Our Father's House

Edited by Mariella Gable, O.S.B. “Catholic” fiction is notoriously difficult to describe, let alone define. In Our Father’s House, Mariella Gable, O.S.B., presents twenty-eight stories that can properly be called “Catholic.” They are Catholic stories “of the center,” stories of saints and sinners alike who are members of the Father’s House, the Church; they are stories from the concentric circles which ring the center—stories whose atmospheres are thickly fragrant with the mystery of Christ and his Church, the prayers and practices and penances; stories which reckon unflinchingly with the problem of evil and the material and formal cooperation of ordinary men and women with that selfsame evil. Fiction is about people—persons. Catholic fiction is about persons dedicated in a special way to the development of full personality. ( Mariella Gable, O.S.B.) The substance of Catholic fiction is a record of “the dramatic conflict, the success and failure, of those who are aware of life as an unbroken obligation to make an appropriate response to value”—and by value is understood that the pearl of great price: the kingdom of heaven itself. With stories by Sean O’Faolain and J. F. Powers, Leo Tolstoy and O. Henry, and Selma Lagerlöf and G. K. Chesterton (among others), Our Father’s House is a richly variegated assembly of twentieth-century fiction that is both Catholic in character and catholic in appeal. * * * Mariella Gable, O.S.B., (1898–1985) was a sister in the Order of St. Benedict and an author and literary critic. Professor of English at the College of St. Benedict from 1928 to 1973, she contributed greatly to the appreciation for and scholarship on Catholic literature, especially with her fiction anthologies (They Are People, Our Father’s House, and Many-Colored Fleece) and her book of critical essays, This Is Catholic Fiction. Paperback: 356pp. ISBN: 978-1685951788