Let’s Tell Our Catholic Stories

The telling and retelling of stories is at the heart of our tradition as Catholic Christians. While the Gospels do contain a lot of counsel on how to live a good life, most of the content is the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers. And even the sharing of moral advice is usually presented in the form of parables, which are stories.

In this approach, Christian scripture takes over from Jewish scripture (our Old Testament), which, again, is full of stories. In fact they are such good tales about kings and battles and escapes from pharaohs and whales that they have regularly been the inspiration for secular works of theatre, whether an opera like Verdi’s Nabucco or a musical such as Joseph And His Technicolour Dreamcoat.

As Catholics, we develop this tradition even further with the stories we share of the lives of the saints. One of the most popular features in The Southern Cross magazine is the Saint of the Month — sometimes reconnecting us with old friends, sometimes introducing us to new ones, or filling in gaps about people whom we only half-knew.

It is interesting that we are much more likely to know what the saints did, where they lived, or what obstacles they overcame than to have memorised their pious sayings or studied their theological writings. It is the stories of the saints that most inspire us and, it is hoped, give us confidence that we too can be saints in our own day.

Stories worth hearing

We do not have to wait until someone is declared a saint to share and be inspired by their story. In fact, the process of setting down someone’s story is an important step in the process toward sainthood. Paddy Kearney’s award-winning biography of Archbishop Denis Hurley, Guardian of the Light, will be a very important contribution when, we hope soon, the cause for the archbishop’s canonisation is opened.

Of course, there are also the people in our Catholic world who are unlikely to be saints but whose stories are well worth hearing. Our editor reminded me recently of a wonderful character, Margaret “Molly” Tobin, who died 90 years ago this month.

Molly was a Catholic, born in the US to very poor parents, who intended to marry a rich man but instead married the poor Jim Brown, with whom she had fallen in love. But Jim then made a lot of money in mining and so she spent the rest of her life using his wealth and her contacts as a socialite to support all kinds of causes: votes for women, court reform for juveniles, rebuilding France after World War I and women’s education.

But she is best known for having survived the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912, taking command of the oars on her lifeboat so they could row back and rescue more passengers. This earned her the nickname “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and she became immortalised in musicals and movies. There aren’t many poor Catholic girls who end up being portrayed by Debbie Reynolds and Kathy Bates!

I mention her because her story could have been lost but instead was noticed by writers and so passed on. But how many other stories from our community are we in danger of losing?

An overdue biography

Paddy Kearney did such a great job writing down Archbishop Hurley’s story. Since his own story in the Church and in the Struggle was so interesting, I used to tease him that he should write his own biography. Being immensely modest, he refused to do so, and when I asked him if I could write it his exact words were: “For as long as I am alive, you cannot write my biography.”

So after his death almost four years ago, I started researching his story. I am close to completing a PhD which is based on Paddy’s life and how he exemplified many of the challenges that Vatican II placed before the Church: to work more closely with other Christians, to open up to other faiths, to recognise the role of the laity in the Church, to fight for justice and peace.

Once my PhD is completed (with God’s grace), I hope to turn it into a more readable book since I think his story is one which should continue to inspire new generations of Catholics, facing for themselves the challenge of how to be “Church in the modern world” (to quote the subtitle of the Pastoral Constitution of the Church, Gaudium et Spes).

Such exercises take work, but it is work well worth doing. What’s more, there are so many gaps to fill. While we have the book about Hurley, there is no biography of South Africa’s first cardinal, Owen McCann, or our first black archbishop, Peter Butelezi. There are even more gaps when we consider the many women and men who founded religious institutions: again we do have biographies of Abbot Pfanner from Mariannhill and Mother Rose Niland from the Newcastle Dominicans, but there are so many other stories worth telling. And that doesn’t even begin to list the heroic things done in the struggle by Catholic laymen and women, like Paddy Kearney.

Yet another good reason to support and invest in our Catholic media is to make sure that we have ways of passing on these stories and inspiring future generations. If we lose these media, and we fail to capture these stories, then our sense of Catholic identity just becomes further diminished.

The term theology is usually reserved for books and treatises written by academics. These writings are sometimes hard for ordinary people to absorb. But the stories of people’s lives are also a form of theology — what American writer James McClendon called “biography as theology”. They remind us of what people did, why they did it, and how they used their talents, their situations and their connections to live out God’s call to each one of us to bring good news to the world.

Let’s make sure that we can be inspired by the lives of others — and perhaps one day our own stories will be captured to inspire future generations.

This article was published in the October 2022 issue of The Southern Cross magazine