NCRegister:A Priest is Just a Man, Imprinted with a Sacramental Character

I picked The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West off the shelf of Loome Theological Booksellers in Stillwater, Minnesota, flipping it over to look at the back. I was immediately intrigued by the fact that West was an Australian Catholic author. It took me another year to read the book, but I found that it was providential for me to have read during this time of scandal in the Church. It was helpful to read an account representing the state of the Church between World War II and pre-Vatican II where the hierarchy was detached from the day to day harsh realities of the People of God and priests had the same failings as other men. In fact it was quite familiar.

Morris West wrote the novel The Devil’s Advocate a couple of years after he spent time with a priest in the 1950s helping poor children in Sicily. He witnessed the state of the people there, and set his book in a similar setting among the poor, superstitious Italians in the hill country. He also was a witness to the politics of the Vatican under Pope Pius XII, and his novel provides for us the contrast between the bishops and cardinals striving for political power and the ill-educated clergy of the countryside. The stark, cool halls of the officials in the Vatican seem to have nothing in common with the barren, hot hills of the peasants, but somehow it is all the same Church.

It makes one think of St. Paul talking about the various parts of the Body of Christ, but it seems that in the Church the Head has lost touch with the Heart, and many of the seemingly insignificant parts are inflamed and infected.

Read the rest at the National Catholic Register...