Page 235 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 223

I was not stupid. I wanted every kind of purity possible: physical,
intellectual, emotional, spiritual. I was a syllogism.
I possessed my vocation with a surety transcending emotion.
The only good Rector Karg had done was warn me off emotion.
The Jesuit O’Malley himself had said that my emotion had too
much driven the intellectual and moral responsibility I had taken
toward my studies, until I could work so intensely no longer.
Only by abandoning all feeling had I been able to defeat Rector
Karg.
I vowed to express my vocation only through clean, clear, crys-
talline intellect.
This was the safe path to the distance of holiness.
I vowed to be analytical, chaste, and obedient.
No one could assail such Jesuitical heroism.
A priest could not leave himself open to any emotional
compromise.
Circumstanc es of feeling cannot be logically explicated upon
questioning.
The rationale of intellect can always be examined, clearly, objec-
tively, without suspicion.
Rector Karg had taught me that. I learned it from him.
I learned about the triumph of reason.
My vocation was no longer based on a swell of boyish feeling.
God had used Rector Karg to redefine my vocation with reason.
I could think.
Therefore, I existed, cool, distant, high above them, and I hated
Karg.
“Never become cynical,” Father Gunn had warned us. “God
knows there’s nothing worse than a cynical priest except an ironic
priest. Irony versus sanctity. Like chastity, the choice is not a choice.”
I watched my classmates and the younger and older seminarians
all swept up in Misery’s chapel and choir loft into the hot May emo-
tion. Ordinations came every year and each class of boys took one
giant step toward the altar. I had written a progressive article about
“The Objectives of the Second Vatican Council” for The Misericor-
dia Review, and gotten in trouble. The other seminarians spoke in
slogans.

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