I did not realize then that I was probably one of the millions moved to faith by Merton’s autobiography. I was not at all surprised to later read that he had a huge influence on men who chose the priesthood in the second half of the 20th century

Merton’s conversion to Catholicism likely opened the door to a whole generation of converts — those who might not have otherwise found the door to the Church. The Church in the 1940s and 1950s was more opaque to an outsider than it is today, and certainly appeared far more authoritarian. And so what Merton communicated with his memoir was: Here it is. Look. It is beautiful. It is much more than it might seem.

I have come to realize that Merton is one of the Catholic literary all-stars of the modern era. He is usually linked with Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Dorothy Day as part of a vibrant movement of American writers who opened the faith to a new generation of converts and refreshed the faith of many cradle Catholics.

Each brought something different: Merton wrote about life in the monastery and the life of a contemplative; Percy wrote heady novels like The Moviegoer about alienation; Day was the great social activist whose autobiography The Long Loneliness challenged a generation to serve the poor.

O’Connor, the only cradle Catholic, wrote brutal novels like Wise Blood and great short stories that showed how grace could penetrate the darkest corners of the American South.

All of them showed how the cross can be heavy but at the same time ultimately freeing and sparkling

Probably the best biography of these four writers is Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which examines the links between this quartet and how each admired the other from afar.

However, a writer who seems to have been ignored may be the greatest of them all. In 1962 Edwin O’Connor won the Pulitzer Prize for The Edge of Sadness, a novel about an alcoholic priest who returns to his hometown of Boston after spending two years in rehab.

Fr. Hugh Kennedy returns much reduced in the eyes of his superiors and is assigned to Old St. Paul’s, a run-down parish full of strange immigrants outside the city’s Irish elite. The narrator of the novel explains that there is no New St. Paul’s and the adjective only refers to the state of the parish.

“St. Paul’s: what a strange parish it is, really. Days, even weeks go by, and I don’t even think of this; then, without preparation of any kind there comes a moment … when suddenly all the lights seem to be turned on at once, piercing the comfortable protection of routine and I am confronted with the cold fact of St. Paul’s,” writes O’Connor.

“This section of the city is dying and so is Old St. Paul’s. In a sense it is hardly a parish at all any more, but a kind of spiritual waterhole: a halting place for transients in despair.”

It is one of the few books I’ve read in recent years that I did not want to end. And when it did I was at least comforted by knowing I could read it again and again.

If I met a young Catholic today struggling with faith, or was to meet someone considering conversion but had hit a wall over any number of issues that he found hard to reconcile, I would bundle these books together and say: Here, read. This is the Church: more beautiful than you ever imagined and more human than you would have ever suspected.

(Charles Lewis covers religion for the National Post and is editor of the paper’s religion website, Holy Post. He’s on twitter at @holycharlie.)