Three Notes

I value going for a coffee on Saturday mornings after Confession; I sit and read the papers.

Two articles in this morning's The Weekend Australian were of interest, especially given their juxtaposition above and below each other: an article about Oscar Wilde as a struggling believer, plus one about the imminent breakdown of relations between the Anglican 'Communion' and the Episcopalians in the U.S. - the same issue of (im)morality bedevilled that playwright then as bedevils that ecclesial body now.

Wilde was received into the Church on his deathbed (and many other fin de siècle decadents became Catholics too), while too many Anglicans, lured by mirages, wander ever further into the desert of infidelity: "we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". How wickedly true for the newspaper to quote another bon mot of Wilde, so applicable to the woes of the C. of E. and its revolting offspring: "the Catholic Church is for saints and sinners only - for respectable people, the Anglican church will do." ROTFL!

On a slightly different note, I was struck by a line in Our Lady's Hours at Sext: Benefac, Domine, bonis et rectis corde (Ps 124:4) - "Do good, Lord, to the good and the upright of heart". This, I now recall, is the response the Paris Breviary used in place of the Roman Retribuere dignare, Domine, omnibus nobis bona facientibus, propter nomen tuum, vitam æternam. Amen. As the matching versicle in both editions suggests, Oremus pro benefactoribus nostris.