The Secret Saint Anthony Prayer
An evocative historical novel, The Secret Saint Anthony Prayer vivifies the memories of a group of Catholic school alumni.
Suffused with remembrances and yearnings, Richard Donze’s poignant and wry historical novel The Secret Saint Anthony Prayer details the past and present intrigues surrounding a 1960s Catholic grade-school class.
In 2018, several alumni of St. Anthony of Padua parochial school meet weekly in the Philadelphia suburbs. Though fifty years have passed since their eighth-grade graduation, the former students share a sense of nostalgic perspective. Regarded as the “consummate passive friend,” reticent Paul shows surprising initiative when he learns that St. Anthony’s has been bought by a property developer. With the school slated for demolition, Paul urges the group to hold a class reunion.
The book alternates between flashbacks to Paul’s experiences at St. Anthony’s and his current involvement with planning the reunion. While his present observations are more structured and incisive, Paul’s past reflections are expressed in flowing, impressionistic sentences that link memories with keen sensory details. These shifts in narrative tone make a compelling contrast between Paul’s feelings of heightened youthful potential and his later learned realities.
The book is further grounded by its evocative historical backdrop. Amid the postwar baby boom, families leave the crowded cities for the burgeoning suburbs. In 1963, a nun brings a radio into Paul’s classroom so the students can hear live coverage of President Kennedy’s shooting in Dallas. A few months later, the Beatles’ upbeat music thrills Paul and his friends, effecting a new surge of “enthusiasm and optimism” after the “darkness” of JFK’s assassination.
Though he is gifted with a photographic memory and notable intelligence, Paul’s aspirations are often undermined by his avoidance of conflict and risk. He attends medical school, but he worries about the pressure of being a doctor and instead works as an emergency room technician. After his divorce, he evades romantic involvements; however, his brief and awkward adolescent interactions with Mary Liz, another St. Anthony student, haunt him for decades.
Beyond Paul’s immersive reflections, other characters center and enliven the plot. Biggsy is Paul’s academic rival and a fellow altar boy. Imaginative and domineering, Biggsy is always the first to finish exams, slamming his pencil down with surety. Father Galvin, a younger priest, is “banished” for holding an “illegal” Mass with “guitar-led folk songs” as Vatican II’s modern outreach begins to disrupt the traditional Catholic Church. And attractive and forthright Mary Liz still shows easygoing confidence years later at the class reunion, when she defuses Paul’s continued longings with warm but firm humor.
At times, the inclusion of mundane or overexplanatory details slows the book’s pace. But more often, the language is beautiful and emotive, as with descriptions of the harmony between the seasonal and liturgical calendars: Winter solstice’s waning light is brightened by Christmas midnight Mass, while crocuses bloom along with Easter’s renewal in a “humming patch of purple.” The book ends with subdued intensity; though the reunion brings both revelations and disappointments, Paul’s entrenched commitment to the event and its aftermath leads to a quiet personal emergence.
With eloquent immediacy, the historical novel The Secret Saint Anthony Prayer recreates the interconnected closeness of a Philadelphia Catholic school class during a decade of pivotal change.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
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