Page 43 - Vol. VI #3
P. 43

 hurch!! Soaring ceilings and magnificent windows! Near bar, linen closet, & sealed concrete floor. Some units with
dug around to find an edge to the granite, but just as he gained a little leverage and had it up on end, the machine exhaled a long black cloud of diesel, blinding him. The rock slipped from his grasp, teetered, then landed on top of the decapitated Christ. Elwin cringed and smelled blood on his hands. Fearing that the stunned crowd might rise up and hang him, he quickly shoved the statue’s remains to the edge of the property, where sat the red dumpster, eternal resting place of the damned. He returned for the granite, but unen- cumbered now as it was from the statue, it was too valuable to discard. With considerable effort, he pushed it closer to the building in case the developer wanted to use it for a step or a wall, or something practical like that.
drinking at 8:00 a.m. This business was all just more salt to the wounds. Not only had they lost their spiritual home, but now they were forced to watch its bumbled execution and see their savior crushed under the weight of arrogance. What had they done to deserve this but love their building? For generations, families had come here to exam- ine their souls, confess their sins, and accept for- giveness. They’d been splashed with holy water and soothed by sacred oils, they’d clutched palms and walked the streets marked with ashes. Their lungs once filled with the smoke of incense. And for this devotion, they were denied even the small animal comfort of a proper goodby. They were at the mercy of events beyond their understanding, events so poorly explained that the archdiocese might just as well have been speaking in tongues. Parish closings were part of the “reconfiguration process,” churches had to be “deconsecrated,” properties had to be “deaccessioned.” All to pay for the sins of the perverts. The perverts and the fools who protected them, blinded by fear to the mission of Christ. Instead of sending them to jail where they belonged, they had just moved them around, spreading the wealth. Reconfiguring. Suf- fer the little children.
~
Bruce Martin, the old caretaker of Holy Inno- cents, sat in his van and watched from the street, with nothing left to care for. He sipped regularly from a bottle of fortified wine in his Carhartt jacket, and when the head of Christ had begun rolling he reflected upon it with a transcendent calm. Dissipation had given him the wisdom that his previous life of asceticism in the holy or- ders was supposed to give and hadn’t. Religious objects used to bleed with meaning around him, stalking his waking dreams with malicious in- tent, but now he saw things for what they were. When stripped of significance and superstition, what remained on the lawn was just an oddly shaped chunk of fake stone.
But not everyone was submitting without a struggle. At other final masses around the state —and there were many—some parishioners had refused to leave. They’d camped out in the pews, staking a claim. But Father Flanagan, off in an- other city now conducting worship for strangers, would have none of that here under his watch. An expert at suppressing information, he locked up the place the night before the farewell mass and
The parishioners, though, poor bastards. They were not nearly so evolved. They had neither mastered his serene detachment nor started
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