Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. This legend has it that St. Francis converted a wolf. I don’t know whether he actually converted this wolf or whether the wolf’s character didn’t just greatly improve after he met St. Francis. Anyway, he calmed down a good deal. But the moral of this story, for me at least, is that the wolf, in spite of his improved character, always remained a wolf. So it is—or ought to be—with the Catholic, or let us just say with the thoroughly Christianized novelist. No matter how much his character may be improved by the Church, if he is a novelist, he has to remain true to his nature as one. The Church should make the novelist a better novelist. I say should, because unfortunately this doesn’t always happen. The Catholic novelist frequently becomes so entranced with his Christian state that he forgets his nature as a fiction writer. This is all right, this is fine, if he stops writing fiction, but most of the time he doesn’t stop writing it, and he makes the same kind of spectacle of himself that the wolf would have made if, after his meeting with St.
