When the appointment of new Detroit auxiliary Bishop Flores was announced, our comments box and emailbox was flooded with good wishes and high praise from people who knew him. It continues – this from a correspondent:

I was in the seminary for a few years, and the last year I was there I had the privilege of Msgr. Flores serving as both vice-rector and my formation director. He was a wise and holy director and the most gifted homilist I have ever heard.

But here’s what you’ll find most interesting. That year Msgr. Flores began teaching a course he titled "Grace and Nature in Modern Catholic Literature". It was the most fascinating – maybe even transformative – class that I took during my formation. We read seven works: Benson’s Lord of the World; Chesterton‘s Ballad of the White Horse; Tolkien’s Return of the King; Greene’s The Power and the Glory; O’Connor’s Wiseblood; Percy’s The Moviegoer; and Hansen’s Atticus. Msgr. Flores not only discussed the books, but brought in supplemental reading from his vast theological knowledge: Aquinas, Augustine, and Newman, but also Kierkegaard and even Neitzsche. How did the concerns of these writers echo or explicate the concerns of theologians and philosophers throughout history? Clearly his two favorites were Greene and O’Connor. It was after completing the class that having sparked my interest in O’Connor I browsed around the web and happened upon your site and blog.

He had a few goals in teaching the course. First was the observation that grace is real, but it generally appears within rather than above the human drama. The novelist has the gift of being able to see and speak about the world as it is – a world offered and transformed by grace (certainly an observation O’Connor made, though maybe others before her as well). Second was the simple point that theology need not only take place in the academic stratosphere, but should touch every aspact of life. Finally, he noted that preaching is always telling a story – ultimately the story of God become man for the sake of our redemption. As he was teaching men preparing for ministry, he thought it beneficial for his students to see how these great artists offered a compelling, imaginative vision of grace working through nature.

Marvelous!

And even better…inspiring.

Why do I always get the most inspired when I have to go off and do other things????