Act of faith …

… Waugh’s Helena, Father General, and the Reality of Revelation | George Weigel | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Helena is full of Waugh’s humor—including a hilarious putdown of Edward Gibbon and the anti-Christian motif in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—which makes for easy and amusing reading. The author’s intent, however, was entirely serious. He knew that Gnosticism was a protean heresy that re-occurred across the centuries. And as a convert (like his heroine), Evelyn Waugh chose the best tools at his disposal, his well-honed abilities as a wordsmith, to take a stand against the modernist tendency to reduce revelation to myth—and to make ourselves the judges of revelation, rather than being judged by it.

If anything could persuade that we are nearing the end times, it is the current state of the Catholic Church.