Wolfe as Catholic

During... perhaps especially Bobby Kennedy's heyday, establishing someone as fundamentally Catholic would probably tell you not all that much... it might even lean towards making you assume they're a version of today's "social justice warrior"; someone who advocates for the forgotten, and is a voice of the young upsurge. (The youngest American president in history, Kennedy, was elected at the precise time America left its '50s consolidation period, and launched into political, leftwing, youth-oriented, explosiveness, and he and his brother were a big part of that voice.)

Today I don't think we should be blind to realizing that establishing him as fundamentally Catholic, could be a way of orienting him almost as an agent of the counter-reformation... of a weapon against the voice of the young, which is today again and again and again, exposing the Catholic church as so suspiciously rearguard in our contemporary effort to create an environment where the abused aren't any longer afraid to point a finger at the abusers; where we don't any longer protect abusers from understanding themselves as they are -- not caretakers we must cling to, but criminals to lock up. 

That may not be "your" Catholicism, and maybe something of what the current Pope is doing, or represents, is counter to the "Spotlight" one, but even if it isn't, I do think this should work as as a reason to be more or less okay if today the effort to establish Wolfe as fundamentally Catholic is not especially successful, even if you feel it is simply pin-point accurate, and ultimately, in the ideal environment, helps our best understanding of his work. 

Here would be Wolfe as... let's call it a Kennedy-era Catholic (or as Bobby Kennedy): when he in Peace shows a young man, abandoned by his mother and father as they set off on a world tour for an indeterminate period of time, and lands him with an aunt who'll do such things as casually expose herself to him, almost in the manner of a Jahlee upon Hoof, or a Hyacinth upon Horn, and never makes him feel like he isn't anything more than a transient in her midst, and conveys a sense that something hugely wrong is being done here, and that it's something to speak out against, rather than claim as a reason to believe yourself worthy of some such as God's pity (I'm so small and little... and there is no response: pity me!). Reading that, I felt him someone who become a pain to today's Catholic church, in pointing out again and again and again, how the priests are being protected at the expense of the young, and how it must stop. 

Here would be Wolfe in today's "Spotlight" context of the Catholic church: when he has Silk meet up with Marbe/Rose's daughter Olivine, who was abandoned by Marble/Rose so "they" could set off on her own adventures, and, at least through her incompleted body, evidently shows the effects of this abandonment, and has him discourage her away from feeling any resentment, and in fact has him manage her so that her potential current resentment at her is revealed as a great crime, as her being angry at someone behaving admirably, rightly, dutifully, saintly, which seems to prompt her into be in mind to not see her abandoner as a victimizer but as someone who might actually give her the love she hoped to find from her if only she offers even more of herself to her. 

Here, with Silk sounding like one of the creepy church men in "Spotlight" who has a chance to get a hold of the victim before anyone else has a chance to counsel her, and further with his mind much more on placating the Marble/Rose conglomerate, who's already had a full life of marriages and children -- they couldn't be conned out of having that! -- and not on "their" other victim, Mucor, who like Olivine has received very little and whom Silk/Horn knows is not in fact really being taken care of by Marble/Rose but serving as her nursemaid, this is Wolfe as Catholic in the way a lot of people have come to understand it.