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What They Did to the Kid 205

entrusted, professional secrets for Sean O’Malley and necessity for
me. Misery and Gunn and Rector Karg looked with disfavor on
any personal crisis. We were supposed to come to Misery in a state
of perfection and remain so. Latitude for crisis and growth fright-
ened them. Somehow they had missed or forgotten the physical and
spiritual crises of their youth. No potential priest was supposed to
destabilize into damaged goods; that was why the priests kept the
contents under pressure for twelve years.
But how, I wondered, can even the Pope expect seminarians, who
come to the seminary at fourteen, not to suffer not only the normal
crises of adolescence, but also the additional ones caused by struggles
in the religious life? Realism says seminarians have to develop as
much as anyone else. Karg can’t expect us to have any interpersonal
relationship with Jesus if we can’t have one with our friends. Would
Jesus want an interpersonal relationship with some boy who had
only a stunted, inhibited persona to bring to the relation?
I wrote journal notes to myself on stationery I stuck into my
translation papers for the book on moral theology whose German
author, that renegade priest, Häring, speculated a forward thrust to
the evolution of Christianity. Maybe the electricity of the wild May
storm shocked me up like Frankenstein’s monster. Maybe Gunn had
gone too far. I felt wonderful. Screw them all! I tore open Heming-
way’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea. Someday I’ll remember all
this and it won’t be any of that Mr. Chips crap.

May 14, 1963

Two weeks into May I told my Jesuit, my Jesuit, that I felt restored
enough to begin a gentle preparation for final exams. All-impor-
tant grades I couldn’t fake. The clock was ticking. The calendar
was turning. My third-to-last year, drawing to a close, promised a
summer dedicated to apostolic work, maybe in some Negro parish
on the South Side of Chicago. Ordinations to the priesthood for
the twelfth-year deacons approached, propitiously, I announced to
everyone, on President John Kennedy’s birthday. That was a good
omen.
They stared.

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