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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK138 Jack FritscherOur new Jesuit spiritual director, Father Sean O%u2019Malley, S. J., suggested that impure thoughts could be driven out by thinking analytically of something else: how many boat trips to get four elephants across a river if the boat can only hold a thousand pounds and the two grown elephants each weigh a ton-and-a-half and the babies five hundred pounds apiece.In Father Yovan%u2019s class in Moral Theology, five hours a week, two semesters, everything was either good or bad. A morality to everything. Nothing natural allowed for priests. Uuh. Nothing unnatural allowed for Catholics. Uuh. Amorality was worse than immorality because amorality was nothing, neither hot nor cold and worthy to be vomited from the mouth of Christ. A moral dimension for everything. No situation ethics. Nothing ever neutral or what personal subjectivity made of it. No private interpretation of the Bible: look at the Protestants%u2019 Bible-thumping problem with that.No telling ordinary Catholics, because the laity doesn%u2019t understand specifics, that Rome discreetly permitted abortions in cases of rape or incest, because the fetus was an unjust intruder inside the woman%u2019s body, so she could use self-defense.No allowance for imagination while discussing in Monsignor Undreiner%u2019s droning class in Dogmatic Theology, six hours a week, two semesters, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I shouldn%u2019t have asked Monsignor Undy what style of dance? Ballet? Modern jazz? I received good grades in the Introductory Sermon class, but Undy warned me away from too much creativity.I looked up at him over the pages of the forbidden book I was reading in his class, under his nose, Fifty Stories by Ernest Hemingway, and said, %u201cYes, Monsignor.%u201dMay 1, 1961By May first, May Day, the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, in the month dedicated to the Mother of God, we were very near final exams for our last semester in college. Because Saint Joseph, the husband of Mary, was a carpenter, Rome honored him on May Day as a retort to the Communists%u2019 celebration of May first as International Workers Day. French priests honored Saint Joseph as a patron saint of worker-priests.Lock and I hardly bothered that our exams would determine which of us graduated at the top of the class. Our college graduation%u2019s real import meant we had eight years down and only four years till our day of Ordination to the priesthood. The last third of the way to the priesthood was