Another TV confrontation

American Letter, Fr. BERNARD BASSET, S.J.
SINCE I wrote last I have appeared on the Johnny Carson Show again. This second invitation came after Look published an article by Fr. Kavanour, a worried priest. Nothing was prepared. These television interviews before millions of viewers are spontaneous.
Carson gave me the chance of a life-time when speaking about a different subject. "Father," he said, "what would you best like to be remembered by?" The Holy Spirit answered for me. I said : "I would like to be remembered as one who followed Christ at 18 and is now blissful at 58." After a deathly hush, the audience clapped loudly and Johnny, always charming and rarely flabbergasted, could only say: "Well that's that."
Fr. Kavanour appeared on the show last night. To me he looked unhappy, admitted that he wished to marry and had not fully grasped what he was doing when he became a priest.
As I reported last month, an appearance on this programme can mean instant fame. When I reached the altar for Mass next morning, an Italian priest informed the congregation : "The priest offering this Mass was on the Johnny Carson Show last night." The emigration officers in New York fell on my neck when I came to extend my visa and a porter at New Orleans downed my suitcase to shake my hand Even so good a Catholic monthly as Sign published an article on this television battle and foresaw a massive hunt for unusual victims in the months ahead. For good or ill, many more priests and nuns may be roped in. For me the situatiton seems unhealthy for an appearance before millions is not necessarily linked with skill.
My next book, will have taken three years to write, but on television one speaks to millions when unprepared. In the last five days. I have been interviewed on four networks and, on Monday next, will answer any questions sent to the studio stage by phone. Just now I switched on my television to find a charming nun explaining why she has not married
The Deep South
My retreat programme has brought me to the little township of Convent, called after that intrepid French missionary, Blessed Philippine Duchesne. I am 300 yards from the Mississippi and 40 miles north of New Orleans. Eighty haen arrive each Thursday to make, in perfect silence, a three-day retreat. So perfect is the silence that, last weekend, a retreatant solemnly killed a poisonous snake on the door-step without saying a word.
Ten years ago in Ontario, a bear so much appreciated the silence that he nearly joined the retreatants in the refectory. Here the retreatants may be recollected but Louisiana is far too distracting for me. In the garden are lizards, chameleons, goldfish and, when the sun sinks in the evening, millions of frogs and locusts together, sneeze, gargle and blow their noses heartily.
Then there is the food. After years of canned meat, frozen peas, bottled sauces, I now face endless new recipes. All the soups are made from bones, the bread is baked each morning, shrimps, crabs. oysters abound.
New Orleans is a very Catholic and a very friendly town. Shoppers and business men pop in and out of the Church next door and it is inspiring to watch them pray. point alone I can make from personal observation, that the racial tension is far less here than in the North. A problem that seems insoluble in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit with their coloured districts, looks far less hopeless here. I have noticed hundreds of small examples of mutual tolerance and affection, truly a joy to see.
Walking in New Orleans I am reminded of the easy tolerance between creeds in Southern Ireland, so different from the old-time friction in, say, Glasgow or Liverpool. The point is, perhaps, worth making for some of the press reporting in Britain now seems to me unfair.
The charm of Louisiana lies in this that it is not rigidly