Sunday, January 16, 2011

JUST AS THE TWIG IS BENT: INTERMISSION


[T]hen gradually the rats began to appear again in numbers that went on increasing throughout the day. People out at night would often feel underfoot the squelchy roundness of the still-warm body. It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abcesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails. Albert Camus (tr. Stuart Gilbert)

You, like us Readers, deserve a break from the pestiferous chronicle of priestly incompetence and negligence. Like Dottore Peste of the pandemics of yesteryear, we all need to rewax our linen gowns, sterilize the pointer canes used to turn over the infected or shoo away the wheezing rats, and repack our beaks with fresh aromatics before returning to the miasmal corridors of the swampland's plague-house of formation.

So... let's look at the "lighter side" of malformation with a few random vignettes. In place of a continuous narrative, we'll opt for a pointillist's canvas of luminous little dots of information:

Point 1: The Rector of Injustice used to lavish upon a favored seminarian gifts of expensive clerical clothing from the papal tailor Gammarelli in Rome*. However, he made certain his minion was aware of his status as "the second best-dressed man in the seminary," the rector being the first, naturally. (In a poignant note, the trendy cosset had to lay aside his so-very-glam sash when his rule-savvy fellow inmates informed the rector that the accessory was an ecclesiastical fashion no-no. Oh, my, the distresses of the clerical catwalk!)

Point 2: The Scut Farkus (sic) and Grover Dill of the institution's nomenklatura, that is to say, the "seminary" prefect and his diminutive toady, used to dumpster dive through seminarians' trash in order to discover evidence of rule infractions.

Point 3: When morally outraged seminarians brought to the Rector of Injustice's attention that one of his favorites (or 'nephews,' in the seminarians' argot), a recruit from Eastern Europe, was habitually untruthful, the rector severely counseled them all to make allowance for his falsehoods since lying was customary in the pet's former Iron-Curtain hometown.

Point 4: One evening, Scut the Prefect had a high-pitched, shrieking tiff with another priest. The next morning, the defiant priest beat Scut to the private chapel, where Mass could be said out of the sight of the laity. (Scut once admitted hating to talk to the people and criticized another priest for spending so much time with the laity after Mass.) When Scut the Prefect arrived to find his opponent saying Mass first, enraged, he assembled all the seminarians in the courtyard for a good tongue lashing. (Maybe we should change his name from Scut the Prefect to Colonel Klink: "Into the cooler. Throw away the key!")

Point 5: Scut the Prefect suffers no one to remove his laundry from the washer, even when he fails to show up on time to claim his load so as to give others access to the communal laundromat.

Point 6: Seminarians failing to mop the floor correctly were required to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms. (No wonder the completers don't know too much. Between the drudgery of housework and vindictive time-wasting penalties, there's no opportunity to study.)

Yeeeccch! You know, this is worse than narration. Please accept our apologies. We intended to provide an amusing interlude while we all washed off, but instead we are more nauseous than ever at the image taking form before our eyes. We'll skip, we think, reference to the deacon's crying game. It's all too much.

Next Sunday, we'll go back to simple, straightforward reporting. We need the greater distance that only bald narrative can supply.

*Gammarelli's "My Red Hose" web page boasts that "[t]hey also sell the famous red, purple and black socks that delights aesthets from all over the world." We bet they do!

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