Rejoinder

According to the Guardian, the Catholic Enquiry Office has developed a website devoted to St. Mary Magdalene--the better to handle the Da Vinci Code phenomenon.   (Full disclosure: I haven't read the Da Vinci Code, nor am I likely to do so in either the near or the remote future.)  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it's quite likely that someone would have written a fictional rejoinder.  Today, the most famous examples are the critiques of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, especially Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shamela.    (See William Warner's chronology of what he calls the "Pamela Media Event.")  But novels much lower down on the literary food chain also provoked indignant responses.  Grace Kennedy's Father Clement (1823), although relatively mild as nineteenth-century anti-Catholic literature goes--things became nastier as the debate over the Catholic Emancipation Act heated up later on in the decade--nevertheless prompted two Catholic responses: the anonymous Father Oswald and, in America, Charles Constantine Pise's Father Rowland (1829).  It seems that Father Rowland was America's first Catholic novel.