I think it only fair to give an example of a sentence that is truly Catholic. And I am going to turn to a real expert on the subject, Walker Percy. He was a Catholic who knew what the Catholic faith is. He was a novelist who knew what words are all about.
The Catholic imagination the imagination that allowed Shakespeare to sprinkle his plays with references to Catholic religious beliefs and practices in meaningful ways also helped to create the fictive worlds of Denmark, Rome, Verona, Venice, and Illyria. The imagination that made him Catholic also helped make him the greatest writer in the English-speaking world.
The Oxford Movement began in 1833 under the leadership of John Keble, E.B.Pusey and John Henry Newman. Another movement which began in Oxford a century later and which has given us shelves of great books is that of The Inklings.
In an age of skepticism, cynicism, and false freedoms, Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) was a passionate and occasionally scathing voice of reason. Like her friends C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Williams, Sayers was a brilliant Christian thinker, an Anglo-Catholic who took doctrine seriously and bristled at the growth of fads, schisms, heresies, and anti-Christ within the Church of England.
Fairy tale and modern fantasy stories project fantastic other worlds; but they also pay close attention to real moral "laws" of character and virtue. By portraying wonderful and frightening worlds in which ugly beasts are transformed into princes and evil persons are turned to stones and good persons back to flesh, fairy tales remind us of moral truths whose ultimate claims to normativity and permanence we would not think of questioning.
The moral education of children must engage the heart as well as the mind.
I was first introduced to the writing of Walker Percy (1916-1990) several years ago and have been hooked ever since. The Moviegoer was the first book by Percy I read. It was also his first novel, the winner of the National Book Award in 1961.
The big worry was that this would be some kind of Hollywood parody of 'The Lord of the Rings.' I have no idea if any of the artists involved in this project are Christians. I have no idea what their point of view is, in terms of faith. But it must have made sense, just from an artistic point of view, to leave much of the spiritual element intact. After all, that is what gives the book its depth and power.
In The Lord of the Rings, I believe Tolkien does exactly what he said he was doing, communicating a religious, Catholic vision through a Secondary World.
