Setting the Stage
• Where do we come from? Where are we going? Eddie Danaher is a smart, good-hearted guy who comes out of a New York Irish ghetto, joins the dashing Christian Fathers, gets an education that would make anyone drool, is taken up into the academic heights as a theologian and tries his best to serve God and neighbor.
• In his old world, parish life flourished, seminaries were filled, religious congregations of men and women added flair to the whole. The talents of bright young people funneled into the system as a matter of course.
• All around, there seemed to be a shared level of discourse with its own familiar idiom and imagery. Holiness was a fixture in that tribal culture, its rules so taken for granted, its rituals so established that they lent a certain muscular swagger to the tribe, even to those whose behavior fell far short of holiness.
• Education was another fixture. Almost by sleight of hand -- given the vast indifference of the gospels to formal schooling -- making sacrifices for education became almost the core expression of Catholic virtue. The payoff was not merely financial success, it was discovering that you could be as smart as the people who considered you second class.
• And then, suddenly, everything changed — not just religion but across the board. Established authorities toppled mid-sentence from their pulpits. Conformity became a dirty word, questioning chic, piety passé.
• Meanwhile, the new order, with its own self-conscious righteousness, its strutting certainty and frantic versions of conformity, crept up the charts, finally dislodging the old. Or haven't you noticed?
The play's the thing!
