February 25, 2008
Connections
Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 near Madrid. He wrote the classic Spanish novel “Don Quixote” about a self-styled knight tilting with windmills. He doesn’t have a calendar day among Anglicans that I know about, but his quixotic skill lurching with literary windmills maybe might get him considered one of these days.
Picking up on this same theme, Graham Green wrote “Monsignor Quixote,” a delightful 1982 novel and pastiche of Cervantes’s story. His title character is a country parson who helps out someone with a stalled car who turns out to be a bishop and, coincidentally, a friend of the pope.
For the parson’s reward, the bishop arranges a major Thank You and has the pope designate him a monsignor. The lucky parson has never been one of his own bishop’s favorites, to say the least. For one thing, his bishop takes a dim view of the fact that his closest friend is the town’s mayor, a Communist who knows more church history than the parson, even down to the essential purple socks monsignors wear. This friendship and going over episcopal heads to the Vatican doesn’t endear him any more than it might under similar circumstances today.
I suppose it never hurts to be one of the pope’s friends. I don’t know how many saints may have made it to the canon like that rather than the hard way with slings and arrows and the like. Or, to carry through with a grasp at anything that might make sense out of today’s OoN, getting canonized like Matthias who has his special calendar day today not by rivaling the Good Samaritan, but merely as the result of an apostolic crap game.
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