Sunday Morning is a wonderful poem, and lines from it have occasionally popped into my mind at odd moments over the years...
The letter from Fr. Hanley is very interesting. 1977. This was not a great time for the Church, but there were still good priests and devout laypeople and it sounds as if he was fortunate enough to find them.
I know this is probably a silly consideration, but I have always worried about artistic converts - that is, people attracted by that aspect of the Church’s vision of the world - after the total collapse of church art, music and language following VatII. I know Graham Greene basically left because of that, and I have always been glad that some illustrious artistic converts - such as Edith Sitwell - didn’t live to see the “stripping of the altars.”
I always had my doubts about Graham Greene. In fact I remember writing an essay for a Catholic literary magazine while I was in college, questioning his orthodoxy.
The Power and the Glory is certainly a fascinating book, but there is something not quite right in all of Greene’s work, IMHO.
As a boy, he was always looking for a way to be out of step with everyone else—the impulse to be perversely different. In his early years he found it in Catholicism, which was the great bugaboo of the English. I think he loved the idea of offending people. Later he found it in Communism, at least that’s my reading of The Ugly American and later work.
Hard to forget “Death is the mother of beauty.”