Paul Elie

A writer who has linked the lives and themes of four great 20th-century U.S. Catholic writers will speak at the University of Portland this month.

Paul Elie, also an essayist and editor, will lecture on “Catholic Culture in a Critical Age,” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 18, in Buckley Center auditorium.

Elie’s 2004 book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, explores the lives and works of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy.

Elie plans to talk about how O’Connor explored, in her stories and novel, Catholic life and issues in a context of an America that wasn’t very comfortable with Catholicism.

“Flannery O’Connor was asked once whether the fact that she was a Catholic meant that she was less than an artist,” Elie told an interviewer in 2004 when discussing his book. “In other words, she thought the truth was self-evident or was to be found in the catechism or some such, and so she didn’t really have to bother with the art. And, she said, on the contrary: Because people were suspicious of her background and her convictions, she had to be all the more of an artist. And I think that’s true of all four of them. They really outdid themselves in their effort to make work that was of the highest quality.”

The Life You Save May Be Your Own won the Christopher Award, the Catholic Press Association History Prize, and other honors.

Elie “manages to intermix all of their stories through every chapter, an architectural feat that is carried off without seeming labored,” said The New York Times. “The symmetries he finds in their histories feel natural and acutely observed.”

Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Day, the foundress of the Catholic Worker movement and its penny newspaper in New York; O’Connor, a literary prodigy in Georgia; and Percy, a doctor in Louisiana who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. All four came to Catholicism later in life.

For three decades, they exchanged letters, ardently read one another’s books, and grappled with what one of them called a “predicament shared in common.”

Elie attended Fordham University, where he began to engage all four writers. He says he read all of Merton’s books while perched under a gothic window in the Fordham library. He attended Corpus Christi Church near Columbia University, famous for being the place where Thomas Merton was baptized in 1938.
“Really serious books demand that we assimilate them to ourselves,” Elie said in 2004.