Henry Morton Robinson’s Horatio-Alger tale of a Boston boy’s rise from parish curate to prince of the Roman Catholic Church was the best-selling book of 1950, became the fourth best-selling book of 1951, and eventually sold more than 1.3 million copies in various editions.
Henry Morton Robinson is best known as the coauthor, with Joseph Campbell (later famous for his work on myth), of A Skeleton Key to “Finnegans Wake” (1944), an explication of James Joyce’s densely allusive masterpiece. Robinson served as an common seaman in World War I and then attended Columbia University, serving there as a professor of literature from 1924 to 1927. In 1932 he became a roving editor for Reader’s Digest. He wrote nonfiction books on subjects ranging from Hernán Cortés to forensic science. After he published his first novel, The Perfect Round (1945), he decided to become a full-time novelist. He worked for three years on his third and most famous novel, The Cardinal, which was initially published in serial form in Cosmopolitan magazine.
The Cardinal is a historical bildungsroman that covers the years from 1915 to 1939, tracing the rise of its protagonist from a young parish priest to a “prince of the Church.” The story draws on Robinson’s own family experience in a working-class Irish family in Boston on the wrong side of Beacon Hill, and the character of his protagonist, Stephen Fermoyle, is a composite of various priests Robinson knew, combined with some aspects of more famous real-life prelates. The novel became a best seller of 1950.
The subject matter of The Cardinal assured at least its notoriety. Catholic priests have always been an object of fascination in American popular culture, initially as positive figures. Two of the first sixteen Academy Awards
Several of the novel’s reviewers noted that The Cardinal followed a trend of many historical novels about the recent past in its mixing of real and fictional characters, referring to Upton Sinclair’s
Nevertheless, the novel does not shy away from controversial issues, such as therapeutic abortions, race relations, and clerical celibacy. Perhaps because of these issues, Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, commissioned a study by Audience Research, pollster George Gallup’s organization, to gauge the appeal the novel would have for various audiences. The result showed that Catholics were more likely to finish the book than non-Catholics, and 67 percent of Catholics said they enjoyed it more than other novels they had read, while only 30 percent of non-Catholics did. Gallup himself wrote to assure Simon & Schuster that in the light of favorable polling results, the Catholic Church should support the novel. Another factor in the book’s success, which Audience Research admitted it could not calculate, was the novel’s simultaneous release in a paper-covered edition costing $1.00 (as opposed to the clothbound edition’s price of $3.50). Around 70 percent of its purchasers chose the cheaper edition.
Also interesting are the subjects not covered. While nuns are prominent characters in the book—Fermoyle’s sister is a contemplative, and Lalage Menton a nursing sister—the chief role of the nun in actual American life, that of educator, is passed over, as is the contentious subject of religious education. Also, in view of later priestly scandals, Robinson’s characterization of sacristan/verger Lew Day is significant. Day has been rejected for the priesthood because of his “nervous system,” but his “almost hysterical rubbing of the candlestick” affords a clue as to the sexual nature of his condition. On the whole, Fermoyle’s opinions on controversial subjects such as evolution and psychoanalysis are fair and moderate. Even the explanation by Fermoyle’s confessor of Fermoyle’s sin of pride is quasi-Freudian. Fermoyle reasonably defends the use of Latin in the Mass, not as a means to mystify the laity but as a symbol of the rite’s universality in space and over time. He also attacks the idea that salvation is granted exclusively to Catholics.
Even before the novel’s publication, Robinson and his publisher were interested in selling its film rights for the maximum amount. The rights were initially sold to Columbia Pictures and producer Louis de Rochement.
At the end of the 1940’s, religious subjects became increasingly popular in American culture. The best sellers of 1949 included books on religious topics by Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Fulton Oursler, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Robinson maintained that The Cardinal was not written to profit from this popularity, but rather as an expression of it. However, several other forces seemed to be at work in Robinson’s writing of the novel.
The Cardinal is an explanation for both Catholics and non-Catholics alike of those aspects of Catholicism, such as priestly celibacy, that mystified observers. Some reviews went so far as to label it as a piece of “propaganda.” Also, several reviewers—and one respondent in Audience Research’s report—deduced that The Cardinal was a response to Paul Blanshard’s 1949 book attacking the growing influence of the church, American Freedom and Catholic Power. Fermoyle continually asserts that Catholics can be as patriotic as members of any other religious denomination (despite Pope Pius IX’s denunciation of the American Bill of Rights as a symptom of the modernism he saw infecting the world). Through the first half of the twentieth century, Catholics formed the largest and fastest-growing religious denomination in the United States, and while Catholics often established parallel organizations of various social groups for their co-religionists, they also were at pains to proclaim vociferously their nationalistic loyalty.
Ironically, though, The Cardinal appeared at the apex of Catholicism’s triumphalism in the United States. Factors such as the spread of higher education and increasing suburbanization weakened the hold and power of local parish priests over their flocks, even before the effects of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council could be felt. The election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency was significant not because Kennedy was a Catholic but because he was a thoroughly secularized Catholic. Outside its explanations of arcana, The Cardinal, in a sense, preached to the converted. As the number of American Catholics doubled from 1940 to 1960, many of the Church’s stances—its fervent anticommunism, its advocacy of nonviolence in labor unions—became mainstream American ideals, as was proved by the popularity of Bishop Sheen’s television show. Stephen Fermoyle’s rise was not only Catholic; it was quintessentially American.
-
Morris, Charles R. American Catholic. New York: Times Books, 1997. A generally fair and judicious portrait of the Catholic Church in America in the eras before, during, and after the time span The Cardinal covers. -
Robinson, Henry Morton. “Why I Wrote The Cardinal.” Cosmopolitan, June, 1950, pp. 88-90. Robinson’s declaration that his main motivation in writing his novel was to communicate the difficulties and rewards of a priest’s vocation. -
Tobin, Greg. Saints and Sinners: The American Catholic Experience Through Stories, Memoirs, Essays, and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Contains an excerpt from book 1 of The Cardinal, “The Curate,” in a section titled “Faith and Fantasy: A Catholic Imagination.” Helps to place Robinson in context with other post-World War II Catholic writers.
Mother Cabrini Becomes the First U.S. Citizen Canonized as a Saint
Merton Publishes His Spiritual Autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain
Pius XII Proclaims the Doctrine of the Assumption
Day Publishes Her Autobiography, The Long Loneliness
Sheen Entertains and Instructs on American Television
Pope John XXIII Issues Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris
Second Vatican Council Meets
Hochhuth Stages a Critique of Pope Pius XII’s Silence During the Holocaust
Roman Catholic Church Reaffirms Its Position Against Birth Control