SOURCE: McDonnell, Thomas P. “Postcard Sanctity.” Commonweal 76 (13 July 1962): 406-07.

In the following review, McDonnell finds the focus of The Penitent misplaced, preferring instead to consider the implications of Alessandro Sereneli's murder of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

The problem of sanctity is so special a bafflement to the modern writer, to say nothing of our general estrangement from its seemingly ineffable milieu, that the attempt to record it, if made at all, usually ends in disaster. At least, that is to say, in literary disaster. It is much like the movies you see which attempt to portray lives of genius in the creative arts. The result is invariably a production in kitsch. But if the creative life eludes the cinematic process, how much more the mystery of sanctity escapes the spectrum, from confinement to liberation, of the written word.

This is the problem faced, though not squarely...