SOURCE: Stanford, Peter. “Madonna Fan Steals Show.” New Statesman & Society 123, no. 4210 (11 November 1994): 36-7.

In the following excerpt, Stanford commends Tóibín's ability to present a personal, though critically detached view of the Catholic Church in The Sign of the Cross.

For an unashamedly personal view of the Catholic Church, Colm Toibin's The Sign of the Cross cannot be bettered. Many authors have recorded a pilgrimage across Catholic Europe in search of the soul of the church, that elusive something behind papal pomp and dwindling mass-going statistics. But Colm Toibin is in another class altogether.

His prose is never anything less than a joy: informal, relaxed, uncluttered by detail but redolent with meaning. His account of his own boyhood in Catholic Ireland, of his slow drift away from the official church, of his remaining emotional attachment to Catholicism, will ring many bells. From his vantage point as a...