At 18 years of age he [Hemingway] volunteered to be a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. It was there one night on the front lines that an Austrian trench mortar shell exploded just three feet away from Hemingway, cruelly injuring him as 227 pieces of shrapnel tore into his legs. Soaked in blood and unsure if he would live or die, the Protestant in a Catholic country found himself praying for the intercessions of “Our Lady and various saints.”


Crucially, an Italian priest happened upon the shelled soldiers hanging onto life and anointed them in the rite of extreme unction. In Hemingway’s Faith, Mary Claire Kendall notes that “Hemingway considered July 8, 1918, a day of spiritual rebirth. It was the day he had stared down death and was ‘anointed’ and absolved of his sins.” From then on, he called himself Catholic.'