Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic Artist
who loved Protestants
FROM: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/2012/05/31/ten-catholic-women-who-changed-the-world/
Flannery O'Connor is one of the best female novelists and short story writers ever to have lived.
She was the first novelist born in the 20th century to have her works published by the Library of America. And her Completed Stories won the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction and was hailed as the "Best of the National Book Awards" in 2009.
But her life was one of contradiction. She was born in 1925 to "an old Catholic family" in the Bible Belt. Her family were conspicuously Catholic, but O'Connor was an adept chronicler of southern Protestant life. O'Connor was convinced by the power of Catholic sacraments to change the human condition by divine grace.
Her novels, however, are dominated by fundamentalist Protestant characters who undergo their personal transformations after much suffering. Key to the success of her short stories and novels such as Wise Blood is that she had enormous respect for her Protestant subjects, admiring their search for truth and their discipline.
O'Connor was inspired by St Thomas Aquinas's concept that the created world is charged with God, and the fervour with which she wrote about wild or serenely beautiful nature scenes testifies to her love of God's creation.
O'Connor was a victim of lupus and died at 39.