Angelus News | March 22, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 6

Heather King is an award-winning
author, speaker, and workshop leader.
supported and loved her — under the
bus. “In New York, it would be nice
to meet [Baldwin]; here it would not,”
she wrote to a friend. “I observe the
traditions of the society I feed on — it’s
only fair.”
In fact, she was “an integrationist on
principle and a segregationist by taste”:
“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t
like is the philosophizing prophesying
pontificating kind” (among whom she
counted Baldwin, while also applauding
some of his work).
Change should and would come. But
to divide humankind into victims and
oppressors with the oppressors all bad
and the victims all good, O’Connor
well knew, is a lie at least as dangerous
as the lie undergirding racial prejudice.
Some of her favorite protagonists are
nihilistic college grads who try to shame
their elders into socio-political enlightenment,
with deliciously tragicomic
results.
They seldom have jobs, these young
intellectuals. They’re disabled (Hulga
in “Good Country People” has a wooden
leg), or neurasthenic (Asbury in
“The Enduring Chill”), or suffer from
a heart condition (Wesley in “Greenleaf”).
Though adults, they’re supported by
their hard-working, hopelessly backward
mothers. Julian in “Everything
That Rises Must Converge” almost dies
of embarrassment when his mother —
condescendingly to his mind, kindly
to hers — offers a penny to a young
black boy. In “Revelation,” a sullen girl
reading a book called “Human Development”
hurls it at Mrs. Turpin’s head,
whispering “Go back to hell where you
came from, you old warthog.”
We must be “nice,” such clear-eyed
activists insist. We must not offend.
We must enlarge our horizons. No
one must feel “unwelcome.” We must
exercise compassion — though not, of
course, toward the unenlightened.
Based on the criteria of this godless,
self-appointed moral elite, the unenlightened
must instead be forced to be
“good.”
As O’Connor recognized, without
faith such “compassion” eventually requires
us to ignore what is right in front
of our faces, to spout absurd untruths,
to contort every event to fit a templated
narrative, and to be stripped of our right
to like who we like based on Irksome vs.
Non-Irksome or whatever criterion we
darn well please.
Such “tenderness” would destroy a
child in the womb rather than let him
or her be born into poverty. Such tenderness
eventually invites the addicted,
the elderly, and the diminished to kill
themselves. “Let us think for them!” exclaim
the tender. “Surely they wouldn’t
want to be a burden.”
O’Connor was a daily Mass-goer and,
by all accounts, a lifelong celibate.
“I went to St. Mary’s as it was right
around the corner,” she wrote of her
neighborhood church, “and I could
get there practically every morning. I
went there three years and never knew
a soul in that congregation or any of the
priests, but it was not necessary. As soon
as I went in the door I was at home.”
That probably describes the situation
for many of us at our “neighborhood”
church. The Church doesn’t much
welcome anyone, in the way of the social-club
welcome demanded by today’s
aggrieved. It welcomes us as members
of the soul-sick, as those ravenous with
hunger and need of the Eucharist.
Lent is a good time to remember that
Judas, keeper of the purse, was the über
virtue-signaler, primly suggesting giving
money to the poor rather than wasting
it on nard to anoint Jesus. Then he sold
his friend for 40 pieces of silver.
Or as O’Connor once observed: “The
operation of the Church is entirely set
up for the sinner, which creates much
misunderstanding among the smug.”
March 22, 2024 • ANGELUS • 31