UNITED STATES
The New York Times
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
The sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church broke into the news around 2000, just as Paul Elie was writing his book “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” His topic was the intertwining friendships of four great Catholic thinkers and writers, some of the best people in his tradition: Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton.
Meanwhile, he was reading, in the news, about the abuse of children.
When Mr. Elie published his book, in 2003, news of the abuse and the cover-ups was still coming. A practicing Catholic, and an alumnus of Fordham, a Catholic university, he felt that the only story people heard about his church was an evil one.
“I felt a pain about my tradition,” Mr. Elie said when I met him for an interview in Brooklyn last month. “Something was broken here, and there must be something in the way we tell our stories that could help to make it better. I’m in the story business. So how could I help to heal it, somehow?”
As it happened, Mr. Elie vaguely knew Dave Isay, the MacArthur “genius” grant winner and founder of StoryCorps; as an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he had edited a book by Mr. Isay’s future wife. StoryCorps is an oral history project that has recorded more than 55,000 Americans telling stories from their lives to interviewers they have chosen. An edited version of one story airs on NPR every Friday, and all the stories are archived at the Library of Congress.
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