Page 163 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 151

suffocating in the room jammed with determined young men all
dressed in black.
I was making extra visits to the chapel during play time to stare
up at the huge crucifix over the main altar where hung the Christ I
was to become when, as a priest, I became an alter Christus, another
Christ. I always lived alone among all the other boys, but in the
chapel, I could be left alone. I had been studying hard. Twenty-eight
semester hours in physics and philosophy and modern history. Try-
ing to decipher whatever anyone said about the needs of priests. Not
only the way priests studied, and not only the way they administered
the sacraments, or said Mass. Wondering how priests actually lived,
minute to minute, how they felt emotion, how they handled temp-
tation. Translat ing the daring Father Bernard Häring’s German
moral theology trilogy. Writing on the side for the Catholic press.
Determined feature articles about brazeros, Mexican migrant work-
ers. Winking allegorical short stories about “The Untimely Death of
Juan Cristobal.” Driven poems about men and women too busy in
the world to realize all the grace God poured on them.
I wrote one feature article about James Dean, who had been dead
only four years. To get it published, I passed it off as a moral cau-
tionary tale: “James Dean: Magnifi cent Failure.” Rector Karg, who
censored every word of writing any seminari an mailed out, okayed
the sinner angle, but said no one would publish it because James
Dean was the glorification of sickness. He was very angry when he
opened my incoming mail and found that the first place I sent it,
The Catholic Preview of Entertain ment, bought the fifteen-hundred
word piece for two cents a word.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” he said. “Of course, you’ll be
donating your royalty check to the fund for the poor students, die
arme Studenten.” He handed me a pen to endorse the check. “I always
keep my eye on you, and your accounts.”
“Thank you, Rector,” I said. I knelt down. I handed him my first
royalty check. “Would you please give me your blessing?”
I had a seminar paper, “How Asceticism Leads to Mysti cism,”
to finish and I was dead tired, an absolutely perfect state for mysti-
cism. All my activity was making me more and more introvert ed.
So much time to think. Six chapel periods a day. Thinking was the

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