Harry Houdini hung suspended above Niagara Falls in a locked barrel while crowds gazed upward in anxious fascination. Chains bound his arms. The lid was nailed shut. Gravity and water waited below with their indifferent certainty. The genius of Houdini was not merely escape, but the creation of a spectacle in which the impossible seemed somehow survivable.
Fr. Robert McTeigue recently invoked this image in reflecting upon the increasingly bewildering question of “full communion” within the Catholic Church. It was a characteristically sharp and provocative meditation, delivered without any hint of bitterness but with the weary candour of a priest who has watched generations of Catholics attempt to reconcile what they are told with what they have plainly seen. One need not agree with every aspect of his framing to recognise that he has identified something very real, something ordinary Catholics have sensed for decades but often lacked the language to articulate.
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