Bethune Catholic

I never read any of Joyce Kilmer's poetry. My closest contact with him was the James Cagney/Pat O'Brien movie: The Fighting 69th. Someone played him in this movie, as he was in this regiment and died fighting in WWI . But in From James J. Daly, SJ's A Cheerful Ascetic there is an essay on Joyce Kilmer-convert to Catholicism and excerpts from some of his letters. Here's a letter which caught my eye:

I need some stricter discipline, I think, and it's hard to get it. I enjoy my confessor's direction very much; he's a fine old Irishman with no nonsense about him. But I need to be called a fool, I need to have some conceit and sophistication knocked out of me. I suppose you think this is "enthusiasm"-that much-heralded danger of converts. Perhaps it is, but I don't think so. I know I'm glad I live two miles from the church, because it's excellent for a lazy person like myself to be made to exert himself for religion. And I wish I had a stern medieval confessor-the sort one reads about in anti-Catholic books-who would inflict real penances. The saying of Hail Marys and Our Fathers is no penance, it's a delight.

Read that last line again.

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We have now lost three piglets; the one we were nursing took a turn for the better on Saturday morning and then just died Saturday evening. And then yesterday it looks like a little piglet was the victim of being laid on. As I said before, its not how many are born, but how many are weaned.

Oremus pro invicem!