Spiritus Monday

My favorite expression of our cultural struggle with religion is Flannery O'Conner's 'Wise Blood'. As a Catholic, a literature aficionado, and a firm believer that irony, satire, and deep faith can indeed coexist - how could I ask for anything more in a novel?

The key character, Hazel Motes, is the perfect skewer of the orthodoxy that can animate secular people to the point of lunacy. And these days, reading the news, it's hard to tell who seems more self-righteous - the people attempting to insert more religion into public life, or the people trying to keep it out.

Today we learned that the first campaign stop for Senator Bill Frist in the run-up to winning the Republican nomination for 2008 was a rally sponsored by the Family Research Council. The connection between this religious organization and the rules governing parliamentary procedure is mysterious to me, but it's enough to get the usual suspects worked into a lather.

Frist's cozying up to the bible thumpers might be too much. But the Democrats should be careful. In their attempt to thwart perceived 'zealotry' of fundamentalists they could easily alienate the vast center of America, which has never lost it's more quiet faith.

And among us papists, circumstantial evidence suggests that attendance could be on the upswing - buoyed by not only the death of John Paul II; but also by the news of Pope Benedict's message of continued optimism - which will only be unexpected to those who bought into standard the media line about his callous conservatism.