Georges Bernanos, Catholic Novelist

Today marks the death of Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), one of the leading Catholic novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Paris, he studied at Jesuit schools, and for a while he thought about becoming a priest. Instead, he studied law and literature at the Sorbonne, after which he became editor of a royalist newspaper. Since 1870 France had been a republic, but royalists wanted to restore the French monarchy. During World War I, he served in the army and was wounded. For nearly ten years after the war, he worked in insurance. In 1926, he published his first novel, Under the Sun of Satan, about a priest’s spiritual crisis. In an interview he said, “I’m not an ‘author.’ Had I been a real one, I never should have waited till I was forty before I published my first book.” His most important work is The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), the story of a young parish priest whose life appears to be a failure. But throughout the book Bernanos denotes the underlying presence of grace. Read it if you haven’t yet! Not the most cheerful, but very powerful and ultimately uplifting.