As a lifelong Protestant, I wondered: If Catholicism is true, wouldn’t Catholics behave better? What I wasn’t prepared for was the flood of grace waiting to overwhelm my heart in the final pages. They were haunted by their sins, but they didn’t even attempt to hide them under a veneer of respectability. They were bad Catholics, people who could barely hold on to the cultural trappings of their faith. The Catholic characters all seemed to be a mess, with failed marriages and scandalous decisions and addictions they knew were wrong. I had been delighted by its colorful characters and the author Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant humor, but slightly confused about where the story was going or why the book was hailed as a Catholic masterpiece. I was reading “Brideshead Revisited” for my 20th-century novel class. In the spring of 2008 I was a senior in college sitting in the backyard of a little white rental house near campus and I was weeping because an old man in a book had made the sign of the cross.
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