George Weigel

   Her fiction may occasionally get the chop in politically correct 21st-century American high schools. But as Benjamin Alexander writes in the preface to a new collection of her letters, Flannery O’Connor’s place in the pantheon of American short story writers seems safe, up there with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. (I’d be tempted to drop Hemingway from the canon, but that’s a matter for another day.)

Immediately after news broke on Jan. 12 that retired Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Robert Sarah had written a book on the crisis of the priesthood in the 21st-century church, online hysteria erupted – which rather underscored the prudence of a New Year’s resolution I had recommended to concerned Catholics in a Jan. 1 column: “Resolve to limit your exposure to the Catholic blogosphere.”

During the 2001 Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who’d suffered through a lot of synodal speechifying and small-group discussions over the years, made a trenchant observation: “Jesus Christ didn’t intend his Church to be governed by a committee.”

Out on the Kansas plains, he was just turning 21 when the Second Vatican Council promulgated its “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” (Lumen Gentium) and its “Decree on the Pastoral Office of the Bishops in the Church” (Christus Dominus). So it’s unlikely that the fathers of Vatican II had Charles Joseph Chaput in mind when they described the ideal diocesan bishop in the third millennium of Christian history – an evangelist, sanctifier and governor who would accept those weighty responsibilities so that the gospel might be proposed for the salvation of the world.