So she slips out of the publishing house where she works, copy-editing cookbooks and self-help manuals and the kind of small-print puzzle books that turn proofreaders prematurely grey, to walk through the bustle of Chelsea and sit in Fr Murray's quiet pews before Mass, reading John Paul II's writings on the theology of the body or Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth — reading something serious, for that's what she is: a mildly pretty 23-year-old, a convert to Catholicism while she was an undergraduate studying at the Ivy League college of Dartmouth, and a woman of deep seriousness. 

Almost mad seriousness, in truth. She's not particularly fastidious in her morality, or, at least, Catholic morality was not the main path for her conversion. It was more  the derived effect of her intellectual alteration, for that's where her seriousness really lies: a smart young woman who dresses fairly well, who goes to the city's concerts and shows, who meets men and wonders about marriage, who drinks a little and sneaks a cigarette sometimes with her friends, who works long hours in New York City, and who demands that this world — the universe, creation, life, truth, beauty — makes sense. Who demands that things cohere.

Perhaps this is the best way to make sense of someone like Eleanor. In the public realm of the modern world, the Catholic form of Christianity has come to play a curious role — as though, while Christianity is a faith, Catholicism is an idea. There are a surprising number of these intellectual Catholics out there. That young man Franciszek, for instance: the Polish boy Eleanor met at a conference on religious liberty and thought it might turn into something, but he went back and entered the seminary in Kraków, after all. Or Peter, who converted at Oxford and who, for John Henry Newman's sake, treks on foot every Sunday from the British Museum to the Brompton Oratory for High Mass.

Or the young classicist Sister John Paul, who gave up her PhD scholarship at the University of Chicago to enter a teaching order in Rome. Or the political theory student Mary Frances, or the aspiring art critic Santiago, or innumerable others. Their faith is real, but that's just the Christianity part. The Catholicism part is the idea, the coherence that comes from two millennia of working out the philosophical and theological of that faith, with a large set of social, political, and moral consequences.