Catholic Church

The Catholic Church becomes, for Esther Greenwood, a possible source of help when she is considering suicide: she imagines turning to a priest because Catholic teaching treats suicide as a grave sin. The possibility is tentative and practical rather than an expression of faith; she hopes for a reason to be dissuaded while remaining unconvinced by Catholic doctrine.

Family and Religious Background

Esther’s family crosses denominational lines. Her mother had been Catholic before becoming a Methodist, while her grandmother, grandfather, and Aunt Libby remained Catholic. Aunt Libby had once left the Catholic Church along with Esther’s mother, but returned after falling in love with an Italian Catholic. The family history makes Catholicism familiar to Esther without making it her own settled religion.

Esther recalls that she herself was Methodist for the first nine years of her life. After her father died and the family moved, they became Unitarian. This sequence places her tentative interest in Catholicism against a background of changing affiliations, rather than a continuous religious upbringing.

A Possible Means of Intervention

Lately, Esther has considered entering the Catholic Church because she understands that Catholics regard suicide as an awful sin. She wonders whether that prohibition might give the Church a way to persuade her not to kill herself. Her reasoning is conditional: she is not describing renewed belief, but searching for an authority that might interrupt her suicidal thinking.

She considers asking her mother how long a person must be Catholic before becoming a nun. Her mother laughs and tells her that the Church would not accept someone immediately; a prospective nun would have to learn and believe its catechisms and creeds. The exchange punctures Esther’s imagined shortcut into religious life and underscores the gap between seeking help and accepting the faith’s requirements.

Doubt and the Limits of Religious Life

Esther explicitly rejects belief in an afterlife, the virgin birth, the Inquisition, and papal infallibility. She nevertheless imagines concealing those doubts from a priest and concentrating on her sense of sin, in the hope that he could help her repent. Catholicism thus appears to her as a possible practical resource even while its theology remains unpersuasive.

She also recognizes that the Church could not occupy all of a person’s life. Prayer and kneeling would not remove the need to eat three meals a day, find work, and live in the world. This objection gives her religious speculation a wider limit: even an authority capable of offering moral direction would not, by itself, settle the ordinary conditions she finds difficult to face.

The Imagined Confession

Esther imagines seeking a priest in Boston rather than in her hometown, because she does not want a local priest to learn that she has thought of killing herself. She distrusts priests as gossips, so the very institution she hopes might help also raises the problem of disclosure and privacy.

In her imagined scene, she pictures herself dressed in black and pleading with a priest for help. The scene gives shape to an appeal she has not yet made; it remains a fantasy of intervention, not evidence that she joins the Church or speaks to a priest. Her later recollection places this imagined appeal before people began looking at her strangely, as hospital nurses did, marking the change from private speculation toward a crisis visible to others.