This coming Aug. 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u201cPassover,\u201d\u009d to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life. In the 50 years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age 39, O\u2019Connor\u2019s literary genius has been widely celebrated. Then, with the 1979 publication of The Habit of Being, her collected letters, another facet of Miss O\u2019Connor\u2019s genius came into focus: Mary Flannery O\u2019Connor was an exceptionally gifted apologist, an explicator of Catholic faith who combined remarkable insight into the mysteries of the Creed with deep and unsentimental piety, unblinking realism about the Church in its human aspect, puckish humor\u201d\u201dand a mordant appreciation of the soul-withering acids of modern secularism.<\/p>\n
Miss O\u2019Connor\u2019s sense that ours is an age of nihilism\u201d\u201dan age suffering from by a crabbed sourness about the mystery of being itself\u201d\u201dmakes her an especially apt apologist for today…<\/p>\n
[She believed the world’s]…darkness is rendered darker still by late modernity\u2019s refusal to recognize its own deepest need. For as Miss O\u2019Connor put it in a 1957 lecture, \u201cRedemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n