Here is Something For the Flannery O Conner Fans

Archbishop George Niederauer of SanFrancisco is not my favorite person right now I admit. I am still awaiting some clarification on what happened there.

However I can't disagree with him on the subject of Flannery O' Conner. Whispers in the Loggia had this great post called Flannery's Prelate. Here is just an excerpt from the Archbishop's great lecture that is at the link:
Flannery O'Connor said of herself as a writer: "I feel that if I were not a Catholic I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything" (p.114). The Church, she claimed, was "... the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable" (p. 90). Why? Quite simply because the Church taught as its central doctrine the Incarnation, the belief that God became human and creaturely, with us, in Jesus Christ. Flannery O'Connor believed that teaching, and, for her, its truth transformed everything in life: She said: "... the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for" (p.92). Thus there follows the clash of consciousness between O’Connor and her audience, the clash between the believers and the non-believers, between contradictory sets of assumptions about human experience.She claimed the Incarnation as the principle of her spirituality: "... if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it" (p.90). But beyond shaping her personal spirituality, Incarnation directed her strategy as a writer. She asserted that, "... the writer has to succeed in making the divinity of Christ seem consistent with the structure of all reality. This has to be got across implicitly in spite of a world that doesn't feel it, in spite of characters who don't live it" (p.290). Incarnation even helps explain an aspect of O'Connor's writing which is particularly challenging for many readers: The grotesque. She said: "The Incarnation makes us see the grotesque as grotesque" (p.227)....

[W]hen her novel, Wise Blood was re-issued, she wrote in an introductory Author's Note: "Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence."