Page 236 - What They Did to the Kid

224 Jack Fritscher

They said, “The priesthood is a sacramental change of your soul.”
They said, “Ordination is a metaphysical change of your person.”
They said, “We’ve got to pray for our vocations to feel the totality
of grace.” They said, “You lose yourself to become an alter Christus,
another Christ.” They said, “Every priest has to pay for his vocation.
Far better to pay for it in the discipline of the seminary than later on
in the practice of the priesthood.”
They defined my goal and my cross.
Disappear, vanish into Christ.
Every boy seemed hypnotized. Every boy except Lock and me.
Even during this Ordination Mass, I didn’t want to feel my vocation.
I wanted to think it. I’d felt too much in the last months. My best
feelings had been misunderstood by the priests who should have
respected them most. But Rector Karg’s raging at the top of his lungs
that I could be dismissed for feeling, his way of talking to me as no
one had ever talked before, delivered me. Having reached two awak-
enings after ten years of flat seminary life, I was delivered by reason.
I stood outside the pale of traditional Catholic feeling. I vowed not
to be swept up by pious claptrap. I would never again tell any priest,
any teacher, anyone anything that could not be explained to lions in
sheep’s clothing like the sanctimonious Rector Karg.
I liked seminary life, but I wouldn’t be taken in by its senti-
mentality of pious little boys with rays of light haloing their heads,
because my call was not to be forever a seminarian, but to leave
the seminary by becoming a priest. I stood away from the other
boys. The gap between us became wider. They posed and pranced.
Two years before, in all sincerity, I had requested, according to our
custom of praying nightly as a group for sick relatives and friends,
that three Hail Mary’s be said in chapel for a sick woman. The next
day when Father Gunn asked me in front of Hank the Tank and his
brother, PeterPeterPeter, and another older seminarian if my mother
were sick, I said, “Oh, no, my mother is fine.”
When they pressed to know the name of the woman, I told
them that they had prayed for Elizabeth Taylor because she was
nearly dead in London and needed a tracheotomy so she could fin-
ish filming Cleopatra. They were shocked. “You brought a scandal-
ous woman into our prayers.” They said the Vatican newspaper, L’

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