“Oh, just one more thing.” After an hour of incidental conversation on September 6, 1981, Terence Cardinal Cooke (1921-1983) mentioned as an aside that at my ordination two days later it might be good to have a few guards to prevent any difficulties. Hierarchs of the Episcopal Church objected to my ordination, since they had … Read more
I began my seminary studies by flying to Rome the same day Pope John Paul II returned from his first apostolic visit to the United States. Some published reports implied that I had been piled into his craft, but I was on the flight behind his, and I definitely had not been kidnapped. The early … Read more
As a summer student in 1967, I banged the heavy knocker on the old door of the Gothic revival building on St. Giles Street in Oxford. Consuelo Vanderbilt had been a neighbor after her divorce from the duke of Marlborough. St. Edmund Campion once walked those acres often when he was at St. John’s College. … Read more
From the time I began studies in Rome in 1979, a matronly lady unknown to me often attended Mass in our college chapel near the Trevi Fountain. She would arrive gingerly in a housedress on a bicycle, with loaves of bread in the basket. One day after preaching I was invited to tea at her … Read more
In the late 16th century Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. Benjamin Franklin modified that: A soldier dies for his country, while a diplomat lies for it. Vernon A. Walters was a soldier often in the line of fire and … Read more
To call Tubby Clayton “Philip” would be like calling Babe Ruth “George.” Born in Queensland in 1885, Tubby’s parents returned to their native England when he was two. “I decided to accompany them.” He was just ten years younger than Chesterton, whom he knew as an old boy of St. Paul’s School in London. Not … Read more
In the 1935 film The Crusades, there is a breathless moment when Loretta Young pleads with Henry Wilcoxon, playing Richard the Lion Heart, “You gotta save Christianity, Richard! You gotta!” Though not a high point in cinematic art, the line reminds me of how so many spoke to Mother Teresa, now Blessed. All who knew … Read more
In 1940 four French teenaged boys followed a dog into the cave of Lascaux and discovered nearly 600 sophisticated paintings and 1,500 engravings almost 17,000 years old that moved the elegantly stubborn soul of Andre Malraux to factor the possibility of a higher hand in the human condition. My first confrontation with the soul splashed … Read more
“The less women fuss about themselves, the less they talk to other women, the more they try to please their husbands, the happier the marriage is going to be.” The audacious femininity of Dame Barbara Cartland (1901-2000) was more radically feminist than the feminists she infuriated. She ran cosmetics and health food corporations (honey was … Read more
For Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose student and literary executor Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe had been, philosophy is not a thing but an action, rather the way Plato called it the highest form of music, and Elizabeth Anscombe acted upon that, moving from the utilitarian and Kantian concepts of ethics rooted in obligation to a revival of … Read more
Having known Edward Piszek for nearly 15 years, my mistaking him for the groundskeeper of the Colorado retreat house where we first met still seems understandable. He stood apart from the rest of my audience, arranging folding chairs in a work shirt and overalls. He had noticed that someone needed help and he helped. That … Read more
When I was a curate in Our Wall Street parish, Josephine Cullen was the housekeeper. After more than 30 years working there, she moved uptown to the same job in the Church of Our Saviour, where I sometimes visited her for tea—her Celtic penicillin that sustained her until death in 2003. Neither of us had … Read more
Cloud of Witnesses: W. H. Auden George W. Rutler Delusion thinks that the self is a steady axle, and everyone else spins about in the turmoil of change and its toll on the flesh. W. H. Auden was only a few years older than I am now when in my early 20s he seemed to … Read more
My grandmother spoke of Cousin Lizzie often and received letters from her hometown of Macclesfield, a Cheshire town in England, all the long distance to New Jersey. That was when the Atlantic Pond was the length of a galaxy. I was barely voting age when I met Cousin Lizzie in 1967. She was older and … Read more
“What would you do if Henry VIII stepped out of that frame?” asked King Edward VII of his friend Herbert Vaughan, S.J., in the royal picture gallery. Father Vaughan paused not: “I would ask the ladies to leave the room.” A portrait of Cuthbert Aikman Simpson by Graham Sutherland, with his mortarboard and inseparable cigarette, … Read more
“You will make an excellent wife and mother,” replied the handwriting expert when Monsignor Florence Daniel Cohalan responded to a newspaper advertisement for free analysis of signatures. His penmanship would require a Rosetta Stone for deciphering, but the confusion was because Florence had been named for the Saint Abbot of Bangor in County Down. His … Read more
My recollections of college are inseparable from New England snow. Our songs were about “the clanging bells, the crush of feet on snow” and “the wolf-wind wailing at the doorways.” I never thought the cold too cold because I was too young for common sense about the senses. Barely had I turned 16 when I … Read more
Call her Miss Irwin, for in the nearly ten years she was my parish secretary I never heard anyone, save her brother, call her Caroline. It was as if “Miss” was the name bestowed with the lustral waters of the Methodist Church whose hymnodic fellowship she left in youth to embrace Anglicanism, which the Methodists … Read more
This is the time to put a few cats among the pigeons. I homophonically cast among these pigeons the parish priest who is obliged by the current liturgical books to worship Almighty God in pidgin English. While I am in no rush for the liturgy in the local vernacular, since there are more than 60 … Read more
Miguel de Unamuno said that a temple is the place where people go to weep. If all the tears shed in a parish church could be bottled, I think the oceans would look small. All tears. Not only of grief, for some are shed raucously at weddings and more softly when a baby is held … Read more
