At first, I wondered how someone could write so convincingly about a Catholic priest without having been one himself; I know nothing about the author J. F. Powers. And, I have no way of knowing if a reader who was not raised Catholic will be familiar with the references to the Church and its hierarchy, or with the differences among the priests' Orders, or with the style or culture peculiar to the Catholic Church. The key to the structure of Morte d'Urban--and to the very existence of such a novel--is that it's set in the 1950s when Americans' lives were changing after World War II toward habits of conspicuous consumption. And the Catholic Church hierarchy knew it had to change, too, in response to these lifestyle developments in its primary "customers," the new kind of Catholics emerging after the war years.

Author J. F. Powers illustrated these changes perfectly when he has the fictitious Order of St. Clement realize that if they are to attract wealthy Catholics to their summer retreat, they will have to build a golf course at St. Clement's Hill. And it's significant that Powers has his main character, Father Urban, be the kind of cultured person who (after the 1960s) no longer experienced a religious calling, or for whom the Church no longer had a place: Urban plays a professional game of golf, he has a taste for fine dining, fine cars, intelligent conversation, articulate speech-making--in short, the cultural pluses which his Italian or French counterparts would have taken for granted.

It's important, too, that Powers has his Father Urban be 54, tall, handsome, and athletic. Church-goers with money have expectations of such a priest which, as one character says, can lead to a "comedy of errors." Billy Cosgrove, Sylvia Bean, and Sally Thwaites all have expectations of their urbane Urban; and all have flaws, or faults of manners, or misguided ways of being in the world, which lead them into conflict with Father Urban's sense of integrity, of discernment, and of proper conduct.

To say this is a moral novel would be too simplistic. In a way, the book is not a comedy at all, but a tale of cultural decline, of missed connections. This novel shows how people become alienated from one another because they lack knowledge of humanity, the sort that Father Urban has. It is Urban's fate to be a misunderstood messenger when what would have most suited his temperament was to be the sort of Old World, cultured priest like his mentor Father Placidus. Confined to the isolation of Minnesota, those serving God must face their earthly limitations--hopefully with as much style and savoir faire as Father Urban.