UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

October 12, 2017

By Peter Isely

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.” — Virgil

This quote in Latin is not a Catholic one. It is from Virgil, the great first century Roman poet. It can be translated in various ways, most literally, “If I cannot deflect the superior powers, then I shall move the River Acheron,” and more commonly, “If I cannot bend the heavens, then I shall move the powers of hell.”

This is the epitaph I would give to my generous, difficult and “mad” friend of over 25 years, Barbara Blaine, whose sudden death Sept. 24 I am still finding incomprehensible. I place Virgil’s defiance, spoken by the goddess Juno, an infinite distance from Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s quote in The New York Times obituary for Barbara: “May God have mercy on her soul.”

Sigmund Freud famously placed Virgil’s quote on the…