G.K. Chesterton said that the Irish are 

In the USA, Irish Catholics have made themselves one of the most affluent, best educated ethnic groups. And Irish "Catholics," not all of them saints, have left their mark on the world. Let's look at two of them. And the non-Irish wife of one of them. 

In 1998 Random House published a list of the 20th Century's 100 best
novels in English. 

• James Joyce took spots #1, #3 and #77 for ULYSSES, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN and FINNEGANS WAKE. 
• F. Scott Fitzgerald was ranked #2 and #28 for THE GREAT GATSBY and TENDER IS THE NIGHT. 

Five, that is, of the hundred best novels were written by two Irish Catholic men. Another half dozen are also by Irish Catholics. 

The young James Joyce lived an exemplary, pious Christian life. He had  years of training by Irish and English Jesuit priests. In large measure, however, he turned his back on elements of his faith. A journalist once asked him if he was not still in some sense still a Catholic Christian. Joyce replied, in effect,  "Why don't you just describe me as a Jesuit?" 

God seems to like Jesuits. So to many it seems a grand thing that James 
Joyce always thought of himself as a kind of Jesuit. 

And what of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald? His widow Zelda died by fire in 
an Asheville, NC hospital. But Asheville is not where either she or her husband now lies buried. 

Scott was second cousin three times removed of the composer of THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. He was raised Catholic in a very German, Irish and Catholic American city, St. Paul, Minnesota. Its skyline is still dominated by the cathedral built by Archbishop John Ireland. In an East Coast Catholic boarding school  a young  priest strongly influenced Scott for good--both as a person and as an artist. 

Fitzgerald began drinking young and far too hard. Like Joyce, he fell away from  practice of his faith. He died tragically young of a heart attack in Hollywood on December 21,1940. He had asked to be buried beside his parents in a Catholic graveyard in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. At first, however, he was interred in Hollywood. For a bishop in southern Maryland refused for decades to allow either Scott or his wife Zelda to rest in consecrated ground beside Scott's civil war veteran father. Scott's public life was deemed too scandalous. 

But Scottie, the daughter and only child of Scott and Zelda, was like that 
persistent woman in the New Testament parable who chipped away and
chipped away at the stern judge until he gave her justice. Finally, in the 1980s, after the Vatican shifted the cemetery in question to the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Washington, Scottie's petition for reburial was granted. 

Today Scott, Zelda and Scottie rest together in St. Mary's Catholic 
cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. For the Archbishop moved swiftly. He said that only someone who deep down inside is a true Christian could have written as knowingly and compassionately of the needs of the human heart and its longings as had F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

Four generations of Fitzgeralds now lie together in the most frequently visited plot of St. Mary's cemetery. 

In Asheville through July 30th [2000] you can remember the Fitzgeralds
while visiting  a well regarded exhibit of Zelda's paintings in the Asheville
Art Museum at 2 South Pack Square. 

-OOO- 

for INDEPENDENT TORCH