America’s 75 million Catholics claim a tradition steeped in mystery. But if book sales are any indication, many are ready to have their tradition demystified, and publishers stand eager to help.
Efforts to bring the Church down to earth begin at the top with Pope Benedict XVI. Ignatius Press’ Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times (Nov.) sold 35,000 copies in its first two weeks as readers snatched up the first-ever book-length interview with a pope.
Light of the World, by journalist Peter Seewald,is on track to be Ignatius’s best-selling book in its 32-year history, according to marketing director Anthony Ryan. Sales got an early boost from a wave of news coverage, including erroneous reports that the pope had declared a new, more permissive stance on the use of condoms to fight AIDS in Africa. Ryan says the brouhaha raised awareness of the book, but readers are mostly interested in its core substance: a rare, intimate encounter with the Pope.
“Contraception, birth control, abortion--the pope talks about everything in this book,” Ryan says. “That’s why it has caught on. It’s never happened before, and the pope is taking a risk here.”
Others are vying to bring particular Catholic traditions to the faithful. HarperOne’s The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything has sold nearly 65,000 copies, including e-books, since it went on sale in March, according to HarperOne publisher and senior v-p Mark Tauber. Author James Martin, a Jesuit priest and an editor at America magazine, brings a touch of humor and earthy spirituality to a subject area--the quest for God--that could easily overwhelm readers or become overly abstract.
“We see the Catholic market as a huge opportunity,” Tauber says. “Catholics are in Barnes & Noble, and they’re looking to buy religious books there” but haven’t always found much selection. Tauber says HarperOne has done especially well marketing its Catholic Bibles, which now come in pocket sizes and large-print editions that Catholics aren’t used to seeing.
Catholic publishers expect there’s plenty of appetite left to fill. Our Sunday Visitor, a primary source of books for Catholic parishes, hopes the curious will want more from the increasingly accessible Pope Benedict XVI. In October, OSV released The Virtues, the fourth in a series of published lectures that Pope Benedict XVI delivered at the Vatican. Sales of The Virtues are approaching 5,000, according to director of marketing John Christensen: the book was recently retitled Great Teachers.
Paulist Press, meanwhile, aims to strike an especially American chord with a definitive biography of Avery Cardinal Dulles. Across 579 pages, historical theologian Patrick W. Carey explores how Dulles left Presbyterianism to become a straight-talking Catholic theologian with a front-row seat for Vatican II and other pivotal developments of the 20th century. Kickoff events included a panel discussion at Fordham University on Dec. 14 and remarks from New York Archbishop Edward Cardinal Egan before an author talk on Dec. 15.
By offering Catholics down-to-earth encounters with their tradition, publishers hope to make fresh inroads to a massive U.S. market. Look for more in the vein of practical, earthy, approachable Catholicism in the months and years ahead.
G. Jeffrey MacDonald is an independent journalist and author of Thieves in the Temple: The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul(Basic Books, 2010).
