I was reading Heather King’s “Credible Witness” column in my little Magnificat devotional the other day. Miss King is a contemplative laywoman in Los Angeles, and I picture her sitting on a spur of the Santa Monica Range, perhaps on Cahuenga Peak itself. She perches above the famous Hollywood sign, looking over the City of Los Angeles, the largest diocese in the United States. She looks over the Universal Church from her post, thinking and praying over the "Big Picture".
Miss King’s “credible witness” to the Catholic faith this month is Sir Alec Guinness. You know him as Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. But long before he took up lightsaber and monastic cowl, he starred in The Detective, in which he played GK Chesterton’s Father Brown. Guinness was leaving the set in France one afternoon, still clad in his actor’s clerical soutane, when a little boy darted up to him. Mon Pere, he babbled, “I want to tell you about my day at school!” And for several minutes the atheist-Anglican actor and the little Catholic boy walked hand in hand, discussing the day.
