The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18: 9-14) perfectly mirrors the spiritual crisis of Blaise Meredith in the novel The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West. At the beginning of the novel, Monsignor Blaise Meredith discovers he is dying of stomach cancer. This terminal diagnosis forces a brutal reckoning: he realises that despite being a priest and a respected canon lawyer in the Vatican, he has never truly loved, suffered with others, or experienced genuine human connection. He has hidden behind the rigid rules, paperwork, and safe bureaucracy of the Roman Curia. His faith is orthodox but entirely bloodless. His primary struggle is the terrifying realisation that he is facing death without ever having truly lived. For most of his life, Meredith unknowingly embodied the spirit of the Pharisee. The Pharisee approached God "full of himself; and he went back unchanged". Similarly, Meredith built his life in the Roman Curia on orthodox correctness and canonical law, insulating himself from human messiness.
Without realising it, he was tempted to "build up our profile of holiness on the weakness and sinfulness of others". He judged the complex lives of the faithful from a safe distance, acting as if his meticulous bureaucratic adherence earned him grace. But as St. Francis de Sales notes, "when praying, if one is swollen with pride of the fact that he is praying then he is not praying". Such an attitude does not make one grow but makes one’s pride grow.
To give his final months purpose, Meredith is sent to the impoverished, sun-baked villages of Calabria as the Devil's Advocate to investigate the potential sainthood of Giacomo Nerone. This introduces him to the "other side of existence." He is pulled out of his comfortable, academic theology and thrust into a world of raw human emotion, poverty, political strife, and messy morality.
As Meredith investigates Nerone—a man who fathered an illegitimate child, had a mistress, yet lived a life of profound, self-sacrificing love for the villagers—he is forced to contrast Nerone's passionate, flawed humanity with his own "sinless" but empty life. Nerone’s life challenges Meredith's black-and-white, legalistic view of God's grace.
Meredith's ultimate struggle is to break through his own emotional paralysis. Interacting with the people connected to Nerone—his earthly mistress Nina, his illegitimate son Paolo, the cynical Dr. Meyer, and the local Bishop—Meredith slowly learns empathy. His journey is one of moving from a cold administrator who judges people by the letter of the law, to a vulnerable human being who understands the spirit of love and forgiveness.
Ultimately, his struggle resolves when he accepts his own humanity, connects deeply with those around him, and finally experiences the true grace he had spent his life theorising about but never feeling. Stripped of his future and his comfortable certainties, he realises his spiritual ledger is entirely blank. He cannot earn his salvation through legalistic perfection; "mercy is given and not earned".
The profound challenge of both Meredith's story and this Gospel reading is avoiding the subtle trap of spiritual comparison. It is so easy to look at the rigid Pharisee—or the cold, early version of Blaise Meredith—and judge them. We often "spend a lot of time pointing figure at others" to say "I am more holy and acceptable".
Who decided that as long as we are better than our neighbour everything is going to be alright? Where in the world did this sad embarrassing idea come from? To be quite honest, it sounds silly but we live like this. We spend a lot of time pointing figure at others; either to put them down or to say I am more holy and acceptable to others. Our identification of sin is often determined by what others do and what we don't do; but we seldom examine objectively what we do. We easily point a figure at, judge, condemn others, and place them lower than us. We make what we do as normal.
The great irony is that the tendency in this parable is to end our reflection saying Lord I am not like this Pharisee. If we do this, we instantly become the Pharisee ourselves. One must not form one’s spiritual perfection on the brokenness of others. What have you done that is acceptable to God? We cannot claim our acceptance on the non-acceptance of others. Instead, Jesus asks us to meet him every day humbly, recognising that true justification only happens when we empty ourselves of our pride.
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