Reading Has Made Many Saints

The Catholic Thing

By Michael Pakaluk
But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, October 10th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing second Synod on Synodality now underway and other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column...
A new problem - new to me, anyway - came to my attention last week. I was corresponding with a college student from another institution who had just converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. It became clear in our exchanges, however, that his conversion had resulted solely from watching videos on YouTube. Not from friendships, not through "reading himself" into Catholicism, but by watching videos.
I thought to myself, This is interesting. He hasn't read any books. His Catholicism is a product of our new visual age. . . .But why do we care about books anyway?
It's a concern to me - though not a very big concern - that there used to be a good credentialing system, which went along with books. If you picked up a Doubleday Image book in the 1950s you could be sure that you had a pretty good Catholic book in your hands. Then, too, it used to matter if a book had a bishop's imprimatur and nihil obstat. Today, anyone with a smartphone can post videos on the internet.
It's been a long time since the credentialing of books has been reliable. Our gatekeepers have generally failed. I'm fine if, in matters of religion, we return to a mainly oral culture, as in New Testament times, when anyone could walk into a town like Corinth and preach whatever he wanted. Such a change shifts responsibility for the purity of Christian truth back to where it belongs, to our bishops, the successors of the Apostles - and maybe then they'll wake up from their synodal slumbers and start doing that job again.
Nevertheless, books have a place, just as the Bible has always had a place, because of the closeness of reading to prayer. Reading can foster interior life, watching videos cannot. Moreover, reading provokes deliberation and considered judgment, while videos incite to distraction. Reading is undeniably rich soil for receiving the seed: videos are shallow soil at best, usually mere rocks by the side of the path, birds hovering nearby.
So then, here's the new problem: What spiritual books do you recommend for a young person who has not read spiritual books, and maybe not even read any books at all? The problem used to be to pick an intelligible sequence of books mapping out a path of conversion. Now the problem is: out of hundreds of good books, which half dozen or so are best to place first in the hands of a genuine neophyte?
They would need to be books that are mother's milk for nurslings, not strong meat for mature Christians. They need to be short. They need to answer to the more serious needs of young persons. They need to open doors and lead somewhere. But they also need to be solid and serious - the straight stuff. We have no reason to think they will be the books that were important for you and me. Perhaps they will not even be explicitly spiritual books but books dealing with prolegomena.
I will tell you my thoughts for such a list; you might compose your own.
The very first book I would recommend is C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. Nothing so elegantly tells a Christian about the kind of world he lives in, and what sort of Christian he must become. The first lecture refutes emotivism, the view of morality that nearly everyone holds today, and argues for the building up of the heart, magnanimity, and manliness. The second shows that insofar as we reject the natural law, we efface ourselves. While the third warns that industrial science with its roots in magic and Faustian bargains will turn against ...