Clearly, I should have been a pre-Vatican II priest, speaking of which let’s pray for our poor Pope Francis.
And seriously, the title is from a quote from Flannery O’Connor, a reader of St. Thomas Aquinas who was anything but a fundamentalist, rigid traditionalist, or “right-wing.” One problem with purporting to “soften” Catholicism–take the teeth and meat out of it, dumb it down, and make it palatable to one and all, meaning one and all who don’t care to examine their consciences too closely (all of us, in other words) is–What do you tell, say the Prodigal Daughter who comes lurching, stumbling and crawling through the doors of the Church, in agony over the state of her soul?
Hand her a Rumi poem? Tell her to burn a smudge stick?
The man or woman in existential and spiritual agony is exactly the person for whom the Church was/is established. That’s why Jesus says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” “Healthy people don’t need a doctor; sick people do.” “Healthy” people can get by on yoga retreats and Leonard Cohen. Sick people are desperate for a confessional.
One of my favorite Flannery O’Connor characters is Father Finn, an old-school priest called to the supposed deathbed of a country mother’s college-educated, virulently atheist son Asbury.
Asbury hopes he can finally have an intelligent conversation (he despises his “ignorant” mother, who supports, feeds, houses, and cares for him), and opens by asking the old priest, “So, what do you think of Joyce?”
“Joyce who?” thunders Father Finn. “Do you say your morning and night prayers?…Do you have trouble with purity?..Who made you?…Are you so ignorant you’ve never heard of the Holy Ghost?”
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