On the back flap of The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s author bio states that before he became a writer he converted to Catholicism. Before he began writing about a search, he conducted his own. Biographical literature on Walker Percy includes his quotations on the matter of his conversion. When asked why he joined the Church, Percy answered, “I believe what the Catholic Church proposes is true.” For a man who had experienced the search that Binx embarked on himself and found an answer, it is impossible that it was not in the back of the author’s mind that the answer to Binx’s despair was found in the Catholic Church.
The novel’s closing paragraph leaves Binx pondering a man’s motives for entering the Catholic parish on Ash Wednesday. He wonders if he is there on a mundane task, or because he believes is God is present in the building. Perhaps, he wonders, he may be coming for a routine errand and leaving with God’s grace anyway. Although Binx concludes that it is impossible to know this one man’s motivation, Walker Percy certainly knew that Binx was in the right place to receive grace. Given Percy’s own persuasion towards the Catholic Church, he certainly wrote Binx in the direction of the Church.