Page 158 - What They Did to the Kid

146 Jack Fritscher

“For his curiosity, no. Was his question intellectual?”
“It was cock-eyed.” Hank paraded his pun.
Ha ha ha.
“His guilt, I contend, is mitigated, and is inversely proportional
to the guilt of the institution which fostered and fed the growth of
his neurosis.”
I pushed Mike aside. “Personal guilt is impossible? I have always
taken personal responsibility for myself in the face of every imper-
sonal institutionalization forced upon me.”
“Bravo!” Dryden beamed as if I were a new devotee. “Proceed.”
“I’m responsible for myself,” I said.
Sporadic applause.
“I have a social consciousness.”
Ha ha ha.
“Nevertheless I have a Roman Catholic conscience. So I wonder,
what if I am wrong in my personal stand within the institu tion al
seminary or the institutional Church? Then what?”
“Yes, then what?” Lock asked. “We stand up to Gunn and Rec-
tor Karg. We read books the Church itself has condemned.”
“We risk getting shipped. We risk our very vocations,” I said.
“Trying to learn something about the world without becoming
worldly.”
“We now talk to you, a priest!” Lock said. “What a contradic-
tion. For all these years, the priest hood is our ideal, but the priests—
our teachers—are our worst enemies.”
“How do we know,” I said, “you’re not a turncoat?”
“Or a double-agent?” Dryden said.
“Yeah,” I intoned comically, ambiguously.
“You don’t,” he said.
“We need you,” Lock said, “or priests like you, to teach us how
to be effective personal agents for Christ. That’s what a priest is.
Yet as seminarians we’re trapped in an imper sonal tyranny Christ
never dreamed of.” Smattering of applause. “We’re supposed to be
the institutional Church, but we can’t stand its present condition.”
“As priests, as persons, we need some safe harbor,” I said. “A
priestly vocation shouldn’t have to mean personal isolation. Now,
with all this change from Rome, where do we stand? I have a vocation

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