"Communion of Saints" (1959)

"We may deny our own family, we may deny our father and our brother. But what we have to understand is that we are even closer than that. We are not just related persons in one family. It is more as if we were parts of one body. We are all of us one person. We are the same person. [. . .] For I must acknowledge that Timothy whose odor is more pungent than the odor of sanctity, is more to me than a natural brother or husband could be. But it is hard to acknowledge it."

Lafferty ended up feeling fairly disaffected with American Catholicism. "Ishmael Into the Barrens"—and a recent online discussion—has me thinking about how the Church appears as a growing, living thing in Lafferty’s fiction, and about how it simultaneously places a check on his explosively centrifugal imagination. The communion of saints is not a theme Lafferty addresses overtly very often in his published work, yet it permeates the many small communities he creates—from the Institute people to his mega people. A nearly transparent instance of what the idea means can be found in his unpublished short story “Communion of Saints.”

There are two main characters in the story: Celestine Carmody, the reluctant leader of the St. Anselm’s Study Club, and Timothy Tompkinson. The story begins with Celestine complaining to her friend Felicity. Celestine does not want to host the study group. She finds the arrangement “simply horrible” and is disgusted by the members assigned to her. One of them she finds especially repellent, Timothy Tompkinson, whom she describes as “a hideous old drunkard, and he is filthy.” What makes it worse is the topic assigned for the meeting: the Communion of Saints. Felicity responds with what becomes the premise of the story: “If you are all of the Communion of Saints, then you have everything in common. You are all of one body.” That includes Timothy. Felicity says she will attend the meeting at Celestine’s house that evening, and she promises to wear “asbestos gloves, and heap hot coals on your head.”

Before the meeting, Lafferty makes clear that this is only one piece of a larger phenomenon. There are many conflicting perspectives, and the other members of the study group have their own anxieties and opinions about the people they have been grouped with.

Sitting in the Plugged Nickel Bar, Tompkinson asks the bartender Nokomis (a recurring character in Lafferty’s Willoughby stories) a question that deepens the story’s premise: “Did you ever question, Nokomis, what the third finger of the right hand must wonder when it looks down and sees on the opposite foot a misshapen second toe by the name of Mrs. Celestine Carmody?”

Elsewhere, Perpetua Phillips, a lawyer with a controversial past, tells her suitor Michael that she would “rather go to Hell for an hour and a half than to [Celestine’s] house.” She even calls Celestine a ghoul who lets nothing stay buried. From what we have seen of Celestine, this seems accurate, since the story begins with her committing the venial sin of detraction.

Meanwhile, two wives, Bess and Patrish, discuss the group’s dynamics over the phone. Their husbands are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, so a clash seems inevitable. Bess says, “If their respective wives don’t tangle, Patrish, then I am wrong also.”

Evening comes, and the twelve members gather at Celestine’s home, joined by Felicity. It is a mismatched set of personalities: Celestine, “a widow of irresponsible tongue”; Timothy, a “talkative and learned lush”; Perpetua and her college-age beau, which causes a stir; a quirky osteopath; four collegians; and two married couples who are politically opposed. Celestine opens the meeting bluntly. She tells Timothy that the windows are open for his sake, seats the rival husbands at “opposite ends of the room,” and warns Perpetua that “if nobody refers to certain things in the past, why then nobody refers to them, and that is better for all.”

Thus the discussion on the Communion of Saints begins. Perpetua quotes St. Paul’s letters to establish the scriptural basis for the Church as one body: “‘The head cannot say to the feet: I have no need of you.’” Timothy interrupts with a plea for alcohol and calls it “a highly moral question,” asking whether the “thirsty members of the body” should forgive the one who denies them the “juice of the body.” Sacred doctrine becomes personal when Patricia Wynne reflects on her relationship to the others. She says that Timothy “is more to me than a natural brother or husband could be. But it is hard to acknowledge it.” Virginia Sue Simon quotes Frank Sheed, the lay theologian: “‘Each of us is more closely related to every other member of the Church by the life of Grace than to our own mother by the life of Nature.’”

Timothy Tompkinson now takes center stage. He outlines the three traditional parts of the Church—Triumphant, Suffering, and Militant—but adds a fourth of his own: the Ecclesia Perdita, the Church Lost and Damned. He argues that even a severed limb is still part of the body. “To hack off a limb and throw it in the fire is to make it no less your limb.” After this, Lafferty writes that “the doctrine of the Communion became clarified among them, and charity began to grow a little.” The story ends from Timothy’s perspective as he reflects on the strange unity of the group. Looking at “Celestine, the Celestial Shrew,” he thinks that she is more closely related to him than his own mother.

This is almost the definition of a minor Lafferty story. There is nothing here of genre interest. What makes it interesting is the messiness of the Catholic Church, which has argued with itself since its founding. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul calls out St. Peter. While Protestants have often focused on recovering a pristine or hidden doctrine from the documents the Catholic Church assembled into the New Testament, Catholics have a long tradition of thinking about the development of sacred doctrine as the deposit of faith. In modern times, the most influential account has undoubtedly been that of John Henry Cardinal Newman and his idea of the development of doctrine. In his 1845 work An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman argued that Christian doctrine does not remain static. Our understanding of it develops and deepens over time. This process, guided by the Holy Spirit, is the Church’s reflection on divine revelation and ensures continuity with the original apostolic faith. Newman held that true developments preserve the essence of revealed truth and protect it from corruption. The last time the Pope spoke infallibly was just such a development. It was the declaration of the Assumption of Mary in November 1950.

This is an endlessly deep topic in the intellectual history of the Church. Catholic thinkers can break hard over Cardinal Newman, who has sometimes been called the father of Vatican II. In July, Pope Leo XIV announced that Newman would be named the Church’s newest Doctor, joining thirty-eight others, including Augustine and Aquinas. Lafferty seems to have admired Newman and did not associate him with Vatican II. Even that, though, is complicated. The issue is not Newman himself, but how certain progressive factions in the Church have used him. Lafferty once referred to Yves Congar—Newman's intellectual son—as something like a pop theologian. So the distinction between Newman as Newman and Newman as an instrument of change mirrors something Lafferty deeply loathed. Some elements in the Church used the documents of Vatican II as ideological tools to promote changes in pastoral practice. This is another way of saying that Lafferty’s issue was not with the Magisterium itself, but with how it was being communicated.

Non-Catholics, and even most Catholics, often have only a vague understanding of how the Magisterium works, so it may be helpful to say a few words about it. Just as the entire Church is the Body of Christ, its teaching authority is centered in the head—in Christ and in his Vicar, the Pope. But there are other levels of Magisterial authority.

This is usually described as operating on three levels. First, there is the extraordinary Magisterium. It includes solemn, infallible teachings, for example, matters defined by the Pope speaking ex cathedra or by ecumenical councils, such as the Assumption of Mary in 1950 or Vatican II, held from 1962 to 1965. The second level is the ordinary and universal Magisterium. This consists of the consistent teaching of bishops around the world, united with the Pope. When they agree on matters of faith and morals, these teachings are also infallible. The third level is the ordinary (non-infallible) Magisterium. It includes regular teachings such as papal encyclicals, pastoral letters, and homilies. These require respectful assent from the faithful, even though they are not declared infallible. Taken together, these three levels ensure the faithful transmission and interpretation of divine revelation across history.

"Communion of Saints" is an amusing illustration of abstract theological principles related to doctrinal development and the Church as a living organism in history. The Communion of Saints is the spiritual union of all members of the Church (past, present, and future) who share in the life of Christ. It includes the faithful on earth, such as Celestine and Timothy (the Church Militant), the souls in purgatory (the Church Suffering), and the saints in heaven (the Church Triumphant). Together, these form the mystical body. Lafferty’s story dramatizes how messy and often uncomfortable this union can be.

The St. Anselm’s Study Club is clearly a microcosm of the Church Militant. It includes members who seem utterly incompatible: a snob, a drunkard, political rivals, and people with difficult pasts. Celestine Carmody’s complaint that “we have nothing in common at all” is met with Felicity’s reply, which affirms doctrinal truth: “If you are all of the Communion of Saints, then you have everything in common.” This is an organic unity, but not a gentle or easy one. It is bound to the past and cannot undo what has come before in the development of doctrine. That is one reason why matters such as the Church’s magisterial authority on procreation create difficult and sometimes painful connections. Every finger is forced to recognize its kinship with every misshapen second toe.

The story moves from apparent disorder to order—though it was never truly disordered. The progression of the study group’s discussion can be seen as a process that parallels doctrinal development, which is, again, the Holy Spirit revealing the unity of the many parts of the deposit of faith. One might recall that at one point in history, three-quarters of the Church was Arian, because magisterial clarity had not yet been reached. The little St. Anselm’s Study Club is like that. It begins with a vague and shallow understanding of its topic, but as different members contribute (Perpetua quoting St. Paul’s letters, Virginia Sue citing the wisdom of Church Fathers like St. Cyprian, and Timothy identifying the three states of the Church) their grasp of the doctrine grows. This is not the invention of a new teaching. It is the clarification of an existing one through communal reflection.

This is one reason the story is so very Catholic. As Lafferty writes near the end, “the doctrine of the Communion became clarified among them, and charity began to grow a little.” What matters is not just intellectual assent, this being non-negotiable, but a deeper, more charitable living of the truth. As open as Lafferty is imaginatively, the constraints he accepts are Magisterial, those that serve the body of the Church. One of the greatest challenges in reading him is perceiving how his extreme expansiveness is tightly organized by this stringent, centripetal force.

“Communion of Saints” is about as minor a story as one can find in the Lafferty canon, yet its subject is key to understanding what he was up to.

And a roadmap for how to misread Lafferty—if you truly wanted to do it well: