Ernest Hemingway is one of the greatest of American writers and a true giant of twentieth century world literature. His novels, short stories and works of non-fiction have proved so popular and so influential that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955.
A convert to the Catholic faith who had a troubled relationship with the Church, Hemingway held religious beliefs that would inspire his greatest work. Since this is so, we need to understand Hemingway’s Catholic faith if we are to understand his work. Thankfully, a newly published book, Hemingway’s Faith by Mary Claire Kendall (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), helps us to do so. The book is one of Aleteia’s “Big Winter Books for 2025.
Getting to know a complex man
Kendall’s book is a biography, not a work of literary criticism. This is an advantage with respect to the quest to understand the man behind the work. We need to know the author as a person, especially with respect to his deepest held beliefs, if we are to understand his motives and the moral perspective which inspires his writing.
Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the young Hemingway was formed in what Kendall calls “the Protestant heartland.” It was while serving with the American Red Cross Ambulance Corps in Italy in the summer of 1918, in the final months of World War I, that the young man “discovered the richness of Catholicism — with all five senses.”
It was shortly before his 19th birthday. “He bathed in Mary’s love and soaked up the redemptive reality of her son Jesus hanging on that wooden cross, writhing in pain, to his very sinews, the great European cathedrals he visited punctuating this reality…. The experience was transformative.”
On July 8, 1918, a mortar shell exploded a few yards from him, killing one Italian soldier and seriously wounding another. In spite of his own wounds, Hemingway carried the more seriously wounded soldier to safety, receiving the Italian War Merit Cross and the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor for his bravery. More important, this near encounter with death was described by Hemingway as the definitive moment of his conversion to Catholicism.
A miserable sinner clinging to Christ
Although Hemingway’s life was a mess morally, especially in terms of his serial adultery and several unsuccessful marriages, he never abandoned his Catholic beliefs. A miserable sinner he might be, but he wasn’t going to deny the divinity of Christ nor the authority of the Church that Christ founded.
Tragically, as Kendall describes, Hemingway’s final years were marked by a descent into mental illness: “Later, as Hemingway descended into severe mental illness, especially after his plane crashed in Africa in January 1954, when he used his head as a battering ram to escape from the burning plane, he was not the same person.”
On July 2, 1961, a few weeks before his 62nd birthday, he committed suicide, shooting himself in the head. It was a truly tragic end to a truly traumatic life. Kendall quotes Hemingway’s friend, Orson Welles:
“He was sick. He was sick,” said Welles. “But he did talk of suicide…. And he talked to me about it several times in a sort of obsessive way. He was a sick man. He was not well mentally. He’s not to be judged as himself. The Hemingway we are talking about did not choose his death. He might have. But he wasn’t that man.”
Hemingway’s Catholic heart
Even if Hemingway had been in his right mind when he took his own life, and it seems from all the evidence that he wasn’t, it’s not for us to judge the eternal destiny of his soul. And yet we can and should be able to judge the literary merit of his books. In order to do so, we need to know the man.
“Hemingway was a complex man with a simple faith,” Kendall writes. “The hidden crucifixes, untrumpeted visits to cathedrals, and private celebrations of feast days are as much a part of Hemingway as his big game hunting, deep sea fishing, boxing, and bullfighting….”
If we wish to get to grips with the faith of a writer as complex, confused, and confusing as Ernest Hemingway, we must be willing to wrestle with the man and his beliefs. Mary Claire Kendall grapples with Hemingway’s faith and does so commendably. She doesn’t explain him or explain him away, but she does get us closer to his Catholic heart. Those wishing to know the heart of Hemingway will relish this book.
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