Preparing my sermon for today on the Propers for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
and using the Gospel of John and the "Commandment to Love One Another as the
the Father Has loved me and I have loved you" I ferreted out the following in
'The Church and the Fiction Writer' in Mystery and Manners..............
....[The average Catholic Reader}...forgets that sentimentality is a n
excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overempahsis
on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasised in the
ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite.
We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the
Redempiton which was brught about by Christ's death and by our slow
participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its
concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which
strongly suggests its opposite. Pornography on the other hand, is
essentially sentimental for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard
purpose, and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it
simply an experience for its own sake...
pp 148..