Why Bad Catholics Make Great Art

“Now, you know, I’m a Catholic,” Toni Morrison told Cornel West during a 2004 conversation at The Nation Institute. “We’re used to blood and gore. On the cross in the church, there’s the body, with the cuts and all the bruises.”

Though Morrison was a self-described “disaffected Catholic,” she was a Catholic nonetheless: She converted when she was 12 and took Saint Anthony of Padua as her baptismal name. She found herself “fascinated by the rituals” of the faith and was especially transfixed by the ornate, almost otherworldly experience of Latin Mass. But she had what she called “a moment of crisis” on the occasion of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which largely abolished