This dissertation examines how the language and moral commitments of Roman Catholicism weave through the work of contemporary American novelist Don DeLillo. Influenced by and in reaction to his Catholic tradition, DeLillo depicts religiously unaffiliated characters who approach their ostensibly secular environment in search of religious meaning, a search unconsciously revelatory of DeLillo's conflictive engagement with American Catholic theology and social practice. Although DeLillo's authorial voice is not aligned with doctrinal surety or liturgical orthodoxy, his novels express Catholic themes, promoting a relational consciousness characterized by an interconnected sense of community and a sacramental approach to the material of the Earth.

This project begins by reviewing the historical foundations of the American Catholic context of DeLillo's work, focusing on the individual's relationship to the community and on sacramental approaches to the contemporary material environment. Subsequent chapters attend to four novels in terms of these issues: Americana (1971) is read as an early effort to pose questions that persist throughout DeLillo's career—questions of death, community, and the individual's relationship to material. White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991) are then read as confronting questions of consumer goods and visual media, respectively. In Underworld (1997), DeLillo turns his attention to consumer waste, suggesting that a community-oriented and sacramentally infused approach to contemporary life can counter the communal and environmental violence generated by an isolated consumer stance toward the world.

Throughout this study, novelistic expressions of theological positions are examined through a method of close reading based on strict attention to the narrative style and historical resonance of the texts reviewed. DeLillo's authorial voice is inflected by a deadpan humor whose tone is both resigned and awe-struck, and this tonal ambivalence is read through textual allusions to papal and extra-ecclesial developments in Catholic theology. This project explores how, in DeLillo's novels, religious resources are used to make meaning of a secular consumer environment, concluding that DeLillo, an avowedly secular man, is the author of profoundly Catholic novels.