Ladies and gentleman, John C. Wright:
If I may be droll, allow me to recommend to my fellow science fiction and fantasy novelists that they become Catholic merely to increase their chance of writing a novel of lasting worth, power, and beauty, on the grounds that we Catholics see the cosmos as a sacramental temple whose stained glasses are lit with supernal light streaming in from beyond, and where the many-colored light touches, enchantment, magic, wonder and all the sacred things which give life richness spring up like elfin flowers, like the moly herb that wipes the lies of the eyes away, or like trees whose leaves are for the healing of nations: and like a wind in the stars we hear, far above the mystic horns of elfland blowing, the deeper magic ring in choirs of angelic song whose breath is the breath of life.
I just…I have zero idea what to say to this. None. My gob has been given so thorough a smacking by the awfulness of this sentence as to leave me cognitively inert. Thus I shall just sit here, twitching gelatinously in a puddle of my own drool….
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I believe the more pithy translation of that sentence would be, "Catholics: we'll believe almost anything."
yeah, I know some Catholics who believe that.
My issue isn't so much with the Catholicism but with the florid, preening, self-impressed lunacy expressed in this sentence….
It's not Catholicism I'm noting, it's the fact that more than a few RCs, thinking we heathen Protestants somehow lack artistry (or something), whereas the Catholic way is beautiful and connected to the universe (or something).
Yeah, I kinda dig the sentiment, but I think that… sentence… would give Strunk a seizure.