Over the weekend I shared a tweet about Ernest Hemingway’s Catholicism. Although I’ve long enjoyed his work, the fact that he was Catholic had come as a surprise to me. Reading an article on his life, I came across a statement about his Catholic faith that grabbed my attention:
His observances included habitual prayer, attending Mass, eating fish on Fridays, having Masses said for friends and family, donating thousands of dollars to churches, celebrating saints days, and revisiting important pilgrimage sites and cathedrals.
My tweet on Hemingway’s religiosity has now had nearly 50,000 views and has elicited a whole chain of comments. The majority of them, like my initial reaction, express surprise at learning of the writer’s faith. Others produce some further biographical information regarding Hemingway’s conversion, which came just before his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife. A third category of comments served to denigrate the famed author for claiming to be Catholic, pointing to his frequent womanising, serial divorces and love of violence, all culminating in his suicide by way of a double-barrelled shotgun.
These objections to identifying Hemingway as a Catholic may be justified. Many of his actions were, indeed, immoral. But, then again, if we condemn a self-proclaimed believer because they are are unable to live the standards of the faith perfectly, the Church risks rehashing its historic debates with the Donatists.
These heretics from the fourth to sixth centuries held that clergy, in particular, must be flawless in their lives in order for their ministry to be effective. Their heresy led the Church to establish the common and normative phrase “ex opere operato”, which implies sacraments are valid from the work done in the sacrament, not by virtue of the holiness of the priest. This principle, although established in reference to priests, can apply to the faithful more broadly as it challenges the false premise of the Donatists: that the reality of faith and its fruits is contingent on the morality of individual believers.
Sin is a reality, and so is human nature. Confronting these facts, a familiar modern credo offers an equally erroneous solution. Whereas the Donatists called for us to reject the sin and reject the sinner, moderns ask us to love the sinner and his sin. St Augustine’s rejection of Donatism solves these false dichotomies and establishes the true Christian response: reject the sin, but always love the sinner.
No doubt Hemingway was a difficult character and his escapades cannot elude anyone who engages with his life, however fleetingly. Yet the uncharitable estimations of his faith that I encountered online are, in many ways, a phenomenon just as bizarre as his own tendency to revel in his failings. I could not help but note that most of the critical comments on my Twitter post seemed to come from Hemingway’s American compatriots. There may, therefore, be a cultural explanation for this response.
Hemingway was raised in America, a country which despite having many Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland historically, and Latin America more recently, has never had a dominant Catholic tradition of its own. There, Catholicism has been defined as something imported, and therefore, in the eyes of many, something alien. America has, of course, developed its own Catholic history over the years. Yet the Catholic viewpoint is a marginal one in a country where the dominant Christian character has traditionally been more pietist in its outlook. In the pietist tradition, personal faith is often held to be contingent on moral rectitude. This jars with the cultures of many Latin Catholic countries where a profound, emotional and rather vocal love for the faith is often coupled with an apparently immoral lifestyle, joked about and never entirely hidden – much like Hemingway’s.
Faced with two clashing visions of lived religion, Hemingway seems to have rejected the outlook of his homeland and embraced that of the Latin, largely Catholic, world. Hemingway was seemingly obsessed with Spanish culture, especially in one particularly controversial element of its cultural patrimony: the bullfight. His affection for all things Hispanic also took him to South America, particularly Cuba, where he encountered and befriended Fidel Castro. As a former colony of Spain, the South American continent is replete with Catholic iconography and history. Perhaps it was the more characteristic hot-bloodedness of Latin culture that appealed to him, or perhaps it was precisely their acceptance of human frailty.
Neither viewpoint on morality is perfect, of course. Whilst we should aim for sainthood, we cannot wait to achieve it before calling ourselves Catholic. At the same time, however, we cannot condone any immorality, let alone revel in it as Hemingway sometimes seemed to. I would, however, remind readers of this article, my tweet and Hemingway’s oeuvre of a quote attributed to Winston Churchill, in which the words of that great writer of the northern hemisphere take on a strikingly southern tone: ”The best among us choose not to judge human frailty too harshly.”
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