Flannery O’Connor, arguably the best Catholic writer this country ever produced, was born 100 years ago March 25 in Savannah, Ga. Her short life was marked by profound suffering: She was 15 when her father died of lupus and 25 when she was diagnosed with the same disease, which would end her life at 39. Her grief gave her an insight into the power of God’s grace—that it could be violent but also revelatory and redemptive. Her experience with the mystery of suffering would become the enduring theme of her fiction.
O’Connor’s work can’t be understood apart from her imaginative Catholic vision. She attended Mass daily and read St. Thomas Aquinas before bed every evening. Because of the violence O’Connor made her outlandish Southern characters endure, a critic once described her as a hillbilly nihilist. She protested that “hillbilly Thomist” was more apt, because she wrote happy stories thick with the promise of God’s mercy. O’Connor believed that although we are fallen, we are still good, and if we freely cooperate with God’s grace, our nature can be perfected in union with him.
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