Waiting for Godot to Leave

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. This is hard for readers to grasp, for O’Connor’s stories are so shocking, violent, and disturbing that we wonder how they can be about grace. This is because we see grace as being a “nice thing”, like quietly saying grace before meals, like the “graceful” moves of a figure skater, like the “social graces”, which are about soothing and calming people and situations. We really believe the message of all the Scriptures is “Jesus was nice; you be nice, too.” But the Grace of God is a man clothed in rags with a wild gleam in his eye eating locusts in the desert and warning his people to flee from the wrath to come. The Grace of God is the zeal of Phineas, who slew the Israelite and his wife who were flaunting God’s commands. The Grace of God is St. Paul, blinded, knocked down, humiliated. When the hand of God reaches o...

This is part one of what will be posted in two parts on The St. Austin Review Ink Desk . The Beast Advances or The Attack on Reason by Kevin O'Brien Hilaire Belloc, in “The Great Heresies”, pointed to a disturbing feature of the Modern Attack on the Catholic Church: the attack upon Reason. Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than on the internet - yes, on Facebook in particular, but also everywhere on the internet. And though I have written about Facebook before and my on-again off-again love-hate relationship with her, I’m beginning to see that the enemy is not Facebook. The enemy is us! Let me try to categorize the problems I’ve noticed: 1. BEING FORCED TO EXPLAIN THE PUNCHLINE A friend of mine on Facebook can not post even innocuous quotations such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying,” without a barrage of comment box (combox) attacks nitpicking at all sorts of things the quote never intended to convey. In this case, comment...

On the St. Austin Review Ink Desk, Sophia Mason has written an post in which she both pans and praises Facebook. How I empathize with Sophia! As regular readers know, Facebook and I have had a tumultuous relationship. She and I have split a few times after ugly public shouting matches, she pushed me down the stairs once, I have accused her of infidelity, her algorithm had originally sized me up as a loser and drug abuser simply because I was an actor, and so forth. But we’ve settled into something rather permanent of late. Facebook and I are not exactly “married”, nor “single”, we are “in a relationship” and “it’s complicated”. So I do indeed empathize with Ms. Mason over her tendency to love / hate this thing called Facebook. But how much is Facebook as a mode of communication to blame for Facebook’s shortcomings? As the internet blogger Dr. Thursday pointed out to me once, “Objecting to the internet is like objecting to a road or a highway. The internet is simply a pathway to a ...

There is awash in the world today a kind of idealism that’s loosed from its moorings. I suspect this is because the cynicism against which the idealism reacts is so strong and entrenched that it’s provoking reactions that are unrealistic. A case in point is James O’Keefe, a young man who spoke at this year’s American Chesterton Society Conference. O’Keefe is best known as the video journalist who brought down ACORN and who exposed the racism inherent in Planned Parenthood’s abortion agenda by means of undercover videos in which he posed as a pimp or a racist, and elicited responses that were shocking enough to cause a few tremors. He struck us at the Conference as a quixotic idealist carrying on against the windmills of corruption while under assault from the mainstream media, lawyers and other nasty bugbears. However, it was a bit disturbing when, in the Q & A session following his speech, O’Keefe was asked, “How do you justify your technique? You lie to people in your undercover ...

First, I was given the great privilege of recording the official audio version of the Holy Father's new book, Light of the World as published by Ignatius Press, which can be ordered on audio CD or downloaded here . And I said two weeks ago to Jim Morlino , my co-reader for the audio book, "The Pope's comments about condoms will be the comments the press will run with." It did not take much prophetic insight to predict that. The situation is simple: All the Holy Father is saying is that if a man who is steeped in sin to begin with and is having sex for reasons contrary to God's will and the Natural Law, then if this particular man begins to have a pang of conscience that says, "Perhaps getting physical pleasure is not what this is all about. Perhaps I should be concerned about my partner here. Maybe I should use a condom so as to protect my partner from the ravages of disease," this is clearly (as charity and common sense will tell you) a movement in...

The word is “unreal”. I had been looking for this word for a long time. You see, we have a few odd linguistic quirks here in St. Louis, where I live. For one thing, we use the word “hoosier” to mean “urban white trash” – the only place on earth where you’ll find this word used in this way. And when I was growing up we used to use the word “fruit” to mean not what “gay” means now, but to mean “contrived, artificial, self-indulgent in a stupid way”. For instance, the music of Marty Haugen is “fruit”. Catholic Schools Week is “fruit”. Movies on the Hallmark Channel are “fruit”. And for a long time this was the only word I could use to describe what was wrong in the Catholic Church. I had come into the Church having been inspired by the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and so by the time I was Catholic and regularly attending Mass and sending my kids to the parish school and especially after experiencing nine months of purgatory with our RCIA non-faith non-formation no...

We've been talking much lately about "intentional disciples" and of the need for parishes to foster "true discipleship", to encourage the formation of capital D Disciples and not just neo-pagan lukewarm modernists disguised as Christians. The problem is Wormwood pulls up a pew and says to us, in his cloying and flattering tone, "According to most pastors, only five percent of all their parishioners are serious about following Christ. You're one of those. You're a capital-D Disciple. You're an intentional Disciple. You're a true Disciple. These fat church ladies with their pot luck dinners and their parish picnics, they're not even Christians in any meaningful sense of the word. Look at that chubby grocer in the pew beside you. He nods off during the homilies. He's not a True Disciple. Look at that pierced kid at the Teen Mass, with glowing hair and a condom in his pocket. He's not a True Disciple. But you are! You ma...