fr Richard Ounsworth OP, who teaches Scripture and Greek in Blackfriars, Oxford, and who is concurrently pursuing a doctorate in the typology of the Letter to the Hebrews, shares his reflection on a priestly figure whom he considers to be "a human hero":"Glancing through a list of fictional priests on Wikipedia, I am struck by how many of them are either wicked or foolish. This is especially true of the more recent examples, and it confirms my impression that today’s popular culture casts the priest either as the villain, sinister instrument of a secretive and manipulative Vatican, or as the drunken idiot, out of touch with the real world and doltish in his refusal to recognise the reality of modern man.
On the other hand, who are our heroes? Wizards, time-travelling aliens and superheroes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Harry Potter, and am almost breathless with excitement waiting for the next instalment of Doctor Who … but these heroes are difficult to emulate. I will never have a Tardis, never have superhuman strength, and don’t have an owl to deliver my letters.
But there is one hero, and a priest, who has always inspired me, and who in my more optimistic moments at least I might hope one day to be like in some way, and that is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown: a man of transparent and instinctive goodness and immense compassion, a seeker after truth, and utterly unassuming. In the stories, Father Brown finds himself drawn into investigating crimes, not entirely unlike Sherlock Holmes (another great love of mine). Unlike Holmes, however, Father Brown’s brilliant solutions are not found through cold logical deduction but through a profound insight into humanity.
And it is because he is a priest that he has this insight. As he says to Flambeau – the villain that Father Brown converts and turns into his sidekick – in The Blue Cross, he spends a great deal of his time listening to people’s sins. So, of course, he knows what people are like. He has a great gift of empathy, and one imagines he must have been a wonderful confessor. He’s also a good Catholic theologian, who knows that true faith is reasonable, and his solutions come from this combination of reasonableness and compassion.
I suppose, though he never says so, that these are also the things that led him to become a priest. He seems an absolutely selfless man, not fascinated by himself like so many modern heroes with their endless navel-gazing and pampered vanity, not needy for praise or understanding. Instead, he is fascinated by other people, and by the wonders of the created order – fascinated by their mystery and yet their comprehensibility. This fascination leads him to love the truth, and to minister to every human being that comes his way, without distinction.
Father Brown is a true hero, the more so for being so truly human. This hero is a priest, and it is as a priest that he is a hero. I like to think he would have made a good Dominican.
Most of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories are available free on the internet, for example at this site. I urge you to read them."
Thanks for this, Father. The first fictional priest I remember wanting to emulate was the Bishop of Digne in Les Miserables, with his willingness to trust and love whomever came into his orbit, no matter how mistrusted and rejected by society. It was that model of compassion and mercy (demonstrated in its effects on the life of Jean Valjean) that I wanted to emulate, and that led me to consciously choose to follow the religion in which I was brought up.
ReplyDeleteCole Matson
The Unicorn Triumphant: http://colematson.com
I too have always loved Fr Brown - and enjoy much the same things about him that fr Richard does.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourite lines is the comment which he makes right at the end of 'The Man in the Passage', when he is asked by a Judge how he recognized his own reflection in a mirror when two other men did not : "Really, my lord, I don't know . . . unless it's because I don't look at it so often."
It took me some time, as a schoolboy, to work that one out; but I finally came to see that what he was saying was at least partly that we can confuse ourselves about ourselves precisely by being too taken up with ourselves . . . that the little priest, who probably only looks in the mirror once a day to brush his hair recognizes his outline in a mirror (which he doesn't know is there) immediately, whilst two other, much men, whose obvious vanity probably makes them look in mirrors all the time, do not recognize themselves in that unexpected mirror because they are faced with what IS, and not what they want to see.
In other words, that self-deception can be the unwitting product of self-absorption; which might seem to be opposed to the principle of regular self-examination. In fact, though, it seems to me that what Fr Brown is teaching is that remorselessly honest scrutiny of oneself is essential, if one is not to be deceived by oneself.
'Gnothi Seauton', in fact ! (Sorry, the comment box won't accept Greek characters !)
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