From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Oscar Wilde, whose flamboyant homosexuality shocked 19th century Britain, has won an unexpected endorsement by the Vatican.
The Holy See's official newspaper has praised the playwright and poet as a "lucid analyst of the modern world".
Wilde, who was jailed for acts of gross indecency with Lord Alfred Douglas and later converted to Catholicism, has been regarded by the Catholic Church in the century since his death as a dangerous degenerate and dissolute nonconformist. But on Thursday, L'Osservatore Romano declared that the author of The Importance Of Being Earnest was more than "an aesthete and a lover of the ephemeral".
Thanks to Brian for the title of the post and the link.
Fascinating!
ReplyDeleteAmazing!
ReplyDeleteGreat! Maybe we'll put him on our calendar of saints.
ReplyDeleteOrmonde, that's the next step. Will the picture above be the official portrait?
ReplyDeleteMaybe Benny has fond memories of playing Cecily Cardew in a Hitler-Jugend production of "Importance"? His first lace.
ReplyDeleteLapin, you are wicked. Poor Benny. He broke his wrist at his Alpine retreat, you know.
ReplyDeleteWell, with the 'sanctification' or what ever it is called(I have no memory) of Cardinal Newman, the dam has broken... Who will be next after Wilde. Perhaps we could come up with a list, in alphabetical order of course...
ReplyDeleteSusan, that's an idea for a post. Who is your first choice to be included in the calendar of the Episcopal Church?
ReplyDeleteNowadays he wows the College of Cardinals with his Lady Bracknell.
ReplyDeleteI'm just the idea woman... You're the librarian...
ReplyDeleteAnd this is why I don't blog. Can't get any further than the idea. BTW, I was thinking only of the next RC saint.
Lapin, who knew that the College of Cardinals could be wowed?
ReplyDeleteSusan, should I limit the choices to dead Roman Catholics? I don't think so. That's too limiting.
Further thoughts. Wilde was convicted of acts of gross indecency with London rent boys, not with Lord Alfred. The novelist Ronald Firbank also died an RC: maybe they could take a look at him. Firbank was author of Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (the Cardinal expires naked in his own cathedral, exhausted by the exertion of pursuing a playful choirboy) and The Flower Beneath the Foot, one of whose characters is a saint, the only adornment of whose cell is the framed text "I Would Lay Pansies at Jesus' Feet" Just a suggestion. Both novels were published in the 1920's.
ReplyDelete