A Year with Fr Rutler
By Fr George William Rutler
Sophia Institute Press, 744pp, £200/$250
About time last year I flew to New York with a single purpose: to ask Fr George Rutler to write an “Agony Priest” column for the Catholic Herald. Considering Father’s decades as a columnist, television host, and general man-of-the-cloth about town, it wasn’t the sort of business I should attempt to conduct over email. This was the first time we’d met, and I quickly realised the legends were all true.
Father, dressed in his cassock and a cozy Irish sweater, found me shivering on the stoop of that grand five-storey townhouse he calls a rectory. I followed as he glided past the piano and up the spiral staircase, with its Persian carpeting and stately balustrade. We moved through one room that he used as a studio for his paintings. Then we passed through the library, where I spied a bust of the saint-to-be John Henry Newman. We settled in the smoking room, which is decorated with a few stuffed heads of big game. I counted some dozen pipes in stands.
