Page 230 - What They Did to the Kid

218 Jack Fritscher

lean-boned German face was permanently sunburned up to the cap
line across his forehead. His father rarely took off his cap, and when
he did, sitting with the other German farmers at Sunday Mass with
their blond-braided wives and towheaded stairstep children, all the
men’s big-moustached faces were uniformly sunburned red up to the
same cap line, above which their bald round heads were stark white,
and their blond-white hair was cut short.
“Those Catholic laymen,” he told us, “those farmers and fathers,
are manly measure against our soft lives at Misericordia. A priest in
his every action must always consider what other men will think.
You must be manly men.”
He regretted his own face was no longer sunburned. Something
secret in him made him resent that someone in Rome who had
elevated him out of any return ever to his farm parish in Iowa and
vested him in robes that left Iowa behind. Such honor from the world
of the Vatican affronted his conserving sense of personal asceticism.
Obediently, he submitted to honor his superiors, the bishop, and the
Pope. His obedience made him meaner.
Invested by the Church in Rome, a city he had never seen, he
interpreted his new commanding rank as Misery’s rector to mean
Rome delegated him to use his tight-lipped Iowa ways to rein in
liberal tendencies creeping into the seminary. He had swept the pride
of the world from his soul. He shaved his face so close his hard jaw
looked permanently scraped raw. For himself, to be saved, he had
only to obey. Even as commander, he commanded only under a
higher obedience which he commanded in all us boys. His one great
pride was in his simple priesthood, for without his vocation, he was
nothing more than an Iowa farmer’s German son with the rank of
lieutenant colonel from a War that was over except for its lessons.
As the new Papal Chamberlain, Karg set out to preserve the
old ways of Catholicism, without distinguishing between traditional
Catholicism and institutionalized Catholicism, even as the progres-
sive Pope John’s Council of bishops convened in Rome aggiorna-
mento, to throw open the windows of the Church to admit the fresh
winds of ecumenical change. Rector Karg preached that the glory of
simple, blind obedience kept priests free from every sin.
He went on a rampage, disciplining or shipping boys not because

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