Religion, Historical Fiction, and the American Pope

Despite being raised in the Reform Jewish tradition and having taught a rather nontraditional seventh grade Sunday School class for another Reform Jewish congregation, I seem to have a lot of Catholic characters and elements in my books. In fact, my only novel so far that touches on Jewish themes is my one adult novel, Dirt Cheap. That may be changing, as my upper middle grade historical novel in progress features a Jewish protagonist and the boy she meets when she helps him prepare for his one-year-late Bar Mitzvah. Nonetheless, Catholicism appears so much in Gringolandia, Moonwalking, Torch, and Eyes Open that one may assume I am, or once was, Catholic.

Many Jews and Catholics note the connection between these faith traditions in the United States. They share a common emphasis on ritual and law. For those who trace their family’s roots to Mexico and Brazil especially, a disproportionate number of the Spanish and Portuguese settlers were people who fled the Inquisition and hoped that their distance from the Church-aligned monarchy would give them more freedom to practice Judaism in secret. (For too many of them, it did not, as persecution followed them to the New World.)

For me and my novels, though, interest in Catholicism grew out of my historical research and, in the case of Gringolandia, my lived experience of working alongside Chilean refugees from the Pinochet dictatorship. The Catholic Church’s human rights organization Vicariate of Solidarity (Vicaría de la Solidaridad) played a major role in supporting the victims of the dictatorship and their families and the pro-democracy activists who after almost two decades of struggle and sacrifice brought that regime to an end. Daniel and his family aren’t observant Catholics, but the Church plays a role in getting his journalist father released from prison and offers him meaningful work when he returns to Chile after months in exile.

The events of Moonwalking also unfold with the Catholic Church’s human rights efforts in the background. Seventh grader JJ is inspired by the Solidarity movement in Poland, the country where his grandmother and father were born. In its challenge to the Soviet-aligned Communist dictatorship, Solidarity drew much of its reach and power from its connection to the Church and from the first Polish pope, John Paul II, who ascended to the papacy in 1978. Even before JJ’s family has to move in with his grandmother in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 1981, they regularly drove from Long Island to Brooklyn to attend church with her, and by the end of the novel, JJ is the only one accompanying his grandmother to church, his parents having become disillusioned because of the hardships in their lives.

In my YA novels Torch and Eyes Open, teenage characters wrestle with their Catholic faith. For Pavol, as for JJ’s parents, a terrible loss has led him to question his faith. During the liberalization of the Prague Spring, he wore a cross and openly discussed his beliefs with his friends, but when the Soviet Union invades and occupies Czechoslovakia, such displays once again become illegal, his religion practiced only in secret. Then comes the blow that seals his future, the government ordering him to work in the mines that killed his father because Pavol dared protest the invasion.

Sónia’s struggles with her faith from the beginning of Eyes Open to the end, as she writes free verse to decry the constrained life that faces her as a woman growing up under the repressive Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, a place where “our path is straight/ and narrow like an equal sign/ Obedience = eternal salvation.” In this Portuguese society of 1967, the Church serves as an agent of control, to reinforce the hierarchy that the ordinary person is not allowed to question. Even so, Sónia does not give up her faith. She prays for mercy in the face of the cruelty she encounters. She believes that God has given humans free will. Her ability and desire “to think/ to question / to dream” is also God-given.

Addressing religious faith in my novels may appear to be a bold move for someone hoping to get books into schools, where titles that explore faith traditions in greater depth than food and festivals can be interpreted as privileging one religion over another. Historical fiction, though, needs to be true to the time and place. In researching and writing stories about young people growing up during or in the aftermath of tyranny, I’ve been struck by the different roles that the Catholic Church has played in each of these cases, from propping up brutal regimes  to playing key roles in the regimes’ downfall. And one other thing I’ve noted that doesn’t make its way into the books but that I’ve observed in my travels for research: Those places where the Church once worked hand-in-hand with a cruel dictatorship now see low attendance, as well as highly secular policies under democratic governance. Both Spain and Portugal have legalized abortion and same-sex marriage, for instance, and were among the first countries in Europe to implement them. On the other hand, in places where the Church stood up to despots, it has enjoyed far more support and legitimacy under democracy. This is especially evident in Poland, where Pope John Paul II and the country’s courageous priests — some of whom like Father Jerzy Popiełuszko made the ultimate sacrifice — was instrumental in ending Poland’s Communist regime.

This brings me to the third part of this post’s title, the American pope. Pope Leo XIV is American in every sense of the word — born and raised in Chicago and serving for two decades in Peru, in South America, where he is a naturalized citizen. He was a surprising choice, as few thought a cardinal from the United States would ever be elected to the papacy. In the face of rising authoritarianism and official cruelty toward immigrants, the poor, and persons with disabilities in the United States, however, many commentators have compared his election to that of John Paul II in the days of the Iron Curtain and hope that he will offer a strong voice for moral uprising against despotism, greed, and hatred. I am one of those people who holds out that hope.

And one last book recommendation on the role of religion in ending a repressive regime and bringing democracy to the people. There aren’t many of these for YA readers, for reasons I mention above. An outstanding exception is Shari Green’s lyrical verse novel Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams, which portrays the underground Lutheran Church in East Germany under the Communist regime in the late 1980s as a place where protestors found safety, community, and courage. Sixteen-year-old Helena, a gifted musician living in Leipzig, knows that she can only pursue her dream of a classical career if she toes the party line, but she chafes at the restrictions, shortages, and general poverty of a people living under a corrupt, mismanaged regime. After her best friend escapes the country, Helena, too, thinks of getting out, until she attends the protests at St. Nicholas’s Church and meets the boy who becomes her first love. Many of the book’s scenes take place at the church, and Helena, who has not been raised in a religious tradition, experiences the power of faith and its long-standing ties to nonviolent resistance.