In a celebrated interview in the Observer in 1963, Graham Greene was asked if he was happy to be described as a Catholic novelist. His response was this: “No. I am a novelist who happens to be a Catholic.”
The French novelist François Mauriac (1885-1970) had no qualms about being described as a Catholic novelist. The distinction is subtle but important. It was Mauriac’s religious faith which underlay his creative work as a novelist, his concern for truth and also his lifelong fight for justice, as a public intellectual in France.
