This was sent to me a while ago by a friend
who is a Benedictine monk. It is part of an interview with the famous American Catholic writer, Walker Percy. I agree with my friends assessment:
"This piece by Walker Percy is
wonderful."
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In a piece called “Questions They Never
Asked Me,” collected in Conversations with Walker Percy, Percy
said some things which relate to our current malaise.
Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A. Bad.
Q: No. I mean are you liberal or
conservative?
A: I no longer know what those words mean.
Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an
open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do
you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q: How is such a belief possible in this day
and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there?
There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism,
Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.
Q: To say nothing of Judaism and
Protestantism.
A: Well, I would include them along with the
Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude,
for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is too much trouble, far too
strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it
and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is
a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one
should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite
delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything
less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually
grabbed a holt of God and would not let go until God identified
himself and blessed him.
Q: But isn’t the Catholic Church in a mess
these days, badly split, its liturgy barbarized, vocations declining?
A: Sure. That’s a sign of its divine
origins, that it survives these periodic disasters....
Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your
fellow Christians, to say nothing of Ku Kluxers, ACLU’ers, northerners,
southerners, fem-libbers, anti-fem-libbers, homosexuals, anti-homosexuals,
Republicans, Democrats, hippies, anti-hippies, senior citizens.
A: That’s true — though taken as individuals
they turn out to be more or less like oneself, i.e., sinners, and we get
along fine...
Q: How do you account for your belief?
A: I can only account for it as a gift from
God.
Q: Why would God make you such a gift when
there are others who seem more deserving, that is, serve their fellowman?...
A: You want me to explain it? How would I
know? The only answer I can give is that I asked for it, in fact demanded it.
I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this
life and in this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without
demanding a gift commensurate with the offense. So I demanded it. No doubt
other people feel differently.
Q: But shouldn’t faith bear some relation to
the truth, facts?
A: Yes. That’s what attracted me,
Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that
other religions are more or less false.
Q: You believe that?
A: Of course.
(Here ends the citation from Walker Percy.)
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