Point of View

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., is told in the third person past tense by an objective, albeit generally sympathetic and friendly narrator. It is important to realize A Canticle for Leibowitz is written and published in 1959, prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965.) Vatican II, particularly the early sessions, while Pope John XXIII lived, re-examined many of the medieval practices seen in the novel and reformed the liturgical rites that are portrayed in A Canticle for Leibowitz extending forward some eighteen centuries. Positing a massive nuclear confrontation the world feared in 1959 - and came dramatically to the brink of in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 -- the novel heightens and makes immediate the tough bioethical problems, primarily euthanasia and abortion, that the Roman Catholic Church in fact wrestles with under less trying conditions in the 1960s and 1970s. The papacy of the...