In Which Flannery O'Connor Takes It To The Streets

Oh. my. gosh Flannery, you have said it better than I could ever have said it if I sat at my keyboard like a monkey typing for 1,000 years.

... All your dissatisfaction with the Church seems to me to come from an incomplete understanding of sin. ... what you seem actually to demand is that the Church put the kingdom of heaven on earth right here now, that the Holy Ghost be translated at once into all flesh. The Holy Spirit very rarely shows Himself on the surface of anything. You are asking that man return at once to the state God created him in, you are leaving out the terrible radical human pride that causes death. Christ was crucified on earth and the Church is crucified in time. ... The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and couldn't walk on the water by himself. You are expecting his successors to walk on the water. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs ...

Flannery O'Connor, from one of her letters

via (again) Happy Catholic (I'm like Ace of Spades to her Hot Air)