The Diary of a Country Priest


Book Description

In this classic Catholic novel, Bernanos movingly recounts the life of a young French country priest who grows to understand his provincial parish while learning spiritual humility himself. Awarded the Grand Prix for Literature by the Academie Fran?aise, The Diary of a Country Priest was adapted into an acclaimed film by Robert Bresson. A book of the utmost sensitiveness and compassion? it is a work of deep, subtle and singularly encompassing art.? ? New York Times Book Review




Georges Bernanos


Book Description

Michael Tobin's study is part literary criticism, part biography. Tobin follows Bernanos and his family from France to Spain during the Civil War and then to Brazil and North Africa. He also provides a thematic synthesis of Bernanos' novels and his extensive body of non-fiction, demonstrating that one fundamental theological truth - the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ - was the the unifying factor of Bernanos's entangled political and social criticism and the engine of his creative imagination.




Last Essays


Book Description




Heroic Face of Innocence


Book Description

Georges Bernanos was the author of the modern literary and religious classic, Diary of a Country Priest, in which he explored the Christian mystery of redemption through love. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernanos is a key figure for our times in the relationship between theology and literature. In this selection of Bernanos' most significant works — Joan: Heretic and Saint, Sermon of an Agnostic on the Feast of St Thérèse, and Dialogues of the Carmelites — we find theological and psychological insight interwoven with a profound sense of historical drama: a masterly exploration of heroic innocence in a group of extraordinary Christian women.




Mouchette


Book Description

One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art. “Nothing but a little savage” is how the village school-teacher describes fourteen-year-old Mouchette, and that view is echoed by every right-thinking local citizen. Mouchette herself doesn’t bother to contradict it; ragged, foulmouthed, dirt-poor, a born liar and loser, she knows herself to be, in the words of the story, “alone, completely alone, against everyone.” Hers is a tale of “tragic solitude” in which despair and salvation appear to be inextricably intertwined. Bernanos uncompromising genius was a powerful inspiration to Flannery O’Connor, and Mouchette was the source of a celebrated movie by Robert Bresson.




Mouchette


Book Description

Outcast peasant girl searches for the compassion and strength to combat her loneliness.




Monsieur Ouine


Book Description

In a small village in northern France, Monsieur Ouine, a retired professor, is taken in by the dull local squire, Anthelme de Näräis, and soon rules the life of both Anthelme and his wife, Ginette. A fourteen-year-old fatherless boy, Philippe Dorval, flees home and, on impulse, follows Madame de Näräis to her chÛteau. There the squire, who is dying, tells the boy that his father is actually alive and well?that despite what Philippe?s mother had told him, his father had not died in World War I. The forsaken boy finds himself on that fatal evening succumbing to Monsieur Ouine?s embrace after falling into a drunken sleep in the old professor?s bed. The events of the tempestuous night lead to upheaval in the village the next morning, when, at dawn, a boy?s body is found afloat in a stream near the chÛteau.




Plea for Liberty


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.




Under Satan's Sun


Book Description

This new translation marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Georges Bernanos's first novel, Under Satan's Sun, a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author's deeply-felt religion. The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny. ø This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest's chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.




The Other Side of the Mountain


Book Description

With the election of a new Abbot at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton enters a period of unprecedented freedom, culminating in the opportunity to travel to California, Alaska, and finally the Far East – journeys that offer him new possibilities and causes for contemplation. In his last days at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton continues to follow the tumultuous events of the sixties, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. In Southeast Asia, he meets the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist and Catholic monks and discovers a rare and rewarding kinship with each. The final year is full of excitement and great potential for Merton, making his accidental death in Bangkok, at the age of fifth-three, all the more tragic.