Toni Morrison, Catholic?

After time off devoted to literature, family and friends, place – Maine, new furniture – how can I not mourn the passing of Toni Morrison? She wrote about everything.

The Catholic press is debating whether she was a Catholic writer. Thursday, Carol Zimmerman, for Catholic News Service in NCR, summarizes:

for those who have sought to label Morrison as a Catholic writer, there has been some ambiguity even though her works often focus on the religious theme of redemption and many of her characters go through spiritual struggles.

In 2015, she told Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” that she did not have a structured form of religion at the time, but she added: “I might be easily seduced to go back to church because I like the controversy as well as the beauty of this particular Pope Francis. He’s very interesting to me.”

I love that she liked the controversy. So do I. And that is more convincing to me than Kaya Oakes’s initial characterization in US Catholic; she labels Morrison “America’s best-known living Catholic writer.” Certainly well-known, as a Nobel prize winner. Oakes goes on to say, however, “Like Morrison, many contemporary female Catholic writers are non-practicing Catholics who still delve into religious themes.” Oakes is the author of of The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Believers, Seekers, and Those in Between (Orbis).  I trust her about where women are today – in an ambiguous relationship with the church.

Nadra Nittle writes in the best of these articles, from America in 2017:

Morrison converted to Catholicism as a child in the 1940s—a time when black churchgoing families still shared African folklore with their children, swapped ghost stories and held on to superstitions. This mash-up of mainstream Christianity and African-American spiritual traditions shaped Morrison in her personal and professional life alike.

Nittle concludes the article, “Still, [Morrison] seems content to practice a religion of her own design. In her religion, as in Christianity, the last do come first. Accordingly, blackness and femaleness are characteristics to revere, not to loathe.” Sometimes the stories she creates makes that response difficult, but it’s a journey through pain to the depth of the human spirit.

I taught The Bluest Eye for years at Temple University, as did my colleague Sonia Sanchez, who talks about it more vividly than I ever could in the recent documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am.” That’s the book I recommend you begin with if you have not read Morrison. All the themes are there: the embodiment of suffering, the destruction that racism causes, the strength of the African-American family. This is the most autobiographical of Morrison’s books, and, maybe because I taught it so often, to me the language is the most poetic.

Maybe that’s because she worked on it for years. Morrison was a single mother with a job as an editor, eventually selecting and publishing other black authors. I don’t want that mentorship lesson lost on us, either. We need each other to create our unique voices, as Morrison did for African-Americans.