The Christian accepts that much of God’s work goes unseen.

Georges Bernanos, 

The Diary of a Country Priest

by Paul Joseph Prezzia

Literature is sometimes thought of as a treat, as a dessert, as a delicacy. The Diary of a Country Priest, by Georges Bernanos, is instead like a carrot, eaten whole, raw, and unwashed. But as a wise priest says in the book, “Man can’t live on jam.” This book is a book that can be lived on, however hard it is to digest. Healthy digestion is an apt metaphor for reading this book, a book that is grittily earthy and profoundly spiritual at once, a book that may strike one as crude and even crass, but only because it is following one implication of the Incarnation—an idea, in the eyes of the World, crude and crass. The book further helps us to “digest” the modern world as a Catholic, and to experience some foretaste of heaven in the very ugliness and sorrow that makes this world a veil of tears.

It might seem at first to be a devil’s parody of a nice Catholic novel. The children are afflicted with lust. The peasants are envious and worldly. The servant is prideful. A noblewoman who is outwardly pious secretly plots her revenge against God. The Catholic Church in France of this time (the 1930s) is riddled with careerism, worldliness, and complacency. Yet under all the seeming appearances the work of God finds a way to fulfillment through the weak vessel of a country priest.

Just as his circumstances do not appear to be promising soil for holiness, the “country priest” does not seem to be a saint. He is an unattractive man, with little personal charm, from a low background. He relentlessly analyzes his faults, his tendency to sentimentality, his emotional weakness, and his frequent social blunders. The way in which he keeps his diary might at first repel the reader as something neurotic and self-centered. The country priest is a timid soul, terrified by the experience of his dark night. His perceived inability to pray, his emotional weakness, and his ineffectiveness in the care of souls torment him. Yet as the book continues, one detects hints that this man has shares something with Isaiah’s “worm among men,” “one despised and rejected by men,” a “man of sorrows”—a priest whose suffering brings peace to his little flock.

A key to our reading comes by observing the confidante of the protagonist, the Curé de Torcy, a priest in a nearby village. Guiding the country priest through his difficulties and apparent failures, he is always prepared to point out one of the main themes of the book: that service to God is often experienced as mundane, work-a-day, unfulfilling.

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