Diary of a Country Priest

Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, 255 pages

Written and published in interwar France, this remarkable novel takes the form of the intermittently kept, sometimes self-edited diary of a young priest recently assigned as the pastor of a small rural parish.  The unnamed priest must deal with indifferent peasants, deceitful merchants, malicious children, a dysfunctional family of aristocrats, an atheistic doctor, and one of his colleagues who has abandoned the priesthood.  Some of his flock believe him to be a drunk, others a fool, or a weakling, or all three.  In fact, he is a saint, although he himself cannot imagine this to be true.

In Diary of a Country Priest Bernanos created one of the greatest portraits of sanctity, and the world's disdain for sanctity, in the history of literature.