Before Warday I was well on my way to losing my vocation. I wanted to get married. I think I might have become an Episcopalian. But then came Warday and, afterward, the Reunion with the Anglicans and the Episcopals. Then, most of all, the tremendous upsurge of need for my services. I got the feeling that Christ was very close to us religious people, full of forgiveness and need, asking for our help. I want to be Christ’s servant. Now when I’m feeling alone I take my soul to Mary, who is His mother and therefore the mother of all mankind. She’s what the witches call the Mother Goddess! I just kneel before her altar and say the rosary.
She never fails me, Mary. The rosary is far better for me than, say, meditation. It’s not only meditation, with all the repetition, it’s humble and it’s a request for help. She was once a human being.
She knows what we suffer. She is always there, anytime, for anybody. Mary doesn’t care a fig about the details. She loves and respects you because you exist.
The witchcraft movement talks about taking personal, individual responsibility for the condition of planet Earth as if they invented the idea. But it’s also a Christian and very specifically Catholic notion. At least I think it is. My saddest, guiltiest parishioners say that they sinned terribly by not taking some kind of personal action on behalf of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. They say they should have demonstrated against this or in favor of that. But I tell them no, the sin was that we did not accept one another in our hearts, neither side. Our leaders hardly even knew each other. The two greatest nations on earth, with almost total responsibility for the fate of planet and species, and they hardly even spoke! They should have made it their business to be close personal friends. And there should have been as much commonality of policymaking and government as possible.
Instead the two countries were separate islands, distant from, and mysterious to, each other. That was the sin of pride, doing that.
What a price has been paid for the pleasure of such indulgence.
When I think of what our generation did, I pray very, very hard that the future will somehow accept us and find in the Body of Christ the love and understanding that will enable them to say, “Our ancestors chose foolishness over wisdom and hostility over acceptance, but we understand and we forgive.”
Now I’m not your deep thinker. But I do try. I’ve read the Catholic philosophers, and the Greeks, and most of the moderns. I mean to say, I’ve read my Whitehead and my Hegel, my Aristotle and my Plotinus.
You know, throughout history, philosophy centered on the concept of being rather than the ethics. That was fine until recent years, when we began to try on some pretty bizarre concepts, and to hell with the ethics of it all. Nazism and so forth, I mean. And the concept of nationhood that allowed us to think we had the right to build such things as nuclear bombs.
The American and Russian peoples should never have allowed their leaders to play the game of overstating the threat to justify exorbitant military expenditures. We were supposed to be seeking a balance of terror, weren’t we? But the United States in fact got so far ahead of the Russians technologically that we were about to send up a satellite that would have made their missiles useless against us. And they had no similarly effective weapon. So they were forced to start the war. They were backed up against the wall.
I’m just a priest in a medium-sized parish. Nobody on high would ever have listened to me. Before the war I had eight hundred in my parish. Now I’ve got close to ten thousand frightened and suffering people. In some ways I’d rather have had eight hundred and the old world than ten thousand and the new.
Let’s see now, you asked me for an idea about how my day goes. What I do. Well, I get up at five-thirty and I run like a madman until midnight, then I sleep like the dead until five-thirty the next morning. I’ve got my schedule for last Wednesday. I’ll read it into the record:
5:30 A.M. Arose and said breviary.
5:45 A.M. Breakfast of corn soup and milk.
6:00 A.M. Said Mass. Gave out communion to 230 people.
6:30 A.M. Meeting with my staff. Discussed the reroofing project. Looked over Father Moore’s report to the bishop on the feasibility of splitting St. Francis into two parishes. I hope that this is done!
7:00 A.M. Met a parishioner who has just been diagnosed as having stage-three Hodgkin’s and has been triaged. Has a wife and three teenage children. Is fifty-two. We prayed together and he cried. He paced like a trapped lion. Prayed for him and put him in the Mass list for Sunday.
7:20 A.M. CCD leaders met in my office to plan a bake sale.
They have thirty pounds of flour, six pounds of sugar, some apples, some molasses, and so we are very excited. Thank God they also have Sister Euphrasia, who is one good baker.
7:45 A.M. Had coffee and listened to the Vatican U.S. Service on the shortwave.
8:00 A.M. Went to Holy Cross Hospital for my visitations. I’m glad I took Father Moore, as my list was sixty names long! I had an hour there, and because he took half my people, I was able to spend two minutes with each patient. I blessed, I prayed, I heard eighteen confessions and gave out thirty Holy Communions. I gave the Last Rites to twelve patients on the critical list.
9:15 A.M. Returned to the rectory. Did youth counseling until noon. We have seventy young people who are converting, and an active Sodality and CYO. But these were all special cases. I gave each kid half an hour. Saw six troubled kids. A girl who is pregnant. A boy who is in love with a younger boy. A girl who says she sees visions of the Virgin, and indeed may. Another girl who has beaten her mother and father so badly that they want her out of the house. Where does a petite girl of sixteen get such titanic anger? Two boys who steal. I warned them very sternly. They must remember, these children, that we have a looting law here in California, and they are liable to be shot on sight if they’re caught. It isn’t like the old days. There is no due process at the end of a gunsight.
12:15 P.M. Lunch of soybean soup, lettuce with vinegar and oil, and a delicious Budweiser.
12:30 P.M. Met with Parish Council. We are going to try to expand our food program this winter. Last year we distributed 31,280 meals to the hungry. This year we are going to try for fifty thousand. Mrs. Cox said that the baby boy found behind the rectory last week was just fine, normal in every way, and has been placed with the Tucker family. They are at risk for having children, so they are terribly grateful.
1:00 P.M. Met with Joe O’Donnell, who is thinking about running for chief of police. The most powerful job in the Valley. Will he do it? He’d do a very creditable job, I feel sure. I promised to call the bishop on his behalf. There is certainly nothing wrong with having a Catholic in that job, and Joe is a good man.
1:15 P.M. Back to the church for fifteen minutes of prayer.
Spent it with Mary and had wonderful, intimate communication with her. Has our need somehow made our connection with deity stronger? Sometimes I feel as if Christ and Mary are here, alive, almost in the flesh. This, I suppose, is faith.
1:30 P.M. Catechism with my eighth-graders. Fifty kids. What a bunch of jokers! I love that class. We might be in hell, but kids are kids, always. What did I find in the question box? “Father, if you couldn’t consummate marriage any other way, would it be permissible to use an Erector Set?” Kid’s humor. We are into sex education. Some of these children are sterile.
2:30 P.M. Adult counseling for two hours. I took a Charismatic study group for half an hour, then a disturbed couple, then a woman who has bone cancer and is contemplating euthanasia. Personally I detest the practice, but I can see if I get a really rough cancer I might want to turn to it myself. His Holiness and the Archbishop of Canterbury have agreed that it’s no sin to withdraw life support if the person is beyond hope. I promised to attend her.