Can literature help form seminarians into better priests?

"Reading good literature can make us more pastoral, because we can understand the human condition better.”

Reading literature may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of priestly formation.

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Theological and philosophical studies, community life, spiritual direction, and social work may be more prominent in most people’s minds.

However, Pope Francis himself seems to believe that true leisure through good literature should be a core part of priestly formation and, in fact, of all Catholic formation.

Last month, the Holy Father published a letter “On the Role of Literature in Formation” in which he addresses “the value of reading novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity” as reading “[enrichens us] by what we receive from the author and this allows us in turn to grow inwardly, so that each new work we read will renew and expand our worldview.”

The letter did not receive much attention compared to other papal documents. But some seminary formators and Catholic academics believe it could become a significant contribution to priestly formation and Catholic education.

‘A pleasant surprise’

Deacon Harrison Garlick, chancellor of the diocese of Tulsa, is a big believer in the formative power of literature.

In addition to his role as chancellor, Garlick also works in the diocesan diaconate formation program, and hosts “Ascend: The Great Books Podcast.”

“In most diaconate programs, the men are coming, they have one year of mentorship and then four years of formation, which is what you would typically expect. They go through theology classes, they're learning about the liturgy. However, our diocese, in addition to that, also has a four-year Great Books sequence that is part of the overall program and runs at the same time,” he told The Pillar.

“We've always had conversations about the value added of these types of things for the formation of clerics. They need to read a lot of things and we have a short period of time to form them, so is this really worth our time? But I think the Holy Father's document was a resounding yes to the fact that this literature is worth our time.”

Garlick said the pope’s recent letter was “a pleasant surprise.”

“I joked inside here at the Chancery that our diaconate program went from being a weird outlier that has the Great Books to all of a sudden overnight being the one that's actually in compliance with what the Holy Father wanted,” he said.

Garlick believes that a Great Books program in clergy formation can strengthen other areas of clergy formation.

This is because, he said, good literature communicates perennial truths about the human condition – truths which transcend time and space.

“That’s where you really awaken wonder in people; I’ve seen in our Great Books course that people start off reading the Illiad and they’re like, ‘What are we doing? Why am I reading this?’ but once they get into the characters, they understand Hector, they understand Achilles, they understand Agamemnon. They start being drawn into the story. I think this is where the Holy Father is trying to show us that literature expands our emotional capacity,” he said.

“[American philosopher and academic] Alan Bloom said in the ‘90s that his students had flat souls. They couldn't understand poetry, they couldn't understand eros in the best sense of that word because they had just been habituated to screens. Struggling with something that you’re unpacking the beauty of helps expand your own emotional capacity because you start having empathy for these characters,” he added.

Literature and the emotional life

Concern about screens is a significant point raised in the pope’s letter. The Holy Father observes that the modern era is one of instant gratification and thin emotionality, due to the omnipresence of social media, mass media, and screens.

Pope Francis quotes T.S. Eliot approvingly in seeing “today’s religious crisis as that of a widespread emotional incapacity (...) it is the inability of so many of our contemporaries to be profoundly moved in the face of God, his creation and other human beings.”

“The thing that struck me most about it was the seriousness of the claim: That our media environments mean that we don't develop emotionally in the same way; we have intense emotions, but they're thin emotions,” said Zena Hitz, a tutor at Saint John’s College in Annapolis and the foundress of the Catherine Project, an organization offering Great Books tutorials at no cost.

She told The Pillar that she believes good literature can help develop a thin and superficial emotional life into one that is more mature and robust.

“As the pope says in section 13 of the letter, literature is a way of encountering the depths of the human heart and then seeing and feeling the need for salvation. And I just thought it was dead on,” she added.

“Literature opens you to a more complex emotional registry that you might encounter in your media consumption and in your ordinary, middle-class, everyday life,” Hitz explained.

“In literature, you see people make terrible mistakes and you see it from the inside. You see what it's like to be them, and you see that you could have done it. Literature trains humility and compassion and broadens human experience. I think people who read a lot of literature can really use it in a way to live more deeply, feel more deeply, and connect with others,” she continued.

“Raskolnikov is a murderer. And through Crime and Punishment, not only do you see how he might've done that, you see how he might become a saint and he might become a saint through being a murderer, which is really mind-blowing.”

Hitz believes that the act of reading can help enlighten readers to realities they would otherwise not encounter.

“Dorothy Day describes reading some radical leftist novels of the early 20th century as something that launched her onto her vocation. She came from a middle-class background and reading about poverty made her want to see it and understand it for herself. So, actually, what happens is a bit of the opposite of what you'd expect, which is that reading keeps you from reality,” she said.

Father Damian Ference, the vicar for evangelization and secretary of parish life in the diocese of Cleveland, agreed.

“Someone like me, who entered the seminary right out of high school and then was ordained a deacon at 26 and a priest at 27, there's a lot of experiences that I haven't had,” he said.

“I've never been married. I don’t have my own children. I only know what heartache is like to a certain degree, but to get into the minds and the hearts of characters and have a deeper appreciation and a better understanding of the human condition, which God entered into with his very life to save and redeem.”

Ference, who is a specialist on Flannery O’Connor, believes good literature can help incarnate the Church’s doctrinal and moral teachings.

“Your heart can be moved by a profound experience, not just the teaching, which is certainly true, but when that teaching becomes embodied and incarnated, it is much harder to reject it. And it's actually much easier to be won over by it in its beauty and in the flesh. This is why God took on flesh to show us, in our humanity, and especially in the crib of Bethlehem, and then on the cross of Calvary. And it's much easier to be won over by that, I think,” he said.

Ference says he thinks inspiring students to read can help combat excessive use of social media, screens, and sensationalist news that cause so many problems to begin with.

“Many seminaries have reacted to the obsession with screens and with toxic, superficial and violent fake news by devoting time and attention to literature. In our seminary we don't allow laptops or screens in the classroom. We want our seminarians reading out of primary texts and learning how to read a book and underline it,” he said.

“Our propedeutic seminary enforces a technology fast six days a week for our guys. They only get to jump on email and social media for a while on Sundays. Most of our seminarians are digital natives, and they've always known phones. My generation did not, so it’s a little easier for me to take fasts from my phone, but that’s not the case for them.”

Forming a pastoral heart

Pope Francis says in his letter that he hopes literature can make priests and all people involved in ministry better pastors.

“Literature can greatly stimulate the free and humble exercise of our use of reason, a fruitful recognition of the variety of human languages, a broadening of our human sensibilities, and finally, a great spiritual openness to hearing the Voice that speaks through many voices,” the Holy Father says.

Dale Ahlquist, president of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton and one of the founders of the Chesterton Schools Network, said good literature makes readers more human.

“The pope is telling priests they have to study more than theology, they have to be more well-rounded, and be in touch with the humanities and literature,” Ahlquist told The Pillar.

“We live in a world where people have just become too specialized and too narrow, and they don't have a complete education, and, consequently, they're not complete thinkers,” he said.

“Because of our education system, it's not surprising that even priests have become too narrow in their studies and haven't gotten a full, balanced education to expose them to more than just theology,” he added.

Ahlquist stressed that the Great Books communicate universal themes that speak to the human reality across various times, places, and cultures.

“Literature is a retelling, in our own words, of the story of salvation in one little chapter, one little episode, one snapshot of what's going on in our march towards heaven, or in some cases, the people who are trying to flee the other direction,” he said.

“Chesterton himself says that we study the Iliad because all of life is a battle. We study the Odyssey because all of life is a journey. And he says we read the Book of Job because all of life is a riddle.”

“This is eternal literature,” Ahlquist continued. “These dilemmas do not go away. The lessons are always new, even though it's a brand-new generation opening up the book, they are excited by it because those lessons are new and there's a universal moral basis to it. Even though the pagan gods seem to be an immoral bunch, the pagan heroes are struggling with big universal moral questions. So, even if a work is so out of touch with God, it sometimes is eloquent in its longing for God.”

Because of these formative aspects of literature, Ahlquist argues that the Great Books can be a powerful complement to good theology.

“Arts always appeal to the emotion before they appeal to the intellect. We can discuss a work of art for a long time after we've already had the emotional impact of encountering it. The intellect will follow, but the way the artist gets us is through our senses, whereas studying theology is primarily an intellectual experience, which is the reason behind balancing between reading fiction and literature, as the intellectual follows the emotional,” he said.

For Garlick, the way in which literature can makes pastors more empathetic was the main takeaway from the pope’s letter.

“Pope Francis has stressed to the Church, particularly to clerics, the need to be more pastoral. And his main point here seems to be that reading good literature can make us more pastoral, because we can understand the human condition better,” he said.

“I'm not actually that different from someone like Hector when I read his struggles in the Iliad. I see the human condition there.”

“Great literature is usually about running toward God or away from God, and most of us have been there at some time,” added Fr. Ference. 

“Flannery O'Connor would say that sin has a strange way of returning us to God. I think good literature can show that. O'Connor says that in all of her stories grace is offered. It's not always accepted. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes we're not sure if it was or if it was not. Fiction helps us consider this issue in a way that simply reading pure theology may not.”

Reading Scripture more deeply

Hitz said she believes another benefit of reading literature is the ability to read Scripture in a more literary manner.

“We tend to view the stories in the Hebrew Bible very moralistically, and we think a theological approach to them has to involve somehow handling the fact that Abraham has told a lie or Jacob seems to be a cheat, or that David commits adultery,” she said.

“Yes, that's part of the story. But if a person has read a lot of literature and reads these stories or these passages, they’d be much more inclined to see that these are living human beings who have a certain role in the history of their families and the history of Israel and judgment is just not a particularly interesting approach and it's not morally instructive. We all know that lying is wrong, but who Abraham is, what kind of person he is, and the kinds of choices he faces, that's a much richer source of wisdom than judgement,” she added.

Garlick believes that reading classical literature habituates readers to dealing with layered texts.

“I tell the guys in our cohort that reading Homer will make you a better reader of Scripture. Reading Plato will make you a better reader of Scripture,” he said.

“I think we have to understand that on a surface level, it simply habituates us to reading ancient texts, reading texts that have multiple layers, and having the patience to work through them, particularly in an age that's so obsessed with instant gratification.”

Garlick also believes that the ancient classics inform the patristic interpretation of Scripture.

“It's really helpful to read a lot of the pagans that came before the Gospels and then read the early Church Fathers that came after them to really see our Lord's words in the kind of flow of this intellectual tradition,” he said.

“Before John could use the Logos in the opening of his Gospel, we had to have a few centuries of the Greeks wrestling with what the Logos is. And that fact only makes the Gospel richer. It doesn't take away from it.”

Garlick also believes that literature can build better preachers.

“Many clerics struggle with preaching because they're bad writers, and they're bad writers because they don't read anything good,” he said.

“We tend to mimic things. So, if you read the Great Books, you come to appreciate the depth in Homer or in Plato. Then, when you sit down to write something yourself, it tends to be an outpouring of what you've been putting in.”

Ahlquist believes that reading literature makes better storytellers. While homilies are not just about telling stories, he noted that stories played a prominent role in Jesus’ preaching.

“Jesus himself tells parables, right? He tells stories, and that's how he captures people's imagination. People came to listen to his stories. So, it’s not like you have to quote the Classics or García Márquez in your talk or in your homily, but there's always a good story there that we can tell to the uneducated or the unread listener,” he said.

“The more we read, the better we communicate, and we invite other people to elevate their communication as well.”

Ahlquist hopes the pope’s letter is taken seriously in seminary formation and Catholic education.

“The lesson from the letter is very simple: read more literature. You can’t argue with that. Let's not be so narrow. Let's enlarge our artistic knowledge and experience,” he said.

“It will make better pastors, better teachers, and more complete thinkers. We have the ability to really give the universality of the Church to our students, to our congregations by just exposing them to as much as possible in the context of the eternal truths of the Catholic Church. It is a very simple message that comes from this, and I would say, uncontroversial for once,” he added with a smile.