How hard it is to avoid offending somebody! And however hard you try, people seem less inclined to use goodwill to their advantage, than unconsciously eager to set one goodwill against another. Inconceivable sterility of souls — what is the cause of it? Truly, man is always at immunity with himself — a secret sly kind of hostility. Tares, scattered no matter where, will almost certainly take root. Whereas the smallest seed of good needs more than ordinary good fortune, prodigious luck, not to be stifled.

Parisian author Georges Bernanos published Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest) in 1936. It’s a quiet, at times devotional, novel about a young priest eager to serve his parish while his superiors on all sides tell him to calm down. The scant story consists mainly of a few lengthy conversations and a few more brief scenes, the climax of all of them coming in chapter 5 of 8.  

A fictional diary has a natural dramatic resistance to overcome. It’s a secondhand account from a first-person narrator, so you know it isn’t happening as you are reading and the narrator makes it through to write it down. I found it helpful that the priest acknowledged this by confessing he couldn’t record his conversations exactly as they occurred, which was good because it meant he could write more of what he intended to say than what he spat out at the time. 

The book begins with the unnamed priest describing his parish “like all the rest” and “bored stiff.” In almost every character, we can see a spiritual apathy, which he describes as a “cancerous growth” and “like the fermentation of a Christianity in decay.”  Even his superior preach hope only “by force of habit.” Few of his congregation faithfully attend mass, and some have lifestyles that violate God’s moral laws, but they all believe they are Christians in good standing and should be treated as such. As one holy man put it, the priest of our book shouldn’t disturb them by spurring them to greater faithfulness. If they are bitter, conniving, or perverted, what of it? Why risk a scandal by calling them out? 

But our priest does risk a scandal. As he spurs himself into visiting every house in the parish over a period of one-to-three months, he cannot refrain from saying what needs to be said. At least, I think that’s what we’re told he does. We don’t see much of that, and what he says in the larger recorded conversations doesn’t touch on the gospel (at least not clearly enough). Many good lines about our need for the Divine and the uselessness of life without the Father, but nothing about Christ’s atonement. As a soldier in the book says, the church has defined a secular space for the world and stepped away from it, leaving most people to wait on a curb and wonder what to do. 

Our priest does record his desire to uphold church doctrine through catechizing children and pressing adults in matter of the faith. When someone from the community dies of suspected suicide, he’s the one who raises the question with an elder priest. The response he gets is that God is the only judge and what’s the use of saints if just men can die without some grace to justify them. 

One of the best threads in this book is the priest’s wrestling with prayer, feeling completely worthless half of the time, and coming out of it after arguing about it with someone else. Have monks who spend most of their days in prayer confessed it was a waste of time? No. That communion has sustained them, because the Lord’s grace is tangible sustenance.  

There are a few pages of distinctly Catholic flavor, which I imagine helps push this book into the favorite category for many readers.  

There are no time markings in the narrative, so it’s hard to tell whether even a year passes between these covers. Whatever the amount of time, our priest suffers with a restricted diet for most of it, subsisting on bread and sour wine and painting a bold parallel to Christ. But in the final chapter, he appears to learn a profound lesson in grace from an unlikely source. 

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