A key theme at this summer’s Tablet Literary Festival was the meaning of the term “Catholic writer”. The great Irish dramatist Brian Friel, who has died at the age of 86, was not an evangelical Catholic writer, in the manner of Evelyn Waugh, nor did he plunder its doctrines for plot twists, as did Graham Greene. But – though he rejected doctrine and practice – Friel, in common with his great friend and contemporary Seamus Heaney, was a writer whose vocabulary, subject matter and themes always remained visibly stamped by the faith in which, as the son of a schoolmaster, and himself a one-time seminarian at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, he was immersed. This religious influence was explicit in his first mature play, The Enemy Within (1962), a bio-drama