Catholicism in My Fiction

Back in 2016, I began writing A Song Unheard. The entire inspiration for this story was the existence of the Belgian Refugee Orchestra—a group of top-tier musicians who had to flee their native Belgium when Germany seized their small country, and who fled to the UK for safety. They gathered in Wales and, with the patronage of a particular set of wealthy sisters who repeatedly used art to serve the world, formed an orchestra. My hero, Lukas, was the lead violinist in this orchestra.

Now, writing Christian historical romance as I do, I know Lukas’s faith journey was going to be important. He was, at the start of the book, not practicing the faith he’d been raised in and was instead living the life of a famous playboy. But of course, as the story progressed, he was drawn back to God.

And I had a choice to make. My first inclination, influenced by the fact that I had been raised Methodist and was at the time part of a Sabbath-keeping Baptist denomination, was to have him find his faith in the protestant tradition of Wales, despite knowing that as a Belgian, he would have been culturally Catholic. And to justify this, I told myself, They probably didn’t even have any other options. But I could well envision readers correcting me on this if I just assumed, so I looked it up, thinking to prove myself right.

Instead, I discovered that there was a single Catholic church in Aberystwyth, Wales, that had been very small, before the Belgians arrived. And which thrived with the sudden influx of hundreds of devout Catholics. I learned that the priest at the time made it his personal mission to minister to these displaced refugees, despite the fact that so many in the UK quickly came to resent them. I discovered that this time left such a legacy in this parish that it’s still remembered today, and that priest is still recognized for his mission-focused heart, which led some of those Belgians to remain even after their country regained its freedom.

I discovered a history that I did not want to short-change or ignore. A history I wanted to honor. Because it didn’t matter what my denomination was at the time—what mattered was that these followers of Christ did the work of Christ and drew people back to Christ in a time of crisis. Lukas remained Catholic. And when the heroine, Willa—who had never been anything—also comes to faith, she aligns herself with him. It’s quiet. It’s never even mentioned in that book. But it comes up in The Number of Love.

See, The Number of Love is about Lukas’s little sister, Margot. Margot has always been very devout, and that certainly didn’t change when she moved to London. And, also (obviously) being Belgian, she too would have been Catholic.

Let me pause for a brief history lesson. When the new country lines were being drawn in this part of Europe, they were drawn not based on language or cultural heritage, but on religious affiliation. Belgium was Catholic. The Netherlands was Protestant. This is what DEFINED each country. There are Dutch-speaking and French-speaking parts of Belgium, but what united them was their Catholicism. You were NOT going to find Catholics in the Netherlands, and you weren’t going to find Protestants in Belgium. Period. Even today, Belgium is 98% Catholic (though largely secular).

So Margot had to be Catholic. Not a choice. And this was when I created for myself a rule—I wasn’t going to deal with intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants in my European-set books. It would just introduce too much complication that would distract from the story. So Catholics got to fall in love with other Catholics, and Protestants with other Protestants, LOL. This is just Roseanna’s Simple Rule of Religious Affiliation. My own little cheat.

This is why Drake Elton, the hero of The Number of Love, and his sister, Margot’s best friend Dot, are half-Spanish. So they had an indisputable reason for having been raised Catholic as well in a country that has a Catholic minority population, but which has historically been persecuted for it.

This was the first book I’d written, however, where Catholicism was going to play a key role. For Lukas, his return to faith was personal and was mostly a matter of meeting with his priest, and that was the only mention made, given the demands of the rest of the story. But for Margot, she’d be living her faith out day in and day out, along with all the habits thereof. As would Dot. As would Drake. And this meant details that Methodist-Baptist me simply didn’t know.

So I reached out to my college friend (and fellow writer) Rhonda Ortiz who became Catholic during college and asked if she’d answer some questions for me and do a beta-read of the manuscript to make sure I got things right.

For the first time, I really looked into what it meant to be Catholic. How it impacted one’s daily life. The prayers they would pray, the traditions they would keep. And while some of it seemed incredibly strange to me, other parts were so…beautiful.

In The Number of Love, there’s a particular scene where Dot, who has social anxiety, is praying the rosary before she walks out the door. The ritual of it is described by her brother as putting on her armor to face the day, arming herself to go slay the dragon of her anxiety one more time. I thought I was just being poetic.

But Rhonda said, “You have proven with that one line that you understand the heart of Catholicism.” So often, she went on to say, Protestants outright decry the rituals and memorized prayers as vanity. But they’re not. This, she said, is the whole purpose of them. This is how we equip ourselves to face each day—by going, time and again, to the Lord with the words He gave us, the words so many others have prayed before.

Now, I didn’t even know what the rosary prayers were before writing that scene, and I deliberately chose one that wouldn’t offend my own Protestant ears or those of my readers. (There are specific ones for each day of the week.) I chose ones whose focus are on Jesus (as the majority are) rather than Mary (which a few are).

With Rhonda’s seal of approval, I turned in the manuscript…and wondered if it would fly with Bethany House, which historically has strong ties to the Evangelical worldview. But I was totally delighted when they applauded this aspect of the book.

Then it released. Readers began reading it. And emails began flooding in. Two different kinds.

First, the emails from my Catholic readers, who reached out to ask, “Are you Catholic??? I’m so excited to find a Christian historical book that accurately portrays my faith!”

Then came the others. A long-time reader friend who herself had no issue with the Catholicism in the book, but who had a friend who did. She reached out to ask me about the history of Belgium so she could answer this friend’s objection, and I gave her the statistics.

But of course, that didn’t stop the reviews. The ones that issued “warnings.” “These characters are Catholic. I guess it’s historical, so that’s okay, but they prayed the rosary, so beware.”

And I shook it off with a roll of my eyes. Because, friends, we do not need to warn people that characters are accurate. A book about King David or—even worse—Solomon does not need to say, “Fair warning, guys, they embraced polygamy!” This is history. Trying to impose our own expectations, be they cultural or religious, on them is not only ridiculous, it’s harmful. Not to them, not the characters, not the author…to us.

Because if we can’t see past our own perspective, we never grow. If we can’t accept that people who are different in one way or another can still love the Lord, then we are not truly chasing after the heart of Christ.

It was, in large part, writing The Number of Love that made me start examining the Catholic faith. Which, in turn, many years later, led me to join the Catholic faith. Because while there have been historical failings, that is true of EVERY faith. Every denomination. While there have been moral and instructional failings, that’s also true of every other branch of the church. And more, I discovered that much of what I had been taught about Catholics by Protestants is quite simply false. A lie. Catholics do not believe many of the things I was told they believed. They’re not taught those things. My objections were moot.

But my next several books were about Anglican characters, because that’s what they would have been. British aristocracy? Almost entirely belonged to the Church of England. And I was totally cool with that, because it’s history. My characters in Yesterday’s Tides presented an interesting mash-up though. There were exactly two churches on Ocracoke, both Protestant. So my heroines and their families were Protestant. But I have a character, Grann, from Louisiana who most likely would have been Catholic…so I leaned into that. Made mention of the challenge she faced not only as one of the only Black women on this small Southern island, but the only Catholic. Because that would have shaped her. And the British naval officer who dies in the opening scenes? Real historical figure, and he was really historically Catholic too. The fact that he was given a Protestant burial grieved his family when they learned of it, and eventually a priest came from the mainland to offer the Catholic version. History.

Let’s fast forward. The Collector of Burned Books is set in 1940 France. France at the time, especially Paris, was largely secular…but statistically they were still 98% Catholic. Sure, there were a handful of Protestant churches, most of which were in Paris. But we’re talking 1.5-2% of the population, and most of those were not French. They were English, American, and Scandinavian. So my heroine, Corinne, who was part of the faithful remnant, would have been Catholic.  Which meant that, according to Roseanna’s Simple Rules of Religious Affiliation, my German hero also had to be Catholic.

So I looked up Catholicism in Germany in the years leading up to my story. And do you know what I discovered? That the Catholic pockets of Germany had resisted Hitler longer and more vocally than any other districts. They were so vocally opposed to him that the Catholic churches were all stripped of legal standing, physically stripped of all their goods, including altar pieces and the very chalices and dishes used for Holy Communion, and those physical things were sold off or melted down to support the Nazi war machine—a huge affront to the Church, made very deliberately.

And this fit my hero perfectly. Yet when he’s stationed in Paris, he finds himself at last, after years of persecution, in a place where the Catholic faith is still vibrant, if unpopular among the modern, secular avant garde world. Where he can be himself, get back in touch with his faith. And it was a beautiful thing to explore.

In more research I’ve done for the next books, I’ve been reading a lot about the popular artistic culture of the day, and over and again, I came across stories of these artists and writers and actors and musicians who “had a religious experience, as was becoming trendy at the time, and became devout.” And these experiences? Guys, they were very, very Catholic, LOL. As in, they’d go to visit a church to take in the architecture and have a vision. Or pray a Hail Mary in a desperate situation and hear her voice comforting them. This is history. This is the faith of a people.

In Collector, there’s a scene where someone has been shot, and my character prays a Hail Mary. I knew as I was writing it that this could be very unpopular with some of my readers. But I put it in there, because this is the prayer she would have prayed. Why? Because this prayer ends with a plea for the Holy Mother to pray for us “now and at the hour of our death.”

See, in the Catholic faith, there’s a big emphasis on a good death. On the fact that in our final, weakest moments, we are at our most vulnerable, and the devil, who seeks to steal and kill and destroy, is happy to pounce on us in those moments. To make us doubt. To make us curse God for bringing us here. To make us turn away. But that the prayers of the faithful—our own prayers offered throughout life, the prayers of our loved ones, and the prayers of all the saints who have gone before us—can gird us in those moments. We all know prayer is powerful. This particular request is for those prayers to be offered when we need it most.

So I have Corinne thinking through the prayer that could just be rote. She examines every turn of phrase and applies it to her situation. The first part is entirely direct quotes of Scripture, when the angel is speaking to Mary, and then it follows “blessed art thou among women” with the reason that she is so blessed, and which Elizabeth points out in the next story–“and blessed is the fruit of they womb, JESUS.” All caps there, because it’s added in from what we get in the Scripture, yes, but it’s also the pivot around which the entire prayer turns. The middle, the focal point. The rest is a request for Mary, fulfilling the traditional ancient-world role of Queen Mother, to take our petitions for help before Jesus.

Again, I wasn’t sure what my publisher would say. But again, they appreciated the authenticity, not only of that Hail Mary scene, but of the deliberation Corinne gave when she made the sign of the cross over herself. How seriously she took the words, the signs, the traditions that informed her entire worldview and guided her in life. In her very first scene, she contends with a faithless Frenchman that the cross hasn’t failed us just because evil swarms. Its purpose isn’t just to keep us away from danger—it’s to give us the strength to face it.

Not surprisingly, I’ve again had people reaching out both to thank me for the authentic Catholic faith, and also people who feel the need to warn people about it in their reviews.

And I laugh…and shake my head. Because to my mind, what would need a disclaimer would be if she was not Catholic: “Fair warning, guys, this author felt the need to put a character with modern Evangelical American style faith in a setting where nearly every remaining French-born Christian was Catholic. Be forewarned.” I especially shook my head when one person said, “I’m aware the author is Catholic, but I wish she hadn’t put so much of it in here.”

So if we’re talking “apologize” in its classical sense of explain, then I’m happy to do so. I’m happy to explain why I’ve made the choices I have. Why my French and Belgian and Spanish characters are all Catholic, why my English characters are Anglican, why my upcoming Icelandic characters are Lutheran.

Because I write history, friends. And I strive to keep it as true as I can. I strive to make my historical Christians true to their historical faith, and to honor that faith—the very shoulders we today stand on. Were there exceptions? Yes, and those can be compelling stories. But usually those exceptions demand to be the story. I do not want the focus of my book to be why my character isn’t what everyone else is just to appeal to a group of American readers. I want the focus of my book to be how faithful Christians of all Churches have served God wholeheartedly throughout history, and how He has used them to shape the world.

So I will not “apologize” in the sense of saying “I’m sorry.” Because I’m not. I won’t add disclaimers. I won’t warn you, other than this, right now.

Be forewarned—my characters will be true to their time and place and to the faiths that kept people focused on Christ, no matter what the name of their church. I will continue to explore how He has worked through Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and on and on, throughout history. Because we are ALL part of His church. And He called us to unity, not to finger-pointing and tearing down.

Let’s celebrate the stories of faithful Christians throughout history. And how, in the eyes of God, there is only ONE Church.