Such heavy reading did I find Hughes’ A Popular History of the Catholic Church that only with sheer discipline and determination have I managed to finish it.  Aside from its complicated endless treasury of names, dates, and events which left me quite overwhelmed, I think the impression that struck me the most consistently throughout was how the forces of good and the forces of evil can work side by side within the same entity, whether the Church, an individual, or a moment in history—

the chiaroscuro of human existence:

the Church vomiting forth the Inquisition while in the same breath giving us Thomas and Dominic and Francis;  the intertwining good and evil, sound judgement and disastrous folly in an individual like Leo X; France, 1789-1799, struggling fiercely to overcome political and social injustice and at the same time mercilessly slaughtering the French Church.

Now I see much more clearly how all of life seems to be caught up in the same contradiction that somehow I had come to think was peculiar to me alone.

November 1975

Photo Credits Text: Talarico / Calligraphy: DuBosch / Photography: Bachhuber