What a feast it is to read Fr George William Rutler’s recent collection of essays, He Spoke to Us (Ignatius), first aired in on-line Catholic journals. Fr Rutler, a parish priest in Manhattan, is a writer and preacher well-known beyond the confines of his parish. The trademark of his essays is to assemble a seemingly quixotic mixture of people and events in order to show the divine hand at work behind our human follies and fancies.
Underneath his wit, erudition and ironic style lies a deeply orthodox pastor who reads the often dismal signs of the times but, as in the Gospel story of the travellers to Emmaus which he relates, lives with Christian hope burning within him. Writing in Crisis magazine in 2012, Fr Rutler states: “We are not a Christian nation now... We can dance to Caesar’s intolerable music, but he will call the tune. We can feast with Caesar, but he will soon feast on us. We can laugh with Caesar, but he will soon laugh at us... There is abundant laughter in the mouth of the foolish.”
