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Flannery O’Connor Canceled by Catholics?
Let me be bold and say that while there are others worthy of note, the greatest American short story writer is Flannery O’Connor. Her pen was inspired. Her soul is found on every page she ever published. Her commentary can be as biting as a serpent while remaining as beautiful as a piece of stained glass. I take great pride from the fact that she was from Georgia, as I am from Georgia. I take great pride in the fact that she was a Catholic, as I am a Catholic. I take great pride in the fact that she is part of the American canon, as she earned her place. Yet she has been canceled by Catholics at a Catholic university in Maryland that is removing her name from a dorm.
Apparently, when she was a young woman during the Jim Crow Era, Mary Flannery, as she was known as a child, wrote in private correspondence to family and friends some thoughts that “reflected a racist perspective.” It matters not that the president priest of Loyola who is removing her name from the dorm has recognized that O’Connor’s stories–the public art for which she is noted–uphold “the dignity of African American persons” while making “bigots the object of ridicule.” Her sins must be expunged as she is erased from the campus.
This is crazy and depresses me greatly. So instead of focusing solely on what I view as an injustice, I thought I would offer some words on my favorite O’Connor story and ask if anyone else finds her work worthwhile.
I have been thinking a lot lately about “The Enduring Chill,” a story which makes fun of the empty elitism of the main character Asbury who seems to feel his cosmopolitan experiences in New York City transformed him into a better person than his mother who runs a farm in the South. Incidentally, O’Connor shows two black workers on the farm are much smarter than the white Asbury, as no one can tell the young man anything. In his shows of moral superiority, he is full of arrogance, empty of wisdom. O’Connor brilliantly draws the portrait of an individual who would surely call himself “woke” in 2020, while cutting him down to size.
I wish there were writers like O’Connor currently working, though I’m not sure they’d get published in today’s “enlightened” world.
Published in General
It did strike me as exceptionally cowardly, especially since he also (Rightly) lifted O’Conner’s work up as dignifying black people. I would have loved it if he’d made this a “teaching moment” about both tolerance and grace. After all, these are Catholic values. Instead he has let students define a devout adherent to the faith in the most reductionist way possible. It makes little sense to me from a priest.
Feed their souls:
Queen, mother of mercy:
our life, sweetness, and hope, hail.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.
To you we sigh, mourning and weeping
in this valley of tears.
Turn then, our advocate,
those merciful eyes
toward us.
And Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb,
after our exile, show us.
O clement, O loving, O sweet
Virgin Mary.
The Ultimate Cancel Society is the COVID society.
Our very faces have been taken from us. The ability to leave our homes; to enter a store without depriving our lungs of air.
Our businesses are failing, our children in lower income homes are actually dying, with those who do not die expected to “wither.” Food prices are spiking up; incomes are spiking down.
The link between what is happening with a decent writer like Flannery O’Connor and the extreme cancellation against our very selves is a strong one.
Removing an excellent writer removes part of our souls. Removing our facial expressions impairs our ability to be part of a larger society. What is our society currently.
Every time I leave my little enclave of homes nestled against its vast open space, I feel a bit freer. Then I arrive at the parking lot and am greeted by the strange, Death Squad in appearance, county ordained masked faces.
On my return home, I encounter a flashing roadside marquee. It reads “By order of the County Public Health Officer, shelter at home due to pandemic.”
I keep wanting to cement over that obnoxious bit of New Normal over with a bright piece of signage reading “Do as you want, as long as you loot and commit arson. Shelter at home only if you remain decent human beings.”
How would O’Connor incorporate the current insanity into a story? Or would she bother to even pick up a pen. I don’t know if the world around me looks like our Final End Days, but it certainly feels like it.
I am exhausted by the willingness of too many Catholic institutions to yield to the Zeitgeist. What an absolute bit of mealy-mouthed sophistry spoken by Fr. Linnane. Apparently “racial equality,” and not the Logos and the message of forgiveness revealed to us in Christ crucified, is now the highest value at that university. If there can be no redemption – at of all places a Catholic university – for someone like Flannery O’Connor, there can be no redemption for anyone. My comment is offered as an increasingly disillusioned Catholic. Mother Mary, pray for us your poor banished children of Eve!
CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
Take heart, @caroljoy. Flannery would have written something, but she would have also known that God is ultimately in control of the universe. This, too, shall pass.
What should we make of those who are successful in standing up to the same types of cancel efforts: Goya Foods, Trader Joe’s, Bari Weiss, former NY Times editor and the more recent for MSNBC producer? The dead cannot fight back, of course.
I’ve never read any Flannery O’Conner. Is there a recommended collection that I should start with?
Oh, my goodness. Go here.
I am of the conclusion that the only way my household will survive this entire soft martial law situation is to get out of California. God’s presence is sorely needed in this state, but The Dems, not God, control the voting count here.
I get exhausted, too. I look to the church for guidance. This is another disappointment.
It would feature a well-meaning woman (named Karen) who, assured of her own self-righteousness, bullies everyone around her into properly social-distancing and mask-wearing. And after a long day of proudly policing all her neighbors, suddenly finds herself seized with a coughing fit. Sure that this means she’s got the ‘rona, and while thinking back over everyone she’s encountered, wondering which one gave it to her, she drops to her knees in fervent prayer, beseeching Jesus to save her from the WuFlu, and is too distracted with her own mortality to notice the Black Lives Matter activist “peacefully protesting” by breaking into her garage. Finally alerted to the noise, she staggers to the open garage door, where she frightens him. He knocks her over as he runs off, and she bashes her head on the stoop. As she loses consciousness, she has a vision of Jesus riding on a white horse armed with a sharp sword, and sweeping away a great wall of viruses that stand between her and eternity.
Yeah, . . . that’s totally an O’Connor story right there.
My parents were big on musicals, and the Carousel album was on frequently. When I finally saw the movie, I was surprised at how dark it is…the music by itself doesn’t give that impression.
You really are a fan!!! :)
Thank you; I’ve just ordered it.
:: bows humbly ::
I hope you love the stories. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is in most American lit books per twentieth century writers. It’s the one most people have read. Enjoy!
Got this from the History.com website, I guess it can still be validated true or false.
‘The 13th and last of the British colonies, Georgia was the only one to be governed remotely by a Board of Trustees in London for the first 20 years. It was also the only colony to prohibit slavery from its inception—along with lawyers and Roman Catholics’
I thought it interesting in the context of this post and since both @LoisLane and I are from the state. I grew up and all the way through school and 2 years at Georgia Tech in North Georgia and was never acquainted with a Catholic as far as I’m aware. I do believe as Catholics later settled in Georgia they were mostly along the coast.
We are going to be really confused if we keep erasing history.
Erasing history serves a dual purpose. One: it keeps current day students perpetually committed to a goal that they cannot achieve, until the last vestige of the Great White World has been torn down, burned up and placed in the dustbin of non-existence.
It also keeps the current day students from noticing important events occurring right now. Any student who is upset about the name of their dormitory while the cities of America are still smoldering from “peaceful protests” needs a smack across their head.
James Oglethorpe’s bans were very logical at the time. (Oglethorpe led the settlement.) Georgia was a backwater colony that gave the poor and unwanted a place to settle outside of England. This was between South Carolina, a profitable place by the early 1700s, and Florida. If the Spanish invaded north through Georgia, everyone wanted to be sure The settlers’ loyalty was to king, not to pope.
As for lawyers, Oglethorpe just thought they were troublesome people who caused arguments. :)
Educational administrators seem, on the average, to be an exceptionally bad set of people.
Yep. Same path for me. :-) :-)
The production at Lincoln Center was introduced by an apology for the darkness of it, and after watching it, I could see why. I was surprised by it. I don’t think anyone would produce it today. Yet the more I thought about it, Billy’s behavior wasn’t condoned but rather condemned. It was a story that should resonate and be hopeful for Christians. But of course it won’t be either of those things for psychologists. :-)
The new production is nowhere near as dark as the movie.
The music was beautiful as it was written and as it was performed in the newest Lincoln Center production. I’ve heard it all my life (my parents were nuts about the Lerner and Lowe and Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, and I grew up knowing all the songs by heart. :-) )
The Carousel story really got to me, and now I can get neither the story nor the music out of head. It is waking me up at night. :-)
I realized the other day that if there are permanent villains, then there are permanent victims. And that’s where we have stagnated today.
“As a Jew”, I endorse Flannery O’Connor and her belief in the possibility of radical teshuva. By that, I mean repentence, to the extent of being able to redeem past sins by changing future behavior.
This is clearly where her head is at; it is one reason why she is so merciless in her retelling of her own sins in her correspondence and those of her characters in her fiction. Ethically, of course, we cannot truly alter our behavior (and thus redeem our character) until we first search out our deeds and acknowledge our transgressions.
In the Universe of Woke, we will ourselves to ignore our past mistakes, hoping they will just go away.
I second that, most “Catholic” universities have asserted their total institutional independence from the Church in the name of “academic freedom” ever since the Land O’ Lakes Statement in 1967. Saying that a Jesuit university president speaks for the Church is a bit like saying The Lincoln Project speaks for all conservatives.
FTFY.
What stuns me is the utter lack of moral authority here. He’s the president of a Catholic University. Why is he drawing on Social Justice Warriors for his morality? What, precisely, makes him more Catholic than I am? I’d probably be more willing to cite a pope or a doctor of the church (since certain dudes from Hippo or Aquino had incredible insight) as an evil protestant than this clown, who is basically a generic leftist who could have been taken from any university in the US. He’s not even bothering with Catholic trappings for his Leftism.
Fundamentally, he’s an NPC.
In video games, the developers will often have Non-Player Characters that exist for players to interact with – the princess you rescue, the shopkeeper, the person giving you a quest. They have limited numbers of lines based on their programming, and no freedom to choose. As games have become more complicated, we have moved to much more dynamic NPCs that people feel attachment toward, but fundamentally they are just lines of code similar to the old NPCs with just a handful of lines that repeat. He is stuck on script, acting just like any other leftist.
Instead of “bad”, I’d say “weak.”
I definitely get what you are saying, but the president of Loyola is still a priest. The Republicans of the Lincoln Project want to destroy all Republicans and put Democrats in place. They use the term “Republicans” now for fundraising purposes only. This priest, on the other hand, has not become a Baptist drinking fruit juice at communion or said he yearns for the world to be run by Protestants. Pope Francis himself is a Jesuit. We cannot separate this order from the church. It is of the church. Students don’t know anything. Flannery O’Connor was rejected by Catholics in leadership positions.
I get what you’re saying, but I disagree.
While I’m not a huge gamer, it seems that an NPC can do no damage. While he’s “stuck on script”, this president did not do a harmless thing in my mind. Rather, he has contributed to the idea that all Catholic universities are just hollowed out institutions that resemble the rest of the Left. Whatever we say about academic freedom, Catholic universities are extensions of the church. That is why the president of Loyola is a priest. So what does this say about the church itself? How hollow is it becoming?
I do not know where to go for refuge from the NPC assault on everything I deem important.
Another interesting thing to do… Read some 5 star reviews for O’Connor’s collection of short stories on Amazon, and then read some 1 star reviews. It shows a massive divide in how one understands her work and how the world reacts to literature today. The sentiments in the 1 star review are repeated by multiple people who read the stories. I think they are the sort of people who started the petition at Loyola.
This is the first 5 star review on Amazon:
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2018
“It would be easy to write stories about self-righteous, bigoted, condescending, self-assured people getting what we think they deserve. But then, by taking pleasure in those stories we would become the thing we hate.
Flannery does something much more difficult. She writes stories about self-righteous people getting what they least deserve and least believe they need: divine mercy.
Her best stories are not so much about justice for the oppressed as about mercy for the oppressors. She understands that the same divine movement that brings justice for the oppressed also offers mercy to their oppressors. Her God is, in the Thomistic sense, simple. His justice is his mercy.
Finally, I think an honest reading of Flannery will reveal that most of us are like her characters — we least deserve what we most need.”
This is the first one star review on Amazon:
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2020
“Everytime I came across the N word my stomach turned and I could not read on. And it’s not just once, or twice it all through the book . The editor should gave taken it out and replace it. I could NOT read past the second story, I kept flipping the pages to try and move on but there it was agsin…the N word. I am sorry I discovered this writer the book ruined my Sat”
I’d argue that to do harmful things to people…and to institutions, and to total societies…because of weakness, IS a form of badness.