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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 173%u201cI thought so.%u201d Lock counseled me more than once that I had been communicating less and disappearing more. Lock knew how to play what game there was. Our classmates had begun to miss%u2014not me so much%u2014as my class lecture notes that I shared with them. They figured, because I could write and type, they didn%u2019t have to take notes. A true community, they informed me at a class meeting, should share everything beginning at Mass in the morning right on through to study notes and meals in the refectory. One thing was meaning two things. They were literal boys; I was a walking metaphor. I didn%u2019t want to be their secretary, but I wanted to be really well-liked by them, so I could levitate and wake them. I even made up subliminal messages hidden in my class notes to motivate them from apathy and fundamentalism. But a chasm gaped between us. Words didn%u2019t focus.I had taken my vocation into my hands to make something individual of it in the seminary itself. I tried to warn them away from the institutionalization of priests. They were the sons of farmers and factory workers who had survived the Great Depression and many of them wanted to raise their station in life. They talked about not wanting to worry where the next meal came from. They competed about the real estate of their future dream parishes where they%u2019d live in the biggest house in the neighborhood waited on by a housekeeper, a cook, and a gardener. They were not amused by the Christian Family Movement in Chicago. They shook their heads over Canon Cardijn%u2019s beginning of the Christian Workers Movement.Many, choosing designs from Romanesque and Byzantine styles in sample catalogs, had already paid one or the other of the traveling salesmen from the competing liturgical supply companies for their own personal gold chalices. They examined the competing salemen%u2019s chalice displays the way customers shop jewelry.They compared designs of Mass vestments, especially vestments for their own First Mass after their Ordination, at modest little vestment fashion shows, staring at themselves, parading out in the invited salesmen%u2019s finest traditional vestments and newest Vatican II styles.They staked out bragging rights on the monsignors they knew, and predicted how they themselves would climb up the ranks of the clergy. They talked of the apostolate, about working with people, as if they were going to be sociologists or psychologists, not priests. Their vocations were defined by the world. The most ambitious boys loved the study of Canon Law and were set on becoming powerful ecclesiastical attorneys serving bishops and cardinals and the Pope. God told them so.