I was looking for some good summer reading recently. That’s always a challenge, because I don’t particularly value the opinion of critics or Oprah or Reese Witherspoon or Good Morning America or any other celebrity who has a book club.

On the other hand, I’ve picked a few clunkers on my own with no help from the experts. After buying a half-dozen novels for my Kindle, from thrillers to mysteries and science fiction, I started to dip into them, but they weren’t what I was looking for.

I began with a thriller that was an enjoyable easy read, written by a best-selling author whose work I’d read before. This particular book had 3,600 4.5 star ratings, so how could I go wrong? Famous last words.

Yes, the novel was as exciting and suspenseful, until midway through it, when I discovered the villains were a sinister group of Dominicans in Latin America … and the plot got even more preposterous from there. Could I possibly make this stuff up?

After wasting four hours of reading time, I lay the novel aside. Actually, since there was no physical book, I hit the delete button on my Kindle reader and promptly started another novel by a famously popular author about a post-apocalyptic society, which very much resembled the late Middle Ages.

Then, I made another unfortunate discovery. Once again, the villain was the Church. I figured out too late that this was also the author of the novel Conclave, which was made into an Academy Award nominated film, and depicted the Vatican, the Cardinals and just about everyone involved in the papal conclave in a less-than-favorable light. What would these authors do without the Church?

There was a third novel with a similar theme, including one where the villain prays the Rosary. Let me tell you something you probably know already. In the popular mentality and in the secular world view, the Church is the villain, and that belief is inspired by the entertainment industry in collusion with a lot of other professional myth-makers. Sometimes, oftentimes, it’s not easy being a Catholic in a secular amoral society, but if I had to make a choice between the Church and the entertainment industry, the choice would be an easy one.

However, a growing number of Americans recognize they can’t trust the institutions on which the secular world is founded. Once-venerable institutions of our country are increasingly viewed with suspicion, and over the past 25 years, trust in them has declined significantly. For example, Gallup does an annual survey about trust, and the most recent one showed that Congress and the media are at the very bottom of the list—where they have been for a while.

Among the other institutions suffering from distrust are big business, banks, public schools and large tech companies. As the researchers concluded, “From the federal government to the news media to higher education, some historically respected institutions are losing people’s confidence.”

I would venture to say that the Church is gaining people’s confidence. One person who best characterized the situation was the late author Walker Percy, a doctor turned novelist who was a convert to Catholicism and winner of the National Book Award. Percy was once asked by an incredulous reporter why he joined the Catholic Church, and the writer promptly responded,

“What else is there?” What else is there? Nothing.

I give the same answer to my family members and friends who have either fallen away from the Church or been turned off by popular thinking in our society. (And probably by too much misguided summer reading, because one bad novel can cause a lot of damage when readers confuse fiction with truth … or when fiction is cloaked as truth.)

I suppose you think I gave up on summer reading. Not really. There are a lot of great Catholic authors, from Walker Percy to Flannery O’Connor, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene—many of whom are converts.

In the end, I returned to an author the Marist Brothers assigned us to read in high school—G.K. Chesterton, also a convert, who wrote the Father Brown mystery stories. And if you’re not into reading, you can watch the BBC adaptations, which I can assure you are good in summer as well as winter. n