Sarah O'Connor

“‘If I start hating prostitutes where am I going to stop?…All around us there are all kinds of people prostituting their souls and their principles for money. I know people in this city who prostitute our faith for the sake of expediency. I watch it going on all around and wonder how corrupt our faith can become before it dies. So if I can’t have charity for those girls, certainly I can have no love for many others in higher places,'” (Callaghan).

Father Stephen Dowling is a young priest interested in preaching the love of God to his parishioners. When he meets two sex workers, Midge and Ronnie, who live in a hotel in his parish Father Dowling is determined to help them and save their souls. But not everyone in the young priest’s life is as understanding to his cause, creating trouble that will affect the three of them.

Such Is My Beloved has been on my reading list for an incredibly long time. My dad told me about the book and Morley Callaghan, a Canadian writer with an incredible bibliography who has, somehow, been forgotten about amongst Canadian literary circles. I knew the basics of the story, and that it was very faith-based while also challenging certain viewpoints of the church, and that was enough to get me interested.

Set during and written in the Great Depression, Callaghan creates a bleak Toronto (though it’s never named and could be any old city) where people are sad and suffering, struggling to get by and a young priest who is determined to preach the love of God and have his message heard. Considering the publication of the book (1934) certain words are used that aren’t correct for today (Midge and Ronnie are called prostitutes, one of their colleagues is referred to as mulatto) but this is more a sign of the times than anything else, but should be understood before reading.

Father Dowling is a wonderful protagonist to follow. His determination to save Midge and Ronnie from their life as sex workers and attempts to help them are naive if admirable. He loves them, not in a romantic or lustful way but arguably as Catholics should love one another, completely and without judgement. He may not agree with their careers, but his want to get them out of sex work isn’t malicious but concerned for their souls. Unfortunately, the parish and Father Dowling’s colleagues don’t seem to share his viewpoint, an irony and unfortunate truth amongst many religious people.

Midge and Ronnie are also characters you can’t help but care for. They’re sex workers during the Great Depression who have their own sad pasts and have found themselves in a situation they didn’t necessarily picture for themselves but are not ashamed of. Everyone around them is struggling, and Midge and Ronnie are finding a way to survive as best they can.

This book won’t be for everyone. There are a lot of brilliant biblical parallels, a lot of Catholicism, and a bit of preaching so it’s definitely an acquired taste, but so worth the read. Callaghan challenges what it means to preach the love of God, who is deserving of such love and who decides it in a wonderfully tragic way. Such Is My Beloved is a book that shouldn’t be forgotten, and I hope you give it a chance!

Publication: January 1 1934
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Pages: 208 pages (eBook)
Source: Libby
Genre: Fiction, Canadian, Religion (Catholic), Literary Fiction
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

One of the great novels of the 1930s, Such Is My Beloved recounts the tragic story of two down-and-out prostitutes and the young priest who aspires to redeem their lives. The novel is at once a compassionate portrait of innocence and idealism, and an emphatic condemnation of a society where the lines between good and evil are essentially blurred.
Such Is My Beloved is widely considered to be Morley Callaghan’s finest novel.