MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga.—The great hope for the American Catholic novel lies in the Protestant, fundamentalist, Bible Belt South, in the opinion of Flannery O’Connor, the late, famed Georgia authoress whose ideas on religion and writing have just been published. In “Mystery and Manners,” a collection of previously unpublished lectures and articles brought out in book form by her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, it is revealed that Miss O’Connor believed “the opportunities for the potential Catholic writer in the South are so great as to be intimidating.”

Miss O’Connor, who died from an arthritic disease in 1964 at the age of 39 and who was famed for the grotesque and violent imagery in her novels and short stories about sin and redemption, (“Wise Blood,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Violent Bear It Away,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge”) said one of the strongest advantages for the Catholic novelist in the South was the firm Scriptural heritage there, followed closely by the strong emotional nature of religious expression common to Southern Protestants.

“If the Catholic faith were central to life in America,” Miss O’Connor explained, “Catholic fiction would fare better, but the Church is not central to this society. The things that bind us together as Catholics are known only to ourselves. A secular society understands us less and less. It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable, but in this the Southern writer has the greatest possible advantage. She lives in the Bible Belt…

“To be great storytellers, we need something to measure ourselves against, and this is what we consciously lack in this age…The Catholic has the natural law and the teaching of the Church to guide him, but for the writing of fiction, something more is necessary.

“For the purposes of fiction, these guides have to exist in a concrete form, known and held sacred by the whole community. They have to exist in the form of stories which affect our image and our judgment of ourselves. Abstractions, formulas, laws will not serve here. We have to have stories in our background.”

She added that in the Protestant South, Scripture has traditionally provided the people with stories in which “everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and its descent,” making it easier for the modern religious novelist to use allegory and symbolism and also to stimulate his creative juices.

“Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac. Both of these kinds of knowledge are necessary, but in the last four or five centuries, Catholics have overemphasized the abstract and consequently impoverished their imaginations and their capacity for prophetic insight.”

Miss O’Connor saw the Catholic Church’s revival of interest in the Bible—the lectures and articles were composed in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s—as being the best possible insurance for the future of Catholic fiction in the U.S.

As for the emotional fundamentalism common to the Protestant South—Miss O’Connor’s works are filled with backwoods prophets, wild-eyed preachers and revivalists—she said that living in such a society furnishes the Catholic novelist “with some very fine antidotes to his own worst tendencies.”

“The Catholic novelist in the South is forced to follow the spirit into strange places and to recognize it in many forms not totally congenial to him. He may feel that the kind of religion that has influenced Southern life has run hand in hand with extreme individualism for so long that there is nothing left of it that he can recognize but when he penetrates to the human aspiration beneath it, he sees not only what has been lost to the life he observes, but more, the terrible loss to us in the Church of human faith and passion.

“I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.”