, Silent Spring, had in curtailing the massive, indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides, and in helping inspire a backlash that grew into today’s environmental movement. Those pesticides poisoned all kinds of wildlife, including birds. As Sandra Steingraber’s introduction to this edition notes, a blue-ribbon panel in 1992 named Silent Spring “the single most influential book of the past fifty years.” What author doesn’t hope that his or her book might make that kind of a difference in the world?

Silent Spring might not seem at first glance like such a book. 

Much of it consists of fairly detailed analysis of particular examples of pesticide overuse, annotated with sixty pages’ worth of citations from the scientific literature. Yet this is surely part of the book’s appeal. While evidently the work of an informed scientist, the text manifests Carson’s prior experience as a science writer, displaying a gift for intertwining broad findings with particular stories of egregious overuse and a deep appreciation for the beauty and wonder of nature. Serious, informed, yet also passionate, Silent Spring is a model of how to write for the general public about complicated things.

It may be hard for us now to imagine the original context. It was truly the era of better-living-through-chemistry. Readers too young to remember that time may be shocked to learn of the indiscriminate spraying of the 1950s. Take the campaign against the fire ant, an invasive insect in the South. Despite decades of evidence that the ant did little harm to crops, wildlife, and humans, its “eradication” was deemed necessary by the United States Department of Agriculture. Eventually over 20 million acres were sprayed with “relatively new” insecticides. Carson takes several pages to describe the animal deaths that followed. After a couple of years, the USDA severely reduced the program, not least because farmers were increasingly unwilling to sign up for it. Or perhaps it was because the FDA banned any residue of the main insecticide, heptachlor, on food. The ban was based on research already available when the spraying program began.

Carson was not anti-science. Nor was her approach what we would now call “deep ecology.” Instead, it reflected an understanding of humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature that is now enshrined in Catholic teaching. She would have agreed with Pope Benedict when he wrote in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in veritate, that we should always aim to work with, rather than against, creation’s grammar. In her very first pages, Carson notes that she is not saying “there is no insect problem” but only that “control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations.”

Take, for example, her extended study of the Japanese beetle, an invasive pest originally imported to the East Coast of the United States in the 1910s. Carson describes the efforts of Midwestern states in the 1950s to combat this “only…moderately destructive insect” through widespread spraying. The city of Detroit was sprayed with Aldrin because, though a poison, it was the cheapest available product. Residents were told that “the dust is harmless to children and will not hurt plants or pests.” When birds and domestic animals began to die because of the spraying, authorities strenuously denied it. And this was only one among many spraying programs, most of which resulted in “only temporary suppression of the insect.” Carson then explains that communities on the East Coast had controlled the pests for decades by importing a particular wasp predator and introducing targeted bacteria that gave only the beetles “milky spore disease.” Carson never suggests that controlling pests is in itself a bad objective. The crucial question is what sort of control. She consistently favors “natural” or “biological” controls rather than chemical ones. She even has good things to say about prospective genetic manipulations that would render pests sterile over time. Such solutions use knowledge of the natural system itself to achieve their objective, for “the really effective control of insects is that applied by nature, not by man.”

The overuse of pesticides, as described by Carson, also exemplifies the core concept of Pope Francis’s Laudato si’—namely, the technocratic paradigm, according to which we “lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us.” This contrasts with an approach to nature Francis describes as “in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves.” Like Francis, Carson seems convinced that a key reason the technocratic paradigm has been adopted is that it advances the interests of the powerful. She notes the “sales bonanza” for manufacturers that lay behind the fire-ant program. The chemical companies trot out “outstanding entomologists” whose research labs are entirely funded by the industry itself, while research on natural controls is “never so endowed.” As Carson reminds the reader more than once, this heavy-handed approach doesn’t even succeed on its own terms: the bugs quickly evolve to become resistant to the control, leaving an even worse problem. She also warns that the same kind of “resistance” will not be built up by slow-evolving humans, who will be subject year after year to greater and greater quantities of necessarily more potent poisons. After all, she notes forebodingly, new insect populations “arise in a matter of days or weeks,” whereas humans do so “roughly three generations per century.” The point is clear enough: if this is how humans fight insects, it is the humans who will eventually lose.

And surely it is this human peril that ultimately accounts for the large impact of Silent Spring. As Carson notes in a letter written while she was preparing the book, “it has always been my intention to give principal emphasis to the menace to human health, even though setting this within the general framework of disturbances of the basic ecology of all living things.” This Carson does slowly but effectively, waiting until later chapters to talk about the dangers of “innumerable small-scale exposures” that lead to “progressive buildup...and so to cumulative poisoning.” Knowing she will have to overcome the counterclaims of people who say they are “fine” even after using sprays in their gardens for years, she explains in great detail how cellular mutations caused by toxic chemicals generate cancers and long-term genetic damage. She reports that “mosquitoes exposed to DDT for several generations” became “strange creatures called gynandromorphs—part male and part female.” She never goes beyond the evidence, but simply asks whether “filling the environment with chemicals that have the power to strike directly at the chromosomes” is “too high a price to pay for a spoutless potato or a mosquitoless patio?” She pleads that we must simply “reduce the threat.” The analogy with our own ongoing, potentially catastrophic experiment with the earth’s atmosphere will be clear to any alert reader.

Like Laudato si’, Carson’s work also calls us beyond fear to a deeper appreciation for the beauty of natural systems. The Library of America edition helps us see this by including, along with Silent Spring, several shorter works by Carson. In one, she describes how her interest in the sea—the subject of her earlier books—first developed:

I had my first prolonged contact with the sea at Woods Hole. I never tired of watching the tidal currents pouring through the Hole—that wonderful place of whirlpools and eddies and swiftly racing water. I loved to watch the waves breaking at Nobska Point after a storm…. My first impressions of the ocean were sensory and emotional, and the intellectual response came later.

She goes on to write, “I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.” This foundation of delight and wonder is especially evident in her letters, which chronicle days spent introducing the natural world to her young great-nephew and adopted son, Roger.

Where are we today? In one sense, rereading Carson’s book can give one hope. In the United States and around the world, the sort of indiscriminate use of pesticides she describes is now forbidden, and many of the worst chemicals she decries are no longer in use. The very existence of environmental regulatory agencies owes a great deal to her work. And the “Neanderthal science” she laments, which rejects any concern for ecological balance, is at least no longer the dominant paradigm. Finally, Carson’s impact as a woman scientist, faced with much blatantly sexist blowback, should remind us that even in a discriminatory social structure, a well-argued case can prevail.

Yet the book also inspires some less cheerful reflections. To begin with, its appeal depends on its readers having some active ties to the natural world. The “artificial” form of life she criticizes is opposed in her narratives by birders, household gardeners, and other ordinary observers of the natural world. These concerned citizens, often gathered in socially established associations, set off nonpartisan public alarms and provide Carson with many striking details. One can’t help doubting whether, a few generations later, the basic tie to nature embodied in these groups is still as strong as it was then.

Then too, the factual, straightforward, non-hyperbolic tone of the book will remind readers of a time when public discourse was better than it is now. Carson is not above appealing to her readers’ emotions with wrenching descriptions of birds slowly dying of poisoning. Yet pages and pages of the book methodically rehearse the basic scientific facts, and the overall tone is one not of outrage but of earnest concern. It sometimes seems today as though people believe that the only way you can write a book that “makes a difference” is through a dramatic, often angry depiction of heroes and villains. That was clearly not true in 1962.

Finally, one wonders if comparably egregious examples of the technocratic paradigm could galvanize such an immediate response in today’s fragmented and highly polarized media environment. It’s true that one of the difficulties with slow-emerging, large-scale environmental problems like climate change is the difficulty of identifying immediate impacts. Carson did not have that problem: her resonant example of a silent spring in the wake of a massive die-off of birds was no doubt one reason there was an instant response to her general argument. But such die-offs are hardly the only example of technocratic thinking. Arguably, the most alarming example today is the rapid and total penetration of smartphone technology, especially in the lives of the young. Despite well-documented studies of the neurological (Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows) and sociological (Jean Twenge’s iGen) impacts of the technology, little has been done to curb its overuse.

Indeed, in the church itself, Laudato si’, (Care for Our Common Home), although much celebrated upon its release, now seems to be overshadowed by a number of other dramas surrounding this pontificate. Francis’s criticism of the technocratic way of thinking and his call for radical lifestyle changes don’t seem to have had much effect on Catholics, let alone the wider world. On the political front, the pope’s insistence on the necessity of global solutions to a global problem hasn’t led American Catholics to pressure the Republican party to reconsider its opposition to international limits on carbon emissions. Nor has Laudato si’ succeeded in getting most Catholics to view protection of the natural world as an essential part of practicing their faith. Whenever I teach Laudato si’ to college students, parishioners, or seminarians, someone objects that bringing up “the environment” will immediately be perceived as political. Yes, there are policy implications to Francis’s work. But first one must recognize that it is just as appropriate—and today just as necessary—for a pope to write about the natural ecology of a world created and redeemed by God as it is for him to write about the human ecology of marriage.

Here is a final lesson of Carson’s book for Catholics. She asks questions that call on her reader’s deepest moral intuitions. Recording the painful details of how a meadowlark dies, she concludes, “By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?” Elsewhere, she points out the undemocratic nature of these decisions by asking: “Who has decided—who has the right to decide—for the countless legions of people who were not consulted…?” Such questions unmask the technocratic paradigm not by proposing some exotic alternative but simply by noting how unseen powers impose a way of life that results in the destruction of natural habitats, including ours. 

Carson made people realize that this was not what they wanted; policy changes followed from this deeper recognition. Similarly, in Laudato si’, Pope Francis starts by celebrating the beauty of creation before denouncing the “throwaway culture” that endangers it—a culture that encourages us to reject God, our vulnerable neighbors, and all of creation for our own convenience. Who among us is not diminished by that? And who among us really wants that?

* Deep-ecology: An ecological and environmental philosophy promoting the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, plus a restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with such ideas. Wikipedia

Silent SpringAnd Other Writings on the Environment
Rachel Carson
Evidence of the widespread misuse of organic chemical pesticides government and industry after World War II prompted Carson to reluctantly speak out not just about the immediate threat to humans and non-human nature from unwitting chemical exposure, but also to question government and private science's assumption that human domination of nature was the correct course for the future