A novelist may, if he chooses, disclaim all resemblance between the characters in his story and actual persons living or dead. While I am prepared to make such disclaimers for many of the people in The Cardinal, I cannot pretend that Stephen Fermoyle is wholly a product of my imagination. It would be truer, I think, to say that he is a composite of all the priests I have ever known—and particularly those priests who left mysterious imprints of their sacred office on my youth.
To these indelible traces, deeper and fresher now than when they were first made, I owe whatever insight I may have into the priestly life. Upon such seemingly frail foundations, buttressed by conscious study and mature observation, I have sought to build the many-chambered temple of Stephen Fermoyle’s character. Some may think the attempt presumptuous. “How,” it will be asked, “dare a layman approach the altar as celebrant, enter the confessional as a looser of sins, wield the crozier, and don the red hat reserved for Princes of the Church?” Granting that the sacerdotal soul is a secret place, I feel, nevertheless, that the ecclesiastic life offers the novelist a genuine challenge in a much neglected field.
The reader may be interested to know that I am, and always have been, a Roman Catholic. Whether or not I am a “good” Catholic is surely a matter between me and my Creator. I never aspired to be a priest. As a writer, I was struck long ago by wonder and awe at the priest’s function. In The Cardinal I have attempted to express these feelings by describing a gifted but very human priest fulfilling his destiny as a consecrated mediator between God and man.
Some readers may find my hero too-improbably virtuous; others may complain that in certain episodes he forgets, momentarily, his divine calling. With no desire to disarm such criticism beforehand, I ask only that Stephen Fermoyle be judged (as all men must) not on the testimony of single incidents, but on the manifest intention of his entire life.
The Cardinal is neither propaganda for nor against the Church. Most emphatically it is not a theological treatise or a handbook to history. It is a purely fictional tale, a story to be read as a narrative woven by a watcher of our world, who believes—in spite of evils fearfully apparent—that faith, hope, and compassion animate men of good will everywhere.
HENRY MORTON ROBINSON
WOODSTOCK, NEW YORK
JANUARY 19, 1950.