Surviving the Secular: Faith, Grief, Parody

In The Diary of a Country Priest, George Bernanos offers an unsettling

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[T]he Church is not only … a kind of sovereign state with laws, officials, armies – a moment, as glorious as you please, in human history. The Church is on the march through time as a regiment marches through strange country, cut off from all its ordinary supplies. The Church lives on successive regimes and societies, as the soldiers would from day to day on the inhabitants.