I think the adjective I would use to describe this book is zany. If you are a Catholic in the US and you despair of the culture wars, you’ll find humor here.
Depending on your constitution, you may either find comfort or despair with the clarity that Percy brings to the liberal and conservative wings of the Catholic Church in the US.
Highlights
Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. (Location 105)
The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation. The Dutch schismatics in this area comprise several priests and nuns who left Rome to get married. They threw in with the Dutch schismatic Catholics. Now several divorced priests and nuns are importuning the Dutch cardinal to allow them to remarry. The Roman Catholics hereabouts are scattered and demoralized. The one priest, an obscure curate, who remained faithful to Rome, could not support himself and had to hire out as a fire-watcher. It is his job to climb the fire tower by night and watch for brushfires below and for signs and portents in the skies. (Location 107)
The scientists, who are mostly liberals and unbelievers, and the businessmen, who are mostly conservative and Christian, live side by side in Paradise Estates. (Location 247)
I do not notice a great deal of difference between the two. Both sorts are generally good fellows, good fathers and husbands who work hard all day, come home at five-thirty to their pretty homes, kiss their wives, toss their rosy babes in the air, light up their charcoal briquets, or perhaps mount their tiny tractor mowers. There are minor differences. (Location 249)
By contrast with the swamp, the town has become a refuge for all manner of conservative folk, graduates of Bob Jones University, retired Air Force colonels, passed-over Navy commanders, ex-Washington, D.C., policemen, patriotic chiropractors, two officials of the National Rifle Association, and six conservative proctologists. (Location 267)
The old Republican Party has become the Knothead Party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the backs of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century—which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading “Knotheads for America” and banners proclaiming “No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country.” (Location 286)
The center did not hold. However, the Gross National Product continues to rise. (Location 297)
The Knotheads enacted a law requiring compulsory prayers in the black public schools and made funds available for birth control in Africa, Asia, and Alabama. (Location 310)
The only trouble is that South Ecuador is owned by ninety-eight Catholic families with Swiss bank accounts, is governed by a general, and so is not what you would call an ideal democracy. North (Location 316)
Conservatives have begun to fall victim to unseasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood pressure, and large-bowel complaints. Liberals are more apt to contract sexual impotence, morning terror, and a feeling of abstraction of the self from itself. (Location 325)
He was certain that the Negroes and Communists were after him (as a matter of fact, the Negroes were after him, I happened to know) as well as a Jewish organization that he called the “Bildebergers” and that he had reason to believe had taken over the Federal Reserve system. (Location 484)
Don’t tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman. (Location 934)
He recognized my Southern trick of using manners and even madness guilefully and for one’s own ends. (Location 1664)
Father Kev Kevin sits reading Commonweal at his console of vaginal indicators. (Location 1897)
Better to live in New York where life is simple, every man’s your enemy, and you walk with your eyes straight ahead. (Location 2377)
Today is Property Rights Sunday. My mother, who is president of the altar society and also of the Business & Professional Women, is leading an ecumenical delegation to Saint Pius VII Church (A.C.C.). (A.C.C. = American Catholic Church.) (Location 2673)
Mother has a reputation hereabouts as a seer and prophetess. What she is is a Catholic gnostic. Though she believes in God, she also relies on her crystal ball—she actually has a crystal ball, which she looks into—and her gift for seeing signs and divining hidden meanings. But she is quite brisk about it, puts on no psychic airs, has no truck with séances and such. Her clairvoyant powers have rather to do with business and politics. She will not close a deal with a Leo in May. Most of her visions and dreams are about plots of the Lefts against the Knotheads. She predicted four out of the last five assassinations. (Location 2742)
She doesn’t even interpret her visions, leaving that to others. But the meanings are clear to her friends and they usually have political overtones, auguring ill for conservatives and good for liberals. On the eve of the last national election, for example, she came to the third bead of the third decade of her rosary and she saw Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, slowly sinking into the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Her friends understood. The new President is an integrationist Mormon from Salt Lake City. (Location 2754)
We walk over to Saint Pius XII’s. Pius XII, the last Pope recognized by the American Catholic Church, was canonized by the Sacred College of Cicero, Illinois. The present “Pope” of the A.C.C., a native of Anaheim and Bishop of San Diego, took the name Pius XIII. Property Rights Sunday is a major feast day in the A.C.C. A blue banner beside the crucifix shows Christ holding the American home, which has a picket fence, in his two hands. Mother sits up front with the other Business (Location 2805)
