Are You a Vinegar Catholic?
ON GHASTLY 'HOSPITALITY'
In the right places, vinegar has its uses.
White vinegar does an excellent job of cleaning the keys of my piano and the hoses of my CPAP machine. English fish and chips without the added tang of malt vinegar? Inconceivable! Balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing? Ladle it on.
But vinegar is not appropriate everywhere.
Pope Francis, prior to his passing, made modest headlines by enjoining a congregation of sisters not to have vinegar faces. “Many times in my life,” he said, “I have encountered nuns with a vinegar face, and this is not friendly, this is not something that helps to attract people.” Given that many nuns have lost the habit of wearing the habit, they might not be readily identifiable anymore, vinegar faces or no. But so be it.
Surely, Francis could have gone further than singling out nuns, and, in fact, he did. This past November, he addressed a group of pilgrims, telling them, “Please, do not lose your joy, do not lose your sense of humor…. When a Christian, even more so a man or woman religious, loses their sense of humor, they ‘turn sour.’ And it is so sad to see a priest, a religious, a nun, ‘turn sour.’ They are preserved in vinegar.”
Alas, the impression I have gained over the years — and it is solely an impression, not any sort of controlled study — is that an alarming number of parishes are “preserved in vinegar.”
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