The Mary McCarthy-Flannery O’Connor exchange is worth remembering, in which the sophisticated McC, lapsed as to her Catholicity, tells O’C, a believer, that the sacramental host is great symbolism, to which O’C., quiet as a church mouse toward the end of a long evening’s conversation, made her “most famous” remark, “an economical swipe at the reductive, liberalizing view of religion,” wrote Paul Elie, senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux and author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003).
O’Connor told a friend about it:
We went at eight, and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing in such company for me to say. . . . . Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.
Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most ‘portable’ person of the Trinity. Now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.
I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘”Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of.
While we stop with Flannery O’Connor, let us consider her comment about her mother and naming a dog Spot:
[She] once told a friend, “I always thought that if [my mother] had a dog she’d name him Spot — without irony. If I had a dog I’d name him Spot, with irony. But for all practical purposes no one would know the difference.”
“By its nature, irony is the most ephemeral of literary devices, and the wit, or malice, or affection it encrypts is inherently fugitive,” continues Paul Mankowski, S.J., in First Things (March 2003).
Blithe Spirit 