Piers Morgan and the Legion of Mary

I get new followers on Twitter every day but very few of them, I’m afraid, pique my interest enough to follow back. So when TV presenter and sometime journalist Piers Morgan—he whose greatest fear is that “Susan Boyle’s Judge” will be his single epitaph—popped up as one of my followers, I was intrigued and, yes, flattered. Had he read my blog? Did he see that mention of him on my most-accessed posting of April 2009, “Susan Boyle’s Next Song”? How else was he to know that I would know who he might be?

[For all my postings on Susan Boyle, click here.]

But here I must reveal to you the deep dark secret of why I mentioned him. It was because his reaction to Ms. Boyle, once she sang those first few notes and put them all to shame, touched me. His was a look of sheepishness, consternation, guilt and—dare I say it? Revelation. Inner joy. An almost religious reaction, in fact.

I couldn’t put my finger on it, until I started to find out All About Susan, and learned that she was a devout Catholic. Not only a devout Catholic, but a member of the Legion of Mary. Then I also found online an excerpt from one of Pier’s memoirs and discovered that he, like me, was raised Catholic, with a special devotion to the sisters who taught him.

The following is difficult to explain to people who aren’t RC. Michael, raised Southern Baptist, dismisses it absolutely. My Swedenborgian friends think it’s nuts. But there is a Marianist strain in the Roman Church that places a great deal of faith in the presence of Our Lady, the Mother of God. You know—Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe. New Ageists might identify her as The Goddess, secular feminists as the manifestation of Womyn Power. All I know is, I could swear that when Susan Boyle stepped on that stage in Glasgow, there was a perceptible something beyond her immense talent that was carrying her. Can’t explain it any further, I’m no good at that kind of writing. But even in fallen-away Catholics, I think that faith never goes away. And without knowing a thing about Ms. Boyle, or the worldly Mr. Morgan, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint a sort of transcendence going on—but it’s our shared Catholic upbringing that has enabled me to put a definition to it I can live with.