Book Review: The World, The Flesh and Fr. Smith
It’s rare to find a novel that captures with realism and detail the interior life of a Catholic whose heart and imagination is steeped in Catholicism. More often than not, fiction falls short of capturing the Catholic faith as it really is for those who live it.
Catholics, especially priests and religious, are frequently written as caricatures and their interior lives remain unexplored or overshadowed by stereotypes. In popular storytelling, Catholic characters are regularly mocked and disparaged, or they don’t appear at all. Fictional Catholics remain alien to Catholics in the real world due to shallow, exaggerated or lurid distortions of what your average practicing Catholic priest, religious or lay person is actually experiencing in their daily life.
On the other hand, within the genre of “Christian fiction,” Catholics and Protestant Christians alike are often reduced to corny, simplistic or overzealous characters whose interior experience is idealized beyond the point of being relatable.
However, there are many (shining) exceptions. One of those exceptions is Bruce Marshall’s 1945 novel, The World, The Flesh and Fr. Smith.
Set in provincial Scotland throughout both World Wars, The World, The Flesh and Fr. Smith is a “small-town epic” which tells the story of urban parish priest Fr. Thomas Smith as he wrestles with his humanity and seeks the greatness of sanctity while serving in a quirky, industrial town.
The story follows Fr. Smith as he wrangles with church choir politics and ornery parishioners, accompanies a young prostitute and her husband, welcomes exiled French nuns who are running from the anti-Catholicism of 20th century France, navigates the joy and challenges of friendship with fellow clergyman, confronts the spiritual upheaval of both World Wars, and spends his life devoted to bringing Jesus into the most unlikely corners of the town where he is pastor.
An extended scene from Chapter 1 was the first to endear this book to me. It follows the interior perspective of Fr. Smith as he celebrates the Mass and then a baptism. Fr. Smith is walking up the church aisle during the introductory rite of the Mass, sprinkling his parishioners with holy water. His humanity comes into an entertaining confrontation with the holiness of the Mass.
“Down through the files of the faithful went Father Smith. . . To the three chorus girls with hair like wood shavings Father Smith gave a specific sprinkle because he thought their pale, yellow faces looked so awful, and to Professor Brodie Feguson in the third row because he thought that the metaphysician suffered from intellectual pride.”
As the Mass concludes and Fr. Smith later begins the baptism, his piety and spirited personality becomes evident, while his thoughts bounce between sanctity and human eccentricity.
During the Baptism rite, the author writes “[Fr. Smith’s] thoughts wandered once or twice during the recitation of [the Baptism rite], but they wandered in the right direction, and he knew that the Lord couldn’t really be angry with him, because he was thinking about Baptism and not about his lunch. . . how kind God had been to institute so simple a sacrament. . . but that was just the Almighty’s way of doing things: He sent sanctifying grace down in great splashes so that the silver shining puddles lay about all over the earth for people to tramp through or stoop and drink as their dispositions gave them perception.”
I appreciate how this book captures, with charming specificity, the experience of the Catholic sacramental worldview within a fictional context. As the book moves through several decades of Fr. Smith’s life and his growth in holiness, Catholicism is represented with a refreshing nonchalance that made me feel seen as a Catholic. The World, The Flesh and Fr. Smith honors the Western Catholic imagination by telling a Catholic story with realism and affection.
While the story recounts the life of a priest, the character of Fr. Smith does not alienate the experience of lay people. As both a lay person and a woman, I related to the amusing and sometimes jolting enmeshment of the grandeur of sacramental reality with the foibles and flaws of human nature. I appreciated how the author captured the interior life of a person who had spent their entire life submerged in Catholic symbolism, theology, liturgy and community life. And I related to how Fr. Smith—and various other characters—experience the tension of being awestruck by the beauty of the Lord and His Church, while also wrestling with annoyance and impatience and the odd parts of practicing any religion. To be a Catholic is to participate in a divine comedy and The World, The Flesh and Fr. Smith defends that thesis well.
When I closed this book, I wanted to be holier, just like Fr. Smith. I was also grateful that a Scottish Lieutenant-Colonel named Bruce Marshall decided to honor the Church by writing a novel that is as delightful in its style as it is uplifting to the spirit.
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