The Catholic American
I am a Catholic American. When I was a little kid, knee high to a trilobite, some folks still had a problem with that. My mother was one of them. As long as I was a Catholic like my father (and her own mother as a little girl in Ireland and on the lower East Side), I couldn't be a real American like her father, a bookbinder replaced by a machine
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note John Bostwick's remark that
he always feels a moment of alarm seeing
a picture of you as it seems to be himself
I suggest that in your hagiographies you may
both find therefore bilocation ascribed to
you (should things go that far)and with some
not entirely fanciful basis therefore
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As for Joseph Ratzinger, I do find his mind alert and incisive, though I am neither catholic nor orthodox nor any easy label...
Reading this post, I felt like I was in my student flat again, with the radio on, listening on the BBC to one of Alistair Cooke's "Letters from America"...
That same kind of sweet sad, mournful dolorous tone of... some intelligent encounter or aching beauty?
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Amerika, du hast es besser
als unser Kontinent, der alte.
Hast keine verfallene Schlösser
und kein Basalte.
Dich stört nicht im Innern
zu lebendiger Zeit
unnützes Erinnern
und vergeblicher Streit.
Benutzt die Gegenwart mit Glück,
und wenn nun eure Kinder dichten,
bewahre sie ein gut Geschick
vor Ritter-, Räuber- und Gespenster-geschichten.
America, thy lot is better
than this old continent's, our own.
No ruined castles thee enfetter,
no lava turned to stone.
Nor useless memory
nor futile strife
perturb thee deeply
in the midst of life.
To present happiness give way!
And once your children start to write,
may fate be kind and keep away
all tales of robber, ghost, and knight.
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