Excerpt from What They Ask About Marriage

It is not easy for a moralist to combine pungent wit with serious instruction. He is always in danger of be ing remembered as a humorist rather than as a teacher of great truths; and what he teaches is always in danger of being lightly regarded unless he keeps careful rein on his wit, unless he makes sure that it clarifies rather than outshines the primordial truths of faith and morals for which people thirst.

Monsignor Conway writes with a smile. The smile does not soften the hard truths of Christian disci pline. But it does soften the context in which he (and we) must express those truths, adhere to that discipline in our daily lives. It reassures us that Christian life is not a humorless pilgrimage and that everything that ishard is not necessarily harsh. I recall one instance in which a woman asked why the New Testament directed women to be subject to their husbands. The Monsignor explained why and then added that women, lacking scriptural authority, have subtler ways of bringing man to subjection.

Monsignor Conway also writes with wrath, but only on those rare occasions when he receives a question which seems to have been Inspired by hypocrisy and pharisaism. His biting reply to the woman' who te sented another woman's wearing of the Virgina] white veil on her wedding day is a masterpiece of just anger, the sentences flicking out like a lash as he administered the public whipping.

It is this large measure of human sympathy for sin ners, sympathy which is never permitted to degenerate into maudlin sentimentalism (in which the awfulness of sin is comfortably submerged), that not only gives the counsellor the quality of a true friend, but which also contributes to the realism of his counsel. What Mon signor Conway never forgets is that the eternal truths of dogma and morals can be understood and assented to by man only in a temporal, earthly context, that fallen man's wounded nature can grasp these truths and in carnate them only amidst varying degrees of difficulty - amidst a confused context, that is, in which error, doubt, distractions and passions mingle with truth and goodness.

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