There is a curious connection between Graham Greene, one of the most successful Catholic novelists of the 20th century, and St. Thomas the Apostle. At Greene’s reception into the Catholic Church in 1926, when he was only 21 years old, he chose St. Thomas for his confirmation name. The choice of “doubting Thomas” as his personal patron saint would prove to be both apt and prophetic because Greene’s life as a Catholic would be blighted by doubt and skepticism.
More than half a century later, in 1982, he would write wistfully to Malcom Muggeridge, upon hearing of Muggeridge’s conversion, of his “hope that you will make a better Catholic than I have done.”
Ironically, the tension between Greene’s faith and skepticism, and between faith and infidelity, was the creative motive force behind the labyrinthine morality plays which were his novels.
The Heart of the Matter was one of the most controversial, dividing opinion between those who praised its Catholic spirit and those who saw it as immoral. The Jesuit, Father Martindale, considered it “magnificent,” adding that he knew “a hard-headed man to whom this book has given the last necessary stimulus to becoming a Catholic.”
This view was corroborated by another letter which claimed that “one great sinner was so moved by Mr Greene’s last book that he has completely changed his way of life and returned to the practice of the Faith.”
The great Catholic novelist, Evelyn Waugh, went so far as to claim that Scobie, the novel’s sinful protagonist, was a saint. Others disagreed.
“Scobie commits adultery, sacrilege, murder (indirectly), suicide in quick succession,” one correspondent wrote. “In three of these cases he is well aware of what he is doing…. He takes communion in mortal sin because he can’t bear to hurt his wife’s feelings. This isn’t the way a saint behaves.”
This view was echoed in an unfavourable review of the novel by a priest, Father John Murphy. Describing Scobie as “a Catholic with a conscience of the highest sensitivity and insight,” Fr. Murphy then blames Scobie’s “weak will” which had led him “to adultery, sacrilegious Holy Communions, responsibility for a murder” and ultimately to suicide:
“How can you account for the fact that a man commits suicide in order, among other things, to avoid making any more bad Communions? But the answer is obvious: Because he despaired where he should have repented?”
The confusion sown by the novel was not the intention of the novelist himself. In a letter to Evelyn Waugh, Greene insisted that he “did not regard Scobie as a saint, and his offering his damnation up was intended to show how muddled a mind full of good will could become when once ‘off the rails.’”
In the midst of the controversy surrounding The Heart of the Matter, Greene found himself deeply affected by his attendance at a Mass celebrated by Padre Pio in the south of Italy.
He described the experience to his biographer, Norman Sherry: “I can recall the stigmata, the dried blood sticking out. It would dry and then it would bleed again and then dry again. He also had to have his feet padded because they also bled. So the blood dried and then it starts again…. I was as near to him as I am now to you and those hands looked terrible, sort of circular pieces of dried blood.”
Greene told Sherry that he had been invited to meet Padre Pio after the Mass. He refused to do so. “No, I don’t want to,” he had replied. “I don’t want to change my life by meeting a saint.”
He would say something similar in another interview in 1979, 30 years after his encounter with the future saint. “I was so convinced of his powers of goodness that I refused to approach him and speak with him,” he said. “I explained to the friends who had brought me along that I was too afraid that it might upset my entire life.”
Considering that Greene had chosen St. Thomas the Apostle as his personal patron, it is ironic and surely also providential that he should have a close encounter with a saint who bore the stigmata, the visible wounds of the suffering Christ. The difference is that St. Thomas believed when he saw the wounds whereas Graham Greene ran away.
What are we to make of this great novelist, Graham the Doubter, who kept running away from the Faith without ever managing to escape from it?
One thing seems clear. He chose the right saint. Graham Greene was always a doubter. He doubted himself, he doubted others, and he doubted God. The success of his novels lies not in doubt itself, however, but in the ultimate doubt about the doubt. It was this doubt about doubt that kept him clinging despondently, perhaps desperately, to the Catholic faith.
St. Thomas, pray for him.
St. Pio of Pietrelcina, pray for him.
