Lions, Harts, Leaping Does: J.F. Powers 1952

 Lions, Harts, Leaping Does and Other Stories by J.F. Powers | Goodreads

A Review

5/24/2025

 

 So I finally found a pointless short story book. Small vignettes of life inside the Catholic church during the war years. I stumble across these little gems and eat them up. You wander into a scene, catching the conversation in the middle, stand and listen for a while then move to the next room. In thinking about it, I suppose it’s the way poetry is supposed to leave you. Everything is contained in 15 or 20 pages. Not a clear beginning, not a clear end. You're left wondering what you were supposed to gain. Perhaps it's just a cool breeze.

 

Several stories into the book and it's very pleasant. It is the life within the Catholic Church. I was not raised Catholic so all the stories of the priests, nuns and a Catholic school education are stories. The stories take place in and around Chicago in the vague range between the late 30’s and early 50’s. It was when our society revolved around our religions, our cities divided by faith and class. These stories aren't about the schools but the priests navigating the ancient bureaucracy of the Catholic Church. Msgr. Powers describes the people that inhabited Chicago when it was most Catholic, and collar counties didn't exist yet. It was when the religion mattered and in the Catholic neighborhoods, the role of the parish priest and his entourage were central to the functioning of the society. A character is introduced and then tells a story of the minutia of parish life. Their personal issues in attaining professional goals within the priesthood. Failure, compromise, and disappointment. The lessons of life on a stage constructed within the Catholic hierarchy. People both in the clergy and laity accepting their station in life and yielding to the ultimate authority of the church. The stories are sad. The rewards mediocre.

 

The stories are connected through the characters. The main character in one story interacts with a character that is the main character of a following story. A Father Burnes makes several appearances; his introduction is one of a disgruntled man passed over too many times for promotion. Over the course of several installments, he crosses this arc to a true fulfillment of service. An opportunity arises that allows him to demonstrate all the humility and grace of his station as second in command and rises to the occasion. Two of his appearances are stories narrated by a rectory cat. These were fun. Of course there is the prevailing attitude towards pets at the time. I was a little hesitant, but the author made it work. I'm guessing the two stories with the cat were his most popular. They seemed to me the most lighthearted.

 

As far as the tone is concerned, it’s nice just having a pleasant read. No horrific deaths or missing persons succumbing to their circumstances. Just stories about clergy people going through some stuff. The people described are familiar to the faithful. The characters were certainly familiar to the readers at time of publication.

 

As the stories progressed a darkness seemed to emerge. There was the story The Devil Was the Joker followed by Lions, Harts and Leaping Does that I found not dark but introspective.  The first involves two men of completely different dispositions thrown together for a sales trip around the Tri-State area around Chicago. Mac is a pitchman in business with a Catholic Order known as the Clementines. These priests are a small order in need of financial support. I really didn’t understand the order or the mission of the order. Perhaps the target audience could parse it out. Mac takes the endorsement of the Order and then travels to a diocese, interviews with the Bishop, then visits the individual parishes to offer goods and services. It is called “The Plan” and as far as I could discern it involved circulars for donation, trinkets for sale to the congregation, insurance and investment plans? They were greeted often with the hostility and derision by the parish priests. Chased from the property in some cases. There is an implied assumption of grift but never specified. I was lost to all of this. I have no clear examples of this stereotype. A better understanding of “The Plan” might shed a bit more light.

 

Myles, the second man in the story is the narrator. He meets Mac while Mac recovers from a hernia operation in a local hospital. He’s some kind of orderly there but it’s only a temporary position. He’s been dismissed from seminary and his goal is to meet and attain sponsorship from a Bishop to get back into seminary to complete the course of study required for ordination. Mac makes him the proposition that he should travel with him. Mac wanted an “apprentice”. Myles saw an opportunity to seek audience with a Bishop.

 

Myles is a zealot. It’s never stated but it appears to have been dismissed because of his zealotry. His dialog is sincere although there seems to be something off. He seems focused on the greed of man and its corruption of the mission of God. The dialog isn’t recorded, only the mention of long sermons in drives from diocese to diocese. There is also a draft notice for Korea trying to find him because of his dismissal from seminary. A touch of the unreliable narrator seems to be coming through.

 

 Mac is a degenerate deals man always sniffing out a product or service his customer needs. He knows a guy. He's alcoholic, barely honest and displays some internal conflict and struggle in his inebriation. In the morning he’s always apologetic but always trying to manipulate both the situation and Myles. In several scenes, he walks off with a hostile priest and brings back a friend. He tells Myles that the priest has taken the pledge. It reads sobriety but smells like bribes.

 

The second story is of the few remaining days in the life of a Franciscan monk. It’s not particularly moving or deep. Just an old man succumbing to his age and mortality. There are his regrets and final acts of… It’s just someone facing the end and not seeing what he had hoped to as he left. Not a refutation of his faith but an acceptance of the faith he possessed versus the faith he desired.

 

This is a Time Life Library edition from the early 60s. There is a forward and an introduction. The first few introductions I read with some of these older editions seemed to have too many spoilers in them but now I read them with interest. This edition had something of a biography of the author. Born down state Illinois, he tried Northwestern and dropped out due to the money. It was the 30s and he ends up as a clerk in a bookshop and after a time fashioned himself as a writer. He wrote about what he knew, his "cradle Catholic" life somewhere near Chicago. He sat down and started telling a few tales, published a couple of collections and made a small mark in the literary world. At time of publication of this edition, Msgr. Powers was a teacher and part-time writer living in Minnesota.