At holy Mass, the Kiss of Peace seen up close, Flannery O'Connor and Mary McCarthy on transubstantiation

The downloader asked me why. Two Irish women sat down to talk.

Asked what sparked my interest in downloading Michael P Foley's paper, "The Whence and Whither of the Kiss of Peace in the Roman Rite," I wrote:

That's easy. Watching my fellow worshipers at the given time for a long minute at daily and week-end mass waving and smiling at everyone else in the church in a remarkable show.

One can maybe catch one for a friendly smile — maybe, because almost no one wants to do more than catch an eye and get on to the next one. Hands wave like, oh, reeds shaken by the wind, to use a Gospel phrase. Quite a scene.

Enough of quoting myself, something I wrote five minutes ago as if I'd found it in a weathered manuscript.

The mouse roared . . . The Mary McCarthy-Flannery O’Connor exchange is worth remembering, in which the sophisticated McC, lapsed as to her Catholicity, tells O’C, a believer, that the sacramental host is great symbolism, to which O’C., quiet as a church mouse toward the end of a long evening’s conversation, made her “most famous” remark, “an economical swipe at the reductive, liberalizing view of religion,” wrote Paul Elie in a 2007 article reachable then but not now.

(In 2003, however he felt obliged to accuse her of racism and had to be taken to task and rebutted by the National Catholic Register for calling her a racist. A pity.)

O’Connor told a friend about it: 

We went at eight, and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing in such company for me to say.  . . . .  Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most ‘portable’ person of the Trinity.  Now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘”Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”  That was all the defense I was capable of. 

We need to let Flannery O’Connor speak for herself, but let us also consider her comment about her mother and naming a dog Spot:

[She] once told a friend, “I always thought that if [my mother] had a dog she’d name him Spot — without irony. If I had a dog I’d name him Spot, with irony. But for all practical purposes no one would know the difference.”

“By its nature, irony is the most ephemeral of literary devices, and the wit, or malice, or affection it encrypts is inherently fugitive,” continues Paul Mankowski, S.J., in First Things (March 2003).

And while we’re at it, Mankowski, a Chicago Jesuit, remains a study by himself. If you don’t believe me, go here for starts.

Or: all in one place, out of Ignatius Press, San Francisco, look to Jesuit at Large: Essays and Reviews by Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., a 2021 posthumous publication.

More to come about this great man. . . .