Thoughts from the Second Floor Front

II Sunday of Easter / Sunday of Divine Mercy

April 12, 2026

      One of my favorite authors is the late Graham Greene, who comes to mind because his anniversary was this past Friday, Good Friday. Regarded by many as among the greatest writers of the 20^th century, Greene died on April 3^rd in 1991. He left us with stirring novels populated by complex characters to whom readers can return again and again. The Whiskey Priest in The Power and the Glory. Pinky, the young thug in Brighton Rock and his girl Rose. The corrupt and corrupting Harry Lime in The Third Man. Aunt Augusta in Travels with my Aunt. Many of his characters embody the tension we all experience between the Grace available to us and the response we offer to that Grace in the lived reality of our ordinary lives.  

     Greene was convert to the Catholic faith. He wanted to marry a woman, Vivien Daryrell-Browning who was a devout Catholic. She would not marry him unless he became a Catholic. So, he received instruction in the faith (this was before the RCIA existed) and was baptized into the Church. His conversion as you can imagine may not have been generated by the purest of motives but once he became Catholic, he could not be anything else but Catholic. He eventually separated from that woman and they never divorced.  The marriage ended in 1991 with his death.

     Greene often complained when he was identified as a Catholic author claiming instead that he was an author who happened to be Catholic. Deny it as he tried he could not keep his faith out of his fiction. His Catholic faith was an essential element of what he wrote and who he was. 

      The point of all this is to present a point of reflection for your consideration. How is your Catholic faith manifested? Most of us do not write on the level of a Greene; we are given the gift of his insights and his talents. But are we, as Thoreau wrote: condemned to “…live lives of quiet desperation?” That world view seems to be a polar opposite of the Gospel joy we proclaim through this Easter season. Is your faith life recognized?

      At the Easter Vigil many new members were added to our faith, receiving Baptism, Holy Communion. Their decision to enter into the faith ought to serve as a catalyst for us to come to a deeper appreciation of the faith that so many of us received through our families, the so-called cradle Catholics.

       So many of Greene’s characters operate from a Catholic world view. Some do so in a halting and stumbling manner. Some do so heroically and at a great personal cost. The great liturgies of the Easter Triduum unfold for us the mystery of our salvation being achieved through the life giving sacrificial death of Jesus of Nazareth. Our salvation continues to unfold in a mysterious way in the life we live. It is mysterious because none of us can fully anticipate, let alone control, the manner in which our life opens up before us. That does not lead us to be a door mat to the fates but calls on us to engage the world and our life with the power of the faith we have received and which we celebrated so profoundly at Easter. When the opportunity to demonstrate our faith in the world we occupy comes our way this week, and it will, may we have the courage to respond to the grace of the moment and live our faith in a bold and confident manner. 

Faithfully,

Msgr. Diamond