Page 201 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 189

black-and-white TV screen talking to millions in prime time. I was
driven, sanctioned even, by grace to make the tools of journalism
sharp against the day when the great message would come to me and
I, the best editor in the Catholic press, could spread it in headlines
from the worker-priest garret, where I lived, to the very ends of the
diocese. Writing sermons was almost the same as writing articles
and stories.
Certainty of this special calling, of this vocation within a voca-
tion, had come already. Almost. I had seen its faint glimmer ings on
my knees before the tabernacle where the Word Made Flesh, Love
ineffable, Jesus Himself, the Prisoner of the Tabernacle, reigned in
terrible confine ment. Love would be every thing. If only I could find
love certainly and translate divine love into human terms to all men,
Christ could come to them through me. But to be a vessel, I had to
grow into a rich relationship with Jesus so He could fill me to the
brim, even then to overflow ing, so that the thirsting thousands I
would touch could drink and wash and be refreshed in the abun-
dance and overflow. My excess of spilling grace could change deserts
into green pastures.
In the chapel I begged I might become fully human, fully a man,
that in such perfec tion an abundance of grace might be founded.
Grace builds on nature, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote in his
Summa Theologica.
That was the key. That was one secret revealed. If it was so,
because it was so, I prayed, then make my nature the more perfect
that my grace might be increased and I might be a better, self-effac-
ing instru ment moved by the hands of Christ. The hypostatic union
of His Person had been so perfect that Godhead could be joined
straight to manhood.
His body had to be perfect to match His perfect divinity. From
foot to sacred head, He had to become, and be, the most perfectly
formed body to have such a perfect informing soul as deity itself.
On the cross over the altar, the athletic Christ hung crucified but
all-powerful, the almighty God in the perfect body of a man.
“Misericordia’s main crucifix,” PeterPeterPeter told guests on
tour, “was carved in Northern Germany from 1929-1932. The Cross
is fifty feet tall, carved from black oak, and the Corpus is forty feet

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