With his outrageous wit, clear disdain for figures of authority and openly homosexual lifestyle, Oscar Wilde is an unlikely pin-up for the Catholic Church. Persecuted and imprisoned for his sexuality, gay rights campaigners have long idolized the 19th century writer as one of their own.
But the Vatican, it seems, is equally enamored of Ireland's greatest wit. In a glowing review of a new study of Wilde by the Italian writer Paolo Gulisano, L'Osservatore Romano – the Vatican's official newspaper – praises the Irish playwright for being "an aesthete and a lover of the ephemeral".
Scant attention is paid to Wilde's well-publicized relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and the ensuing sodomy trial which sentenced him to two years' hard labor in Reading prison. Instead the paper's review eulogizes Wilde for his "lucid analysis of the modern world" and his eventual conversion to Catholicism as he lay on his death bed.
A few of my favorite Wilde quotes:
~ A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
~ A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
~ A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
~ A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
~ A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
~ Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
~ Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
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