Religion: Outside the Walls

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Top book on Roman Catholic America's monthly popularity poll is the work of a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia: Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette, which has sold half a million copies since its publication eight months ago. Many Roman Catholics have been amazed that anyone not of their faith could write so reverently and eloquently about the French girl, Bernadette Soubirous (1844-79), to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared 18 times telling her to spread the news that the waters of Lourdes had been endowed with miraculous healing powers.

Last week plump, 52-year-old Franz Werfel, now living in California, did much to satisfy the curiosity of his Catholic admirers. In a letter to Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel of New Orleans, he wrote: "I am ... a Jew by origin and have never been baptized. On the other hand, I wish to profess here before you and the world that ... I have been decisively influenced and molded by the spiritual forces of Christianity and the Catholic Church. I see 'in the holy Catholic Church the purest power and emanation sent by God to this earth to fight the evils of materialism and atheism, and to bring revelation to the poor soul of mankind. That is why, although standing extra muros [outside the walls], I have made it my purpose to support with my modest and humble abilities the struggle which the Catholic Church fights against those evils and for the divine truth."