I have always believed that no Catholic with a sound understanding of his faith, which represents the ultimate in realistic thinking and a realistic view of the world, should be shocked by anything. For this reason, the recent contretemps between the President of the United States and Pope Leo XIV left me completely unaffected. Donald Trump is not a Catholic and the Pope in Rome serves in persona Christi, the 367th temporal embodiment of the Lord before the Second Coming.

I believe further that a great many devout Catholics devote too much attention to whoever it is who happens to be serving as the Vicar of Christ at any given moment and that it is theologically wrong to treat him as an international celebrity, as it has been the custom of Catholics to do in the postwar era. The chief intellectual, spiritual, and (I believe) supernatural influence behind my conversion 34 years ago was Flannery O’Connor, whose  letters constitute my principal bedside reading and which I know backward and forward, more than well enough to be able to say with pretty fair surety that she scarcely – if ever – refers in them to any particular Pope, let alone a sitting one, though The Habit of Being is in part a comprehensive introduction to the nature of Catholic........

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