The Old Man and the Sea: A Catholic Classic for Everyone – Catholic Exchange

The Old Man and the Sea: A Catholic Classic for Everyone

20 Apr 2026

– By Augustine Himmel, – History & Art

In the early 1990s while sitting at the bar of Bilbo’s Underground Tavern in Kalamazoo, MI, a fellow graduate student said Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was “the most perfect novel ever written.” Such proclamations aren’t uncommon for graduate students, especially after a couple of beers, but with time I’ve come to realize my comrade might be right. Even though it’s impossible to prove such a claim, Hemingway’s short masterpiece, which won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize and helped him secure the Nobel a year later, has aged like fine wine. But did you know it was a Catholic book?

First published in Life Magazine, selling over five million copies in two days, it’s the story of Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman who has gone nearly three months without catching a marlin, and his friendship with a young boy, Manolin. Let’s start with the names: Santiago is Spanish for St. James, one of the apostles who was a fisherman, and Manolin is a shortened form of the Spanish name, Manuel, which comes from the Hebrew “Immanuel,” or “God is with us.” These names are not coincidences. Hemingway chose them as deliberately as he chose his first novel to be titled The Sun Also Rises and for the epigraph of that novel to be Ecclesiastes 1:4-7.                          

By now, any honest literary critic should be disabused of the myth that Hemingway was an atheist. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of H.R. Stoneback and those who have followed in his footsteps such as Matthew Nickel and Mary Claire Kendall, we know Hemingway took seriously his conversion to Catholicism, even if, as he admitted in a 1927 letter to Father Vincent Donovan, “I have never wanted to be known as a Catholic writer because I know the importance of setting an example—and I have never set a good example.”

For the better part of a century the author has received his wish. He remains best known for devotion to his craft and his hard-drinking, thrill-seeking persona. This has been true not only for the general population, who continue to enjoy the annual Papa Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, but also for other artists, as evidenced by Guy Clark’s song, “Hemingway’s Whiskey,” and Christine Whitehead’s novel, Hemingway’s Daughter. Both of these works are well done, especially Whitehead’s believable, fast-paced tale—praised by Mariel Hemingway—yet they don’t broach the subject of the Nobel laureate’s faith, which there’s evidence for in his life and fiction, especially The Old Man and the Sea.

Aside from the main characters’ names, we have a very Catholic setting: Cuba during the late 1940s, a decade before the Communist takeover of the country. This was the same Cuba Thomas Merton visited and wrote about in The Seven Story Mountain, stating that, in the mornings, “walking out into the warm sunny street, I could find my way quickly to any one of a dozen churches, new churches or as old as the seventeenth century,” and in these churches “every fifteen or twenty minutes a new Mass was starting at a different altar,” and “everywhere were Cubans in prayer.”

That doesn’t mean Santiago spent his mornings at Mass. Being a fisherman, he was out on the sea before daylight, and as with many marriages his late wife was the religious one. It’s her pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Cobre—the Blessed Virgin Mary’s name as patroness of Cuba—that are on a wall of his shack. He used to have a photo of his wife on the wall as well, “but he had taken it down because it made him too lonely to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt.” So Santiago is, as Isaiah 53:3 says of Our Lord, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Early in the novella, Hemingway begins portraying the protagonist, whom today we would call a cultural Catholic, as a Christ figure.

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