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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK206 Jack Fritscherand dropped off to ash. %u201cPromise me you will be good.%u201d He dropped the burning ends of the pages to the floor. %u201cPromise me again.%u201d%u201cI promise. Oh, I do promise.%u201dI was twenty-three years old. In the escalating mystery of change, seventy-two hours later, on June 3, the open-hearted Pope John XXIII suddenly died.On the Vatican chess board, everyone moved.August 29, 1963Threats work. Karg scared me to death. My well-intentioned summer collapsed in a June panic. My secret reading of the Index of Forbidden Books, the Church%u2019s feckless guide to good reading, had led me to Richard Wright%u2019s autobiographical novels, Native Son and Black Boy. My dad%u2019s collection of James T. Farrell%u2019s Studs Lonigan trilogy led me to Chicago. Farrell was a Chicago writer, Irish and Catholic. Jack Nicholson was starring in the movie of Studs Lonigan. The Christian Family Movement in Chicago was promoting the idea of worker-priests. %u201cObserve! Judge! Act!%u201d Chicago was the logical escape, north 150 miles, from the provinciality of Peoria. I needed a place to hide out, regroup, and plan my strategy to survive Karg.By July, the humid heat of the South Side of Chicago spiked my moral urgency to a crisis. I gasped for breath inside the once-grand mansion of the parish house where I had told my parents I was under Church orders to go to live for three months. I lied to them. Of course. As usual. To protect myself. I ran away from them, my own mom and dad, and my five-yearold sister, Margaret Mary, even though I loved them so much that my love for them verged on worldly attachment. Karg told me so. %u201cYou must leave father and mother for Christ%u2019s sake.%u201dI was under more fear than orders.My family did not see me that summer, because I had to experience what a priest%u2019s daily life was like in a parish of two thousand souls. I knew nothing of any folks, especially black folks, but figured they were like white folks, except somehow more full of hurts, and regrets, and secrets they might reveal. I sat beneath a ceiling fan at Holy Cross Rectory trying to decipher sense in the parish records of the pastor I had begged to take me in. His parish had changed from all white to black in less than twenty-four months.Father O%u2019Farrell welcomed me, and any help he could get, with open arms. With a couple other seminarians and young priests, he put us to