Word: priestly
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...else fails with such devastating charm, with such splendid success. Of all the failed Irishmen, none carries down the broken standard of his race more convincingly than the failed Irish priest. Dublin Novelist and Playwright Richard Power has written a funny, rueful little classic about the last days of 63-year-old Father Conroy, whose sudden dying is less a natural act than a winsome acknowledgment of his own obsolescence-and perhaps that of his country as well...
Impelled by premonitions of his own death, the priest revisits his childhood home and pays calls on relatives he has not seen in years. Most of them belong among the Irish categories of the spiritually dead. His sister, characteristically, after one memorable lovemaking holiday, lovelessly married another man and has lived out her life as anticlimax...
Assessing his life, Father Conroy sees that he has been a sleepwalker among sleepwalkers, mending, patching, temporizing with a world that has been deteriorating as inexorably as his body. Playing priest like a character part, he has simply avoided living, allowing Ireland's failure elitists-the drunks, the loafers-to recognize in him their kindred spirit. He has not even been able to fail grandly. The one rebel he has deliciously identified with, a protégé who once ran away with the canon's silver, has ended up by becoming a trivial middle-aged success...
GUIDELINE (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Hatred and tension between black and white and ways to dispel such troubles are the subjects under discussion on "Race and the Church: A Priest...
...alone, and many people are slightly afraid of me. I don't belong to any specific religious community. I have no real home, I have nothing. But I have great faith in the divine structure of the church, and I want to be just a priest in Africa. And if, despite my wishes, my presence here seems extraordinary to the outside world, then I want to profit from this to help the people here...