To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best Though Flannery O’Connor may not have believed in the kind of miracles promised at Lourdes, she believed in grace and mystery. And she believed that when a writer tries to illustrate the things of God, she must not forget how this world sounds and smells and looks and feels. This is why her writing is so vivid, even lurid. She warned against writing that was “conscious of problems, not people; of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence; of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the my