With the passing of celebrated storyteller Frank McCourt this week, the world lost more than just a gifted writer. It also lost someone with a deep and complicated connection to the Catholic faith.

Peter Duffy notes in the Wall Street Journal:

Peter Quinn, the novelist and a practicing Catholic, wrote in an email that his friend was neither “contemptuous of believers in general nor Catholics in particular. On a trip we took together in 1998, he went to Mass with me on the Sunday morning that we landed. He respected the fact that I had reached my own peace with the Catholic Church. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he once told me, ‘that you’re raising your kids in the Catholic faith. At least they’ll have a map to follow or throw away. In either case, they’ll know where they are.’?”

That’s what Mr. McCourt had. Even as he described suffering under its thumb, he developed an unbreakable affinity with the church’s history, traditions and literature. He writes in “Angela’s Ashes” about discovering Butler’s “Lives of the Saints” in the library on a rainy afternoon—“I don’t want to spend my life reading about saints but when I start I wish the rain would last forever.” He told an Irish television host in 1999: “I read the ‘Lives of the Saints’ all the time. If you poke me in the middle of the night and say what are you reading, I’ll say, the ‘Lives of the Saints.’?”

Readers will long benefit from his ability to evoke a Catholic milieu that will never exist again. To someone like me who grew up in the post-Vatican II church, it’s a fascinating glimpse of a lost world. “The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New York’s Eve,” he wrote of his childhood home of Limerick, Ireland. In just a few words, we are transported to a time when every schoolchild knew that said feast was celebrated on Jan. 1. The only picture that hung in the McCourt household, he writes, was of Pope Leo XIII in “a yellow skullcap and a black robe with cross on his chest.” How many families have framed portraits of Pope Benedict on the wall?

Mr. McCourt felt it was impossible to fully divorce himself from the church. So when he stood before Pope John Paul II in 2002, accompanying a delegation of 40 mayors from around the world, the little Irish-Catholic boy in him took over. He knelt, took the pontiff’s hand and kissed his ring.

“I got up and he’s looking at me with his dazzling blue Polish eyes and extraordinary complexion,” Mr. McCourt told the Commonwealth Club of California. “I had a feeling he knew. He knew what a fraud and a phony I was. Then I walked away. And I have to admit, as turbulent as my relationship with the church has been (although they don’t know it and they don’t care), I was walking on water practically. I was walking on air.”

You can check out more at the WSJ link.

I once had a close encounter with McCourt myself. I was departing an awards dinner held at the Windows on the World and found myself, improbably, sharing an elevator with producer David Brown (“Jaws,” “The Sting”), his wife (the legendary publisher Helen Gurley Brown) and Frank McCourt. The only other people on the elevator were McCourt’s date, my wife, and me. We all smiled politely at each other as the elevator slid down to the lobby.

All I could think was: “I hope this thing doesn’t get stuck. I have no idea what I’d talk about with these people.”

Less than 30 quiet seconds later, the doors opened and we went our separate ways in the soaring marble and glass lobby of the World Trade Center.

It was one of the more unusual elevator rides of my life. And not just for the company I kept.

It was also the last time I set foot in the Twin Towers.